The Heart Of Neolithic Orkney

by Sean McLachlan on


For reasons that aren’t very clear, the Orkney Islands just north of Scotland were the happening place to be 5000 years ago.

The temperature was warmer in Orkney back then, with forest and deer in addition to the abundant bird and marine life that still mark Orkney out as a natural wonderland. The Neolithic (Late Stone Age) people farmed the land and hunted game. They also built some of the most remarkable prehistoric monuments in Europe.

The photo above shows the Standing Stones of Stenness, a stone circle built around 3100 B.C., making it one of the earliest of the 1000 stone circles in the UK and roughly contemporary with the earliest building phase of Stonehenge. It was once made up of about a dozen massive yet thin slabs, but now only four remain standing. Several lone standing stones stood in the surrounding area.

Many legends and traditions grew up around the stones. One stone, called the Odin Stone after the Norse god, had a hole near its base. Young Orcadian couples used to promise themselves in marriage by clasping their hands through it. A local farmer got so sick of these happy couples trespassing on his land that he knocked the stone down in 1814, with the intention of taking the rest down too. The Orcadians were furious and the farmer wisely stopped destroying the stones.

Like many stone circles, the Standing Stones of Stenness was surrounded by a ditch and earthen palisade. The opening led to a nearby village of the same date called the Barnhouse settlement. Here archaeologists uncovered 15 round stone houses. The rooms have stone furniture and little recesses for beds. They also have fireplaces made up of four stone slabs. One of them seems to have been moved from here to the center of the Standing Stones of Stenness. Why? Nobody knows.

%Gallery-160972%Less than a mile away across a narrow isthmus between two lochs stands the Ring of Brodgar, a massive stone circle measuring 104 meters (340 feet) in diameter. The only stone circles bigger than it are Avebury and Stanton Drew in England. Twenty-seven stones still exist, and archaeologists have found evidence for a total of sixty.

The Ring of Brodgar was built between 2500 and 2000 B.C. and is the youngest of the great Neolithic monuments in the area. Like the Standing Stones of Stenness, it was surrounded by a ditch that would have been filled with water, thus making a symbolic “island” like the real ones these people lived on.

A couple of minutes walk away, archaeologists have discovered an impressive Neolithic settlement made up of large stone buildings. The largest, rather unromantically called Structure Ten, measures 25×20 meters (82×65 feet) with 5-meter (16-foot) thick walls. This is by far the largest Neolithic stone building found in Britain.

Called the Ness of Brodgar, this settlement was inhabited from about 3,200 to 2,300 B.C. Each of the buildings was used for a time and then covered over. Structure Ten got special treatment. There seems to have been a big feast there as a grand finale, with the bones of some 300 cattle deposited at the same time, as well as a complete skeleton of a red deer, which seems to have been simply left there and not eaten. You can read more about the Ness of Brodgar excavations on their blog. New information is being uncovered every day.

So the dates of the two stone circles and two settlements show there was about a thousand years of activity in this area. Archaeologists believe that it was a ritual focal point for all of Orkney and maybe even for people in more distant lands.

On the Bay of Skaill, on the western shores of Mainland, is the Neolithic village of Skara Brae. The eight structures are similar to the Barnhouse site but on a much grander scale. Each has a large square room, beds to the sides, a central hearth and a stone “dresser.” These shelves of stone have caused all sorts of debate among archaeologists. Some think they were simply for storing things, while others suggest ritual use. The buildings were connected by covered passageways.

Skara Brae was occupied from about 3200-2500 B.C., the same period as the other great Neolithic sites. Before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, Mainland Orkney developed a great and little-known civilization.

The prehistoric sites on the Orkney Mainland are collectively known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Beyond those mentioned here, the UNESCO listing includes many tombs, including the impressive Maeshowe. More on them tomorrow!

A great resource on all things Orcadian is the Orkneyjar website, which has a seemingly endless supply of articles on the history, archaeology, culture and folklore of Orkney. Highly recommended!

