SKARA BRAE, a Prehistoric Stone Age Village in Scotland's Orkney Islands

The ruins of Skara Brae face the Bay of Skaill

On a windswept island at the northern tip of Scotland, thick, stone walls lie half buried by the edge of the sea.  They are the remains of Skara Brae, one of Europe's oldest known and best preserved prehistoric villages.  Five thousand years ago ancient farmers tended livestock and tilled the earth on land surrounding the village.  They also hunted wildlife and fished along the coast.  Their houses, built of sturdy stone, were clustered in a compact unit and joined along an inner passageway.  They were the heart of a close-knit agricultural community and may have been home to as many as twenty families at one time.
    Art and I visited Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands in late August 1992 as part of the celebration of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  We rode a train north from Edinburgh to John O’Groats and took a ferry from there to the islands.  It was an amazing trip back in time as we viewed the remains of the village where people had lived for nearly 600 years. After they left, wind blew sand from the surrounding dunes over the village and buried it.  For thousands of years Skara Brae was forgotten.

Skara Brae and the manor house of the Laird of Skaill

The weather in the Orkneys is often wet and windy and during our visit we experienced both sun and rain. In the winter of 1850, a series of violent storms battered the islands, pounding them with fierce waves and gale force winds.  One of these storms was so severe that it blew away the grass and sand from a high dune on land owned by William Watt, the Laird of Skaill.  (Laird is the Scottish word for lord.)  When the storm subsided, William Watt went out to inspect the damage to his property.  As he crossed the land that separated his fields from the sea, he saw that the wind and waves had exposed the remains of a long buried ancient village.  For the first time in more than forty centuries, the dwellings of Skara Brae were exposed to the open air.  As William Watt uncovered the ruins he discovered more stone walls, furniture, stone and bone tools, pottery, beads and other objects.  The sand and surrounding embankment had protected the houses and the items in them so well that many were in almost perfect condition.

Today, visitors to Skara Brae can explore the remains of the village and see many of the ancient objects found during its excavation.  No other place in northern Europe provides such a complete picture of life in the neolithic, or new stone age.

Shallow basins in the floor may have held fish bait or a supply of fresh water.

The village of Skara Brae is a cluster of one room houses joined by covered passages.  Today these buildings are open to the sky, but in ancient times they would have been covered by low roofs.  The houses probably had rafters made of whalebone or wood which were then covered with sod and held down by ropes. (Fragments of rope made from twisted heather have been found in the midden.) 
    Of all the ancient sites in the Orkneys, Skara Brae is among the most remarkable.  As we peered over the village walls, it was not hard to imagine families sitting around their hearths long ago talking and eating while children played and neighbors came to visit.  With firelight dancing across the walls and winter winds roaring outside, these sturdy stone houses would have been a welcome retreat from the weather and places where people could feel safe and secure.

The standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar are about six miles from Skara Brae.  They were erected during the same period that people lived at Skara Brae.

Skara Brae is amazing both because it is so old and because so much has been preserved.  People were living at Skara Brae before the Egyptians built their pyramids, before ancient Americans built their first cities and before the Chinese built the Great Wall.  Skara Brae is a window onto some of our most ancient history.  For those of us with roots in northern Europe, the ruins at Skara Brae provide fascinating clues to how some of our most remote ancestors may have actually lived.

You can read more about Skara Brae and the Orkney Islands in my book Stone Age Farmers Beside the Sea (Clarion, 1997).  It is out of print but available online and in libraries.  Or, you can download it to your Kindle.

Update July 21, 2014:  For information about the most recent neolithic discoveries in the Orkneys, check out the August 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine. 

A Scilly Holiday, Seriously: Part I

An Idyllic Island Off the Radar Screen for Most Americans (August 2003)

Heather and Ruins on Tresco

Shipwrecks, ancient ruins, fresh air, and an easy day’s journey from London–it sounded like the perfect vacation spot. Better yet, it seemed that no one we knew had heard of the Isles of Scilly. “Isn’t that somewhere in the Indian Ocean?” they asked. “You’re thinking of the Seychelles.” Or, “Isn’t that off the coast of Scotland?” “Nope, those are the Shetlands.” One friend was sure we were going to Sicily and had simply misspelled the name. We assured her that the Scilly Isles are not in Italy, but off the southwest coast of England. Scilly, which is pronounced “silly” as in “how silly of me,” has its origins in Roman times and comes from “sulli” meaning the “sun isles.” To get there today one can either fly or take the daily ferry from Penzance, in Cornwall.

Land, Sea and Mist

St. Mary's

So, on a foggy morning in August, my husband and I boarded the Scillonian III ferry at the pier in Penzance and headed west into the Atlantic. Our fellow passengers included island residents returning home from the mainland, day trippers, and vacationers like us. About two hours later, we spied a cluster of small islands and islets emerging above the waves. As we approached the harbor, the mist cleared and the islands indeed became sun bathed, rising as scattered rocky outposts in a sparkling sea.

