Lying within the complex of buchts on the trail is an unenclosed platform settlement. This term can be taken quite literally – an unenclosed round timber house was constructed on a platform excavated from the side of the hill. This particular type of archaeological site is of considerable importance in south central Scotland and is practically exclusive to the Upper Clyde and Tweed valleys. Similar sites have been identified in Argyll (Rennie, 1977 (but these tend to be later in date to the examples in southern Scotland. Recent surveys in Clydesdale (Ward, 1992) have shown that over 600 of these Bronze Age house sites existed in Upper Clydesdale alone with some groups containing as many as thirty-five platforms constituting pre-historic villages.
Excavation of platform settlements show that people lived in substantial round timber houses up to 10m in diameter. The entrances had a porch-like arrangement and it is likely that animals were also kept within houses, as they were 3000 years later at Glenochar fermtoun.
Hills in the Bronze Age were covered in birch, hazel and rowan trees with alder growing along the burn and river sides. There is also some evidence of oak being present (Terry, 1995). However, the general landscape may have been more scrubland than blanket forest.
The single site beside the buchts is 8m in diameter and a further two platform settlements along the hillside and overlooking the modern farm bring the trail nearly to its end. In the distance behind the white buildings of another farm are a group of nineteen well preserved platforms.
The last feature on the trail is an unusual rectangular shaped cairn measuring 3m x 2.5 x 0.5m high. Small round cairns are the most ubiquitous site type in Upper Clydesdale. Several thousand are recorded: some exist in groups of hundreds, while many isolated examples, such as this one, have been found. It is impossible to be certain about the function of small cairns without excavation, and even then answers are not necessarily forthcoming. The two main theories are that they are simple field clearance piles of stone, and/or burial sites. Certainly, many have been shown to cover burials, usually cremation deposits and mostly dating to the Bronze Age. Several such funerary cairns have recently been excavated in Upper Clydesdale and occasionally, pottery, flint tools and jewellery have been found as grave deposits. Groups of small cairns within groups have also been shown to be burial markers. It seems likely that the Bronze Age people were putting the otherwise useless stones to a good use.
A remarkable flint dagger, found at Glenochar last century, dates to the early Bronze Age and is one of the very few which have been found in Scotland. Such daggers emulate copper daggers. This one can be seen on display a the Museum of Scotland.