Don’t miss the rest of my series “Exploring Orkney: Scotland’s Rugged Northern Isles.”

Coming up next: “Prehistoric Tombs and Viking Graffiti in Orkney!”

Exploring Orkney: Scotland’s Rugged Northern Isles

by Sean McLachlan on


In my school library in Canada, there was a curious old volume printed in 1909 called “The Orkney Book.” It was written for schoolchildren living in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland and told them about their land, culture and history.

This book fascinated me with its stories of Viking warriors and mysterious stone circles. I studied the grainy black and white photos of those remote islands and dreamed of going there. Last week I finally did.

Orkney, as Orcadians call their home, is a group of about 70 islands between the North Sea and North Atlantic. The exact number is a matter of dispute because in addition to the numerous inhabited islands, some with a population as low as one, there are many more uninhabited islands and skerries. When is an island really an island and not just a rock sticking out of the sea? I suspect this has been the subject of many long conversations in Orcadian pubs.

My wife, 6-year-old son and I landed in the tiny airport at Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital. With a population a little above 7,500, it’s not exactly a booming metropolis, but it does account for more than a third of Orkney’s population. What Kirkwall lacks in size it makes up for in history and character. In the broad harbor are moored numerous fishing and pleasure boats and a few larger vessels. Beyond can be seen other islands, green humps rising out of the gray sea.

Dominating the Kirkwall skyline is the 12th century St. Magnus Cathedral built of red sandstone. It was built in 1137 by Earl Rognvald, a Viking at a time when most Vikings were nominally Christian. He built it to house the remains of his uncle Magnus, who had become a saint after having his head split by an axe in traditional Viking fashion. Magnus had been an Earl of the Orkneys, ruling for the Norwegian king along with Magnus’ cousin Hakon, who was Earl of another part of Orkney. This co-rulership led to trouble and when Magnus and Hakon met to sort things out, Hakon betrayed him. Hakon didn’t want his own hands soiled by a kinsman’s blood and called on his cook to perform the foul deed. Soon miracles started happening around Magnus’ grave and he was proclaimed a saint.

Kirkwall also has an excellent museum tracing Orkney’s history from the surprisingly active prehistoric period to the modern day. There’s also a cool Wireless Museum filled with a huge collection of old radios; one from 1912 actually works and on another set you can practice your Morse code. My son was more interested in the old TV where you could play Pong, a video game from an era that must seem as remote to him as the Neolithic.

%Gallery-160901%Our next stop was Stromness, a half-hour bus ride from Kirkwall. As we got off and gazed over the cluster of gray stone buildings huddled around the harbor, my son asked, “Is this the other place they call a city?”

Well, after growing up in Madrid, I guess it doesn’t seem like much of a city to him, but with a little over 2,000 people it’s the second biggest town on the islands. It has a thriving artistic community and many artists display their work at the Pier Arts Centre. There’s also a large museum about the lives of the hardy local sailors, whalers, and explorers of days gone by. Many of the displays are of the things they brought back from their travels, everything from artwork from Niger and Greenland to whalebone scrimshaw and necklaces made from human teeth.

The highlight of our visit to Stromness was walking along the shore and around a promontory. Soon we left the town behind us and looked out over the cold waves. Seals popped their heads out of the water to study us. “Look, a seal! Look, a seal!” my son kept shouting as he spotted another and another. A few rocks became identified as seals too, and spotting more seals took on the uncertainty and excitement that adults generally reserve for UFOs. We clambered over the remains of a World War II gun emplacement, one of many on the islands, and admired the high hills of Hoy island, shown in the photo above.

Both Kirkwall and Stromness are on Orkney’s main island, which Orcadians call the Mainland even though mainland Scotland is barely twenty miles from its southern shores. For those wanting a base from which to get out and about on the islands, either of these two cities is a good bet. Many of Orkney’s top attractions are on the Mainland and Kirkwall and Stromness have regular ferry services to other islands. While we stayed in Kirkwall, my wife and I found Stromness more attractive. Its old architecture and quieter streets had a more traditional feel.

