A History of Ancient Britain (22 page)

Skara Brae as it is presented today is, of necessity to ensure its continued preservation, a tidy and immaculately manicured place. Missing, though, are the sights, sounds and smells of everyday
life. The place was inhabited for a long time and a bustling atmosphere would have prevailed as people went about the business of preparing and cooking food, making and mending tools, equipment and
clothes, discussing plans for the harvest and other tasks, caring for children, playing, chatting and squabbling. Because of the darkness of the interiors, much of the work would have gone on
outdoors, in the daylight, and it is the atmosphere of activity that has to be imagined if the place is to be seen as more than just a sterile cluster of stone cells.

Neolithic specialist Alison Sheridan had special permission to allow me into a house so pristine and so perfectly preserved (and known as ‘number seven’) that visitors are normally
banned from its interior. Thanks to the addition of a modern roof, the inside is gloomy – completing the illusion of stepping back in time 5,000 years. The furniture is identical to that in
the other houses but, safe from the wind and rain, it seems only recently abandoned, its owners momentarily distracted. I had stepped into a Neolithic house (a home that was in many ways
beguilingly familiar) but any notion that it was as simple to step into a Neolithic mind was swiftly swept away by what Sheridan had to say about at least one custom of the previous owners. She
explained how archaeologists excavating the interior had uncovered the skeletons of two women, side by side, buried in the floor beneath one of the bed settings – the ultimate sitting
tenants. ‘It’s as if during the lifetime of the house they lived here, they died here and they were buried here, Granny under the bed – so that it was a house for the living but
also a house for the dead,’ she said.

How are we twenty-first-century people – revolted by and afraid of corpses and with our need for an antiseptic separation between the living and the dead – to
reconcile ourselves to the thought of sleeping above the decaying remains of our own loved ones? It is beyond us to remember when love was so straightforward and uncompromised. Apart from anything
else we must not dare to judge them. At the very least their attachment to kith and kin enabled them to look through death. For me that acceptance of the dead and therefore of death itself is part
of a maturity and an anchorage in reality that we have utterly lost – to our detriment.

Around 8,000 beads were recovered from the interior of that one house, number seven, and Sheridan had brought along examples – together with an array of the kind of enigmatic jewellery and
other artefacts that have been recovered from throughout the village. Many carved stone objects, like elaborate hammers or mace-heads, have also been found. Their function is unknown but each of
them represents at least hundreds of hours of skilled craftsmanship, and it is this investment of time that would have underwritten their significance in a world without metal or precious
stones.

But, remarkable though it is, Skara Brae is not the only Neolithic settlement on Orkney. Dating from around 3700
BC
and therefore markedly earlier is the so-called
‘farmstead’ of Knap of Howar, on the island of Papa Westray. There two massively built stone houses – constructed, like those of Skara Brae, from slabs and blocks of Orkney
flagstone – sit side by side. Each has an entrance through a short passageway in its southern-facing wall and the two houses are joined as one by interconnecting side doors. Unlike the homes
on the Bay o’ Skaill the interiors at Knap of Howar were divided into separate rooms, or spaces, by vertical slabs of flagstone.

A more recent discovery of Neolithic home life has been made at a site called Barnhouse, back on Mainland Orkney. Only the foundation levels survive but a dozen separate houses have been
unearthed. All but one are broadly similar to those at Skara Brae, with roughly square interiors, stone beds against the walls, central hearths and each dominated by a stone dresser on the back
wall. One house at Barnhouse, however, is different. Generally larger and more impressive than all the others, its double cruciform interior incorporates two separate rooms, each with deep recesses
in its walls.

But, for all the richness of the domestic remains, it is not for preservation of the everyday that Orkney is rightly famed. The architecture and layout of the houses is, rather, a key that can
be used to unlock the door into
another world – that of Neolithic religion – and the first clue, as it turns out, was back in house number seven at Skara Brae,
with the bodies under the bed.

