The Paps of Jura Bone Calendar

Paps of Jura, Inner Hebrides, Scotland

A cairn between the two highest Paps where shepherds left bone tokens for the dead; said to predict the next death by which token slipped overnight.

The Paps of Jura — three steep quartzite peaks dominating the south of the island — are visible from much of the western seaboard of Argyll. Between Beinn an Òir, the highest, and Beinn Shiantaidh, the next, there is a high col with a small cairn that does not appear on the maps. The cairn is older than the present sheep-economy, perhaps much older. The bone calendar is a more recent practice that fastened onto it. From at least the late eighteenth century, Jura shepherds working the high tops would leave small bone tokens in the cairn after a death in their family — a sheep's knuckle-bone, a deer-rib, a fragment of jaw. The token was inscribed with the name of the dead, the date, and a single Gaelic word: cuimhne, remembrance. The bones built up over generations until the cairn became, in effect, a parish record of mortality in the islands of mid-Argyll. The folklore was that the bones would shift overnight by themselves. Shepherds returning to the cairn would find one particular bone slipped from its place, lying separate at the foot of the cairn. The name on the slipped bone, when read, was the family next to lose a member. The prediction-rate is impossible to assess now, but the tradition was strong enough that the slipping of a bone was reported to the parish minister and recorded in the kirk session minutes of Killchianaig in the 1850s. The cairn was disassembled by the Forestry Commission in 1968 during a hill-track survey, and the bones — there were more than a thousand of them — were collected and sent to the National Museum of Scotland. The shepherds say the wind on that col is now wrong. There is no longer a place to put the names.