Explore Neolithic Orkney in a Weekend
The Prehistoric Stone Circles and Villages of Orkney
The stone circles, stone villages, brochs and burial howes that we can visit today on Orkney are remarkably well preserved blueprints of a civilization that evolved to its height around 3000 BCE, before the Bronze Age and Iron Age brought a more insecure world culminating in the Viking era. There are six sites which are ancient wonders of stone age architecture and life:
Knap of Howar
On the remote northern island of Papa Westray, reached by a minute-long flight from the neighbouring Westray, there lies our earliest ancestral home: the Knap of Howar. Much like an earlier version of Skara Brae, the stone houses here were constructed around 3800 BCE.
Barley and wheat grains discovered here show early farming was being practised and separate 'workhouse' rooms may have been used to hold livestock. The houses would have been covered by a frame made from timber or whalebone and tiled with turf weighted down with roped stones.
Skara Brae
This remarkable stone village was revealed by a storm in 1850. It was excavated by the archaeologist Gordon Childe – from 1928 to 1930 he diligently revealed a complete stone village of ten houses. Radio carbon dating shows us this village was occupied between 3200 and 2200 BCE before being abandoned, possibly due to encroaching seas.
It is enlightening to discover a complex architecture existing in Neolithic times to confound our prejudice of a retarded 'Stone Age'. The sophistication of the stone furniture, the economical layout and sheltered open plan suggests a community at one with its environment, intrinsically solid and communal in spirit.
The Stones of Stenness
Some of the tallest and most impressive of European neolithic stone circles, the Stones of Stenness are clearly visible once descending the road from Kirkwall into Stromness. Situated in a natural amphitheatre of low hills and lakes, this entrancing site once had a ring-ditch surrounding the stones which themselves frame the hills of Hoy in the background.
The nearby neolithic village of Barnhouse reveals a sophisticated architectural culture existing around 3000 BCE which conceived and built this astonishing array of proud stones on the banks of Loch Harray.
The Ring of Brodgar
Approaching the great Ring of Brodgar stone circle from the south the land narrows to an isthmus crossed by a causeway between two lochs, rising gently to a plateau of mounds and the Ring itself: a 130 metre diameter stone circle containing 36 of 60 original standing stones.
The impression is one of deep connections and centrality within the Orcadian universe, the stones giving a reverberant sense of ancestral time as well as place. Outside the henge ditch lie giant and silent 'howes' or cairn tombs, as well as subsidiary stones and circles, which intimate this site was of great ancestral meaning.
Maes Howe
The 5000 year old burial cairn of Maes Howe forms the centrepiece of the UNESCO World Heritage Site which was granted to Orkney in 1999. On first glimpse it is easily overlooked, appearing much like a small hill in the middle of cow-fields, but this hides a startling Neolithic interior. The low entrance leads in ten meters to a sudden open interior of perfectly corbelled flagstones rising to a conical point, much like a premonition of later Renaissance cathedrals.
Something exotic and electric alerts the senses much like the interior of an Egyptian pyramid – three perfectly square holes in the west, north and east walls lead off into small hidden antechambers where once the bones of the Neolithic dead were laid. Long since robbed and graffiti'd by the Vikings the reverence of this Neolithic tomb is still overwhelming, especially around the winter solstice, when the dawn sun rises and beams down the entrance corridor in a feat of deliberate engineering that takes the breath away. This can be viewed as a podcast online.
Tomb of the Eagles
On the very tip of South Ronaldsay, on the Isbister clifftops overlooking the Pentland Firth and the distant lands of Caithness, lies one of our culture's 'luckiest finds'. In 1958, local farmer Ronnie Simpson unearthed some curious artifacts. Digging deeper he discovered a chambered hole which led him into an echoing dark chamber. Flicking his lighter the chamber flooded with light to reveal the gawping eyes and deathly grins of 30 human skulls.
This burial chamber was in use from 3100 to 2300 BCE. Its annexed burial chambers still flare thrillingly when a lighter is struck, though they are now a little disapointingly empty of course! Some of the original contents are still on display at the excellent interpretation centre on the farm. Amongst the human remains were also found the bones of 14 White-Tailed Sea Eagles which identify these people of Isbister as totemic.
Skara Brae Village on Orkney
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Orkney Islands Map
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