Houses for the dead, rather than for the living, were always the first buildings erected by the farmers. It was symptomatic of the way in which death and the dead were understood, how they were
to be treated. Seemingly central to the philosophy was an idea of continuity – so that death was not the end of someone, rather just a change in their circumstances. A house that had been
– and perhaps continued to be – a home for the living at Skara Brae could also be a home for the dead.

Quite close to the village is a passage grave built on a truly grand scale. It is Maes Howe, huddled beneath its great grassy mound, and it is justly famous as a wonder of the ancient world. Any
who would enter must first fold themselves over, like a half-shut knife, before shuffling awkwardly along a 23-foot-long passage. Most of each side of that passage is formed of a single giant
monolith laid on its side – just a foretaste of the vaulting ambition of the tomb’s architects. Having bowed the head and progressed in suitably respectful fashion, the visitor emerges
into a chamber that is over 12 feet in height, achieved by corbelling. Each successive course of dry stone masonry overhangs the one below, until the internal space is roofed by a simple dome
– in much the same way as you would imagine building an igloo with blocks of ice. It is a simple-sounding technique but at Maes Howe it has been executed with great skill and finesse to
create an elegant, almost symmetrical interior. In each of the four corners stands an upright monolith. They appear structural at first glance, like pillars, but closer inspection reveals they
support nothing at all.

Almost at once you get a nagging sense you are being reminded of something else, someplace else: there is the roughly square interior but with the corners projecting inwards so that the floor
plan has more the look of a stumpy cross; there are the recesses set into the walls as though for sleep (except anyone laid down in here was destined for a deep sleep indeed). Excavation revealed
that the site was occupied by a house long before the monument was built and traces of a hearth were found beneath the floor of the chamber. Then realisation strikes . . . you are standing inside a
more grand, more stylised version of one of the Skara Brae houses (perhaps even number seven with the skeletons under the bed). At Maes Howe it seems there was a slow, considered evolution from
domestic to spiritual, from everyday to otherworldly.

And there is still more strangeness about Maes Howe. Unlike any other chambered tomb on Orkney, the mound there is surrounded by a circular rock-cut ditch and bank.
Recent excavation behind the mound has found the socket of a now absent standing stone.

Two toppled monoliths forming the passage . . . four uprights, one in each of the corners of the chamber . . . an empty socket for another . . . did Maes Howe begin life as a circle of standing
stones surrounded by a bank and ditch before someone saw fit to make of it a house of the dead? It seems almost certain.

Then there is that house at Barnhouse – the one that is twice the size and at least twice as complicated as any of the others there. Its intricate, double-cruciform floor plan is also
reminiscent of the stumpy cross-shape of the interior of Maes Howe – so that distinctions between tombs and houses on Orkney seem to blur, homes for the living blending into homes for the
dead.

Maes Howe’s builders were also astronomers. For a few days each mid-winter the setting sun seems to drop between two hills on the neighbouring island of Hoy. Before it disappears into the
invisible on the solstice, the sun’s rays shine directly into the passage, illuminating the interior of the chamber. Those ancient architects had therefore sited the tomb in direct alignment
with a single sunset, and furthermore had taken care to ensure the occupants of the chamber received the last rays of the dying sun before it was reborn at the start of a new year.

Here were people precisely attuned to earth and sky, cosmologists sharply aware of where and when the heavens touched the land. Single monuments like Maes Howe are so entrancing they make it
hard to see the bigger picture of which they are part. But take the time to look around the landscape of Mainland Orkney and you realise the ancient sites were not operating individually, but in
concert with one another.

Maes Howe sits within a giant natural amphitheatre, a shallow bowl lying low in the land and surrounded on all sides by mountains. The centre of the bowl is filled with water – Lochs
Harray and Stenness – and that gleaming mirror is straddled and bisected by a narrow finger of land, the promontory of the Brodgar peninsula running directly through the middle of it all. It
is by any measure a stage styled for drama and the man-made sets are placed carefully all around. Walk towards the promontory from Maes Howe and you pass the settlement of Barnhouse and, close by,
the Stones of Stenness, thought to have been raised around 3100
BC
. A
nineteenth-century farmer went to some lengths to erase the site but stopped
short of finishing the job, and while just four upright stones survive, there are stumps and sockets for at least six more.

