Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 131

the site, which yielded hundreds of stone implements and pot-
tery fragments “both of the new Stone Age and the Bronze Age.”
Most of the tools were of white quartz, only a few of flint, despite
the name of the site, which means 'flint-workers.' Hundreds of
graves were found beneath the “flooring,” by which Mann means
artificially smooth prehistoric soil surface. From the variety of
pottery types found, Mann estimated that the site had been used
as a cemetery for no less than 2,500 years! Up to mid-1939 only a
few graves had been opened, for fear of damaging the layout, so no
one knows what happened to the rest. The graves clustered right
up to the 'altar,' and Mann took that to be more evidence that the
site was open to the sky: “Some curious features in the architec-
ture of the Temple graves have not yet been fully explained. While
three of the vertical walls of the shaft graves were sometimes built
of stone, the fourth side was paneled in wood, which is now very
much decayed. It does not seem that this was done to save stone
material by substituting timber. Both materials were equally com-
mon and both were easily manipulated. Did wood more readily
than stone afford access, out and in, of the migratory soul?” (“The
Druid Temple explained”, p. 11.)
There's no obvious answer to that question even now, but it's
extremely interesting because in preparing a socket for a stone the
megalith builders often braced three sides of it with thin branches,
to keep the stone from crushing down the sides as it was tipped
upright and dropped into the hole. Why the same principle should
be used in graves in imitation is hard to see. Certainly it wasn't to
take the shock of coffins!
The disposition of the skeletons showed that at Clydebank
as elsewhere, the bodies had been exposed until disintegration set
in, and some were buried in panniers. Others were cremated. The
grave shafts were capped with stones, some of them with a cen-
tral shaped block with a carved egg shaped cavity on top. Beads,
tools, and round-based wooden and pottery utensils were found
in the graves, and in one “a small, artificially shaped stone gener-
ally thought from its size and subdivisions to be (a) gauge for the
old standard linear units used in all parts of the Temple structure
and its layout. Perhaps the grave was that of the architect of the
Temple. Gauges of the same character had been found in other
ancient places in Scotland.”