The Neolithic chambered tombs of Orkney and Caithness — the Maes Howe, Camster Round, and other sites — represent the most monumental expression of this tradition in earlier periods.

By the Iron Age, the scale of mortuary architecture had diminished from the great chambered cairns of the Neolithic to the smaller cairns like the one at Loch Borralie, but the fundamental impulse — to mark the location of the dead in the landscape with a visible, permanent structure — persisted.

The location of the cairn near Loch Borralie is itself potentially significant.

Bodies of water — lochs, rivers, the sea — had specific associations in Iron Age belief systems, as the evidence of deliberate deposition of objects and remains in rivers and coastal waters across Britain demonstrates.