The twenty-eight mile trip had been unusually smooth, a fact I appreciated even more when I later learned that the ocean bottom around the islands is littered with hundreds of shipwrecks, victims of stormier days and the treacherous rocks that lurk beneath the surface. We docked at the quay in St. Mary’s, the largest and most populated of the Scilly Isles and the center of island life. We collected our luggage, which was piled next to beer kegs, building materials, groceries, and all the other supplies that have to be brought over daily from the mainland, and found a taxi. It took us to Eastbank, our bed and breakfast accommodation, just a short distance away on one of the island’s many small bays, with a view of the sea in one direction and a nature preserve and flower fields in the other. After meeting our gracious hosts, Linda and Melville Roberts, and settling ourselves in our large, tastefully decorated room, we set off to explore Hugh Town, the commercial center of St. Mary’s, where we purchased picnic food for lunch and visited the tourist office for maps and information on local activities. With a perimeter of only nine miles and a maximum width of three miles, everything on St. Mary’s is in easy walking distance. You can also rent bikes or use a local bus service.

A Mild Climate

Cromwell's Castle, Tresco

About 2000 people live year round in the Scilly Isles, most of them on St. Mary’s. Five of the islands are inhabited–St. Mary’s, St. Agnes, St. Martins, Bryher and Tresco–and several others have ruins of previous habitation. Frequent boat service connects them. One day we took a trip to Samson, one of the uninhabited, or as the boatman joked, one of the uninhibited, islands, to see birds, seals and some of the many prehistoric ruins that litter the isles. Another day we took a boat to Tresco to see the famous Abbey Gardens, built by Augustus Smith, the 19th century Lord Protector of the isles, in the ruins of a medieval Abbey and now operated by the National Trust. Helicopter service from the mainland brings people daily to see the rare succulents, palms, eucalyptus, and other plants grown nowhere else in the British Isles. Warm ocean currents of the Gulf Stream bathe the Scilly Isles and moderate the climate. Despite a latitude equivalent to Vancouver or Frankfurt, the temperature rarely goes below freezing. The ancient stone walls and thick hedges act as windbreaks and create the microclimates that allow the plants to thrive. Other garden attractions include a stone altar, a remnant from the first century Roman occupation of the Scillies, a museum of figureheads rescued from sunken ships, and a lavish mural made of multicolored seashells.

Detail of decorative panel in Abbey Gardens at Tresco

A Long History
From the original Bronze Age settlers, who farmed and fished on the islands, to the royalists who fled there during the English Civil War of the mid 1600's, and whose descendants are among the present inhabitants, the Scilly Isles have had continuous human occupation for more than four thousand years. One of the best ways to get an overview of the geologic, human, and natural history of the Scilly Isles is at the museum in Hugh Town where you can see maps, stone axe heads and other prehistoric artifacts, legal documents written in flowery script, historic photographs, seafaring and shipwreck souvenirs, mounted specimens of birds and flowers, pictures of the Queen’s millennium visit, and more.

The scattered granite outcrops that form the Scilly Isles today are actually the tops of larger hills that were once part of a single land mass, but as the oceans rose at the end of the last Ice Age, the low spots gradually became inundated until the hills became islands. The present shoreline was reached about seven hundred years ago. At an extremely low spring tide in the 1970's, someone walked a circle between all the islands just to prove that they were still almost joined. The channels between the islands are so shallow that many become sandbars at low tide; in some places, just under the surface of the water, you can see the tops of stone fences that are the boundaries of now submerged prehistoric fields. Uncultivated parts of the islands are mostly covered with bracken and heather. On our visit, the heather was in full bloom, giving the hillsides a brilliant magenta glow.

Bant's Carn (Neolithic Entrance Grave)

On our first full day I joined a walking tour with Katherine Sawyer, a local expert in archaeology and Scilly history, who took us to see Bant’s Carn, a four thousand year old entrance grave on the west side of St. Mary’s. We also visited some prehistoric standing stones, the ruins of an ancient village, and the telegraph tower where Marconi did some of his early radio experiments. As we walked around the perimeter of the island we had to watch out for the shallow stone pits, remains of kelp burning in the nineteenth century. About three feet wide and two feet deep, these stone lined depressions were used as cauldrons for burning sea weed, which was gathered at low tide. The residue was then exported to the mainland for glass making. It was a laborious task, requiring more than twenty tons of kelp to produce one ton of finished product. It reminded me of a youthful experiment in making maple sugar which required boiling forty gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup! At least the maple sugar smelled sweet as it cooked. Apparently the kelp burning produced a smelly, smoky pall that hung over the islands for the entire summer!

Part II will have more about what we did, what we ate, and what we saw during our relaxing week in the Scillies.

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