Orkney (fabulous archaeology)

There is so much fabulous, mysterious, and powerfully compelling archaeology on Orkney, that you'd be crazy to miss it.

Skara Brae

If you have even a passing interest in the Neolithic, and frankly, who doesn’t, then Orkney is a must-see destination. The place is littered with sites worth visiting. One of the oldest and most interesting is Skara Brae, a Neolithic village that was uncovered by a wild storm in 1850 when a layer of grass and soil was torn off a mound by the coast revealing a hidden village buried underneath..

I first read about Skara Brae in Bill Bryson’s book At Home, and as soon as I read about it I wanted to go. He writes:

“When at last the storm cleared and the islanders came upon their newly reconfigured beach, they were astounded to find that where the howie [hill] had stood were now revealed the remains of a compact, ancient stone village, roofless but otherwise marvelously intact. Consisting of nine houses, all still holding many of their original contents, the village dates from five thousand years ago. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, older than all but a handful of built structures on Earth. It is immensely rare and important. It is known as Skara Brae.

Thanks to its completeness and preservation, Skara Brae offers a scene of intimate, almost eerie domesticity. Nowhere is it possible to get a more potent sense of household life in the Stone Age. As everyone remarks, it is as if the inhabitants have only just left. What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area — dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists — where tasks could be done in a social setting. 

Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery. They grew wheat and barley, and enjoyed bounteous harvests of shellfish and fish, including a codfish that weighed seventy-five pounds. They kept cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs…

It is impossible to overstate Skara Brae’s rarity and value. Prehistoric Europe was a largely empty place. As few as two thousand people may have lived in the whole of the British Isles fifteen thousand years ago. By the time of Skara Brae, the number had risen to perhaps twenty thousand, but that is still just one person per three thousand acres, so to come across any sign of Neolithic life is always an excitement. It would have been pretty exciting even then.

We don’t know anything at all about these people — where they came from, what language they spoke, what led them to settle on such a lonesome outpost on the treeless edge of Europe — but from all the evidence it appears that Skara Brae enjoyed six hundred years of uninterrupted comfort and tranquility. Then one day in about 2500 BC the occupants vanished — quite suddenly, it seems. In the passageway outside one dwelling ornamental beads, almost certainly precious to the owner, were found scattered, suggesting that a necklace had broken and the owner had been too panicked or harried to retrieve them. Why Skara Brae’s happy idyll came to a sudden end is, like so much else, impossible to say.” 

This is Skaill House, when you buy your ticket to see Skara Brae you get entrance to this as well (it's pretty interesting)

The Broch of Gurness

On the same day that we visited Skara Brae, we also visited The Broch of Gurness. It’s nowhere near as old as Skara Brae (dates for the broch are unclear, but it was probably built between 200BC and 100BC - possibly on the site of an earlier settlement so is Iron Age – I think). The broch stands around eight metres high with an internal diameter of 20 metres making it a tall, easily-defended, tower, surrounded by a series of small stone houses. The entire settlement was circled by outer defenses comprising of a band of three ramparts and three ditches. Like Skara Brae before it, the houses in this settlement had stone furniture and drainage, and even toilets.

As a site to visit it is nowhere near as crowded as Skara Brae, so what it lacks in ancient-ness, it more than makes up for in atmosphere. We walked around the whole site pretty much alone, and it was beautiful wandering through the buildings and looking out over the ocean.

The building style seemed quite similar to Skara Brae (to my untrained eye), and many of the more contemporary building on Orkney (and all the dry stone walls) seem to be a continuum of this building style as well. It’s what makes the buildings on this island so harmonious with nature – they are actually part of it, and what gives it such a sense of continuous history.

There are so many other things to see that we didn’t have time for. There is an ongoing archaeological dig at the Ness of Brodgar where you can watch the excavations (or even volunteer I think) and many, many other sites. And there are more being discovered all the time. It’s a wonderful, fascinating, stunningly beautiful place, littered with history. I’d love to go back again, for longer next time.