What is left behind is still striking, the remaining sentinels appearing defiant and more like an art installation than an archaeological site. A small pair of stones neatly and deliberately
frames the mound of Maes Howe, less than a mile away to the east, but the connection between the sites runs deeper still. The stones themselves were brought from different quarries, and some
archaeologists now believe they were sourced and gathered together over a long period of time. Like Maes Howe, the Stones of Stenness are surrounded by a ditch, hammered and smashed through the
fractured bedrock. Archaeologists believe both were intended to hold water, like moats. It seems possible the designers of Stenness and Maes Howe endeavoured to create islands within islands
– miniatures of the larger world they were attempting to reshape and influence. Finally, at the centre of the circle, are the remains of a square, stone-lined hearth that may even predate
everything else on the site. Stenness seems to tell yet another long story, reaching all the way from the fires of home to the infinite sky.

Before you step out onto the promontory itself, to cross the mirror of water, you pass another stone sentinel – the so-called ‘Watch Stone’, 20 feet high and like the gnomon of
a huge sundial. Beyond the reach of its longest shadow, a mile or so to the north-west of Stenness, is yet another stone circle.

The Ring of Brodgar is a true giant in the world of Neolithic monuments; in the whole of Britain only Avebury and Stanton Drew are larger. Today it comprises 22 stones – tall shards of the
now familiar Orkney flagstone raised on a gentle, heather-covered slope overlooking Loch Harray. When its builders designed it they had more stones in mind. There are a dozen stumps and several
others that have simply toppled (one was shattered by lightning 20-odd years ago, hinting at what may have happened to some of the others).

At least as impressive as the circle of stones is the ditch that encircles them. Just as with Maes Howe and Stenness, at Brodgar the architects felt the need to draw a line separating inside
from outside. Here, though, it is on a mind-boggling scale – 30 feet wide, the best part of 350 feet in diameter and cut to a depth of 10 feet through the bedrock. Best guesses suggest the
ditch alone would have required something like 100,000 man-hours to complete.

In fact the finished ditch is incomplete, bridged by two narrow causeways. If Brodgar were a clock face they would be at 3 and 9, suggesting a way in and a way out
– a route straight through the circle and roughly aligned with the promontory itself. Suddenly the Ring of Brodgar seems less a destination than a portal, an elaborately designed transit
station on a long walk from somewhere to elsewhere. Only in the last few years have archaeologists begun to realise quite where the path might terminate. It had long been realised that Maes Howe,
the Stones of Stenness, Barnhouse, the Watch Stone, the promontory and the Ring of Brodgar seemed linked like beads on a chain. What has taken everyone by surprise, however, is the possibility that
the real jewel in the necklace – the centrepiece – had been entirely overlooked.

A whale-back ridge dominates the middle of the Brodgar peninsula, roughly halfway between the Ring of Brodgar of the Stones of Stenness, and it had always been taken for a natural feature. The
fact that it lies right at the centre of this great natural amphitheatre, containing all of Orkney’s most famous ritual monuments, seemed purely a coincidence of geology. Then in 2002 the
loftily titled Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site Geophysics Programme turned its attention to the area, about the size of five football pitches, and began what was supposed to be a
routine survey. Instead the readouts from the geophysics machines revealed countless anomalies – buried walls and other structures – across the entire area.

Archaeologist Nick Card, originally from Glasgow but for many years a resident of Orkney, is overseeing efforts to try and make sense of it all. He realised early on that, rather than being a
natural feature, the whale-back ridge of Ness of Brodgar was entirely man-made – the build-up of decades or even centuries of construction and demolition. In the Middle East they call such
accumulations tells – artificial mounds created as successive occupants of the same site keep building on top of the remains of earlier settlements.