A burial cairn positioned close to a loch might have been intended to place the dead in proximity to a liminal space — a threshold between the ordinary world and something else — in a way that a cairn far from water would not.

This is speculative, and the proximity to the loch may simply reflect the practical factors that influence where people build things — the availability of flat ground, the convenience of the location relative to existing paths or settlements.

But the possibility that the water’s proximity was intentional, and that it carried specific meaning for the people who built the cairn, cannot be ruled out.

Connecting Loch Borralie to Orkney: The Prehistoric Maritime World