We’d only been on Orkney for 24 hours and we were already hooked. I was looking forward to seeing the countryside and the smaller islands.

This is the first in my series “Exploring Orkney: Scotland’s Rugged Northern Isles.”

Coming up next: “The Heart of Neolithic Orkney!”

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: No Passport? No Honeymoon

by Dave Seminara on

The day after I got married, I spent much of the day nursing a hangover. And when I was finally ready to emerge from my bed, in the middle of the afternoon, I told my new bride that I was going out to rent “Braveheart” and “Rob Roy” to get us geared up for our honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands. But when I returned from the video shop, I had some bad news for her. Our first full day as man and wife was going to be a stressful one.

After suffering through an interminable, miserably hot summer in Washington, D.C., my first after joining the Foreign Service in 2002, I wanted our mid-August honeymoon to unfold in a cool, comfortable foreign locale. My wife was lukewarm on Scotland, but I sold her on the idea of hiking in The Highlands and on the island of Skye and spending our nights in cozy pubs listening to traditional fiddle music.

I’m a risk taker by nature and had no qualms about booking most of our trip with nonrefundable bids on priceline.com. I booked the flight and four nights of accommodation in London on Priceline and made reservations at B & B’s in Scotland for the rest of the two-week trip. At the time, I was in a six month long Albanian language course at the Foreign Service Institute in Northern Virginia, and my wife was finishing up a masters program in Chicago. We were newlyweds, but didn’t live together yet.I don’t recall what triggered my memory but I came to the sickening realization that I’d left my passport 1,000 miles away at my apartment in Washington, D.C., as I drove down Western Avenue on Chicago’s north side back to my wife’s apartment. It was about 4 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon and our completely non-changeable, non-refundable flight to London via Cincinnati was scheduled to depart in 24 hours.

I dreaded telling my wife about my mistake, but when she didn’t lunge after me with a butcher knife I knew I’d made a wise choice in marrying her. I had a good woman but no passport.

A series of frantic phone calls and web prowling revealed that there were two options to get my passport: A) I could fly to Washington myself, get the passport and then catch a flight to Cincinnati to board our connecting flight to London, or B) Find someone in Washington to bring my passport to Dulles airport on Monday morning and send it via cargo to Chicago.

Both scenarios left no margin for error. If I traveled myself, I’d have to pay about $500, and would arrive in Cincinnati just on time for our flight, but the routing involved three total flights and if any were delayed then my wife would be going on the honeymoon herself. When I broached this topic with her, and opined that if I didn’t turn up at the airport, she should proceed to London on her own, and I’d try to buy a ticket for another flight, she took a stand.

“I am not leaving for our honeymoon alone,” she said. “You bought non-refundable tickets and now we just have to deal with it.”

Option B was cheaper, at about $175, but was also more complex and riskier. The routing had the passport arriving in Chicago about a half hour before our flight was due to board, but this plan meant that I’d have to find someone in D.C. who could gain access to my apartment, where the passport was, and then drive the passport to the airport at an ungodly hour on a Monday morning to catch an early flight.

I decided to ask two people to help me execute option B. I asked Mike Katula, the nicest Foreign Service colleague I could think of, to try to get my passport, and Kathy, my cousin’s wife, to drive the passport to the airport. Both immediately understood the gravity of the situation and offered to help immediately without complaint.

Katula had to go to my apartment building and do some detective work to find the super to explain the situation. I would have called to warn her but I had no idea what her phone number was, and didn’t even know her full name to look her up in the phone book. As my wife and I sweated the situation out in her little apartment in Chicago, I got a call from the super.

“There’s a tall guy here who says he needs to get into your apartment to get your passport,” she said.

“It sounds a little fishy, I know,” I said. “But, please, let him in.”

Katula got the passport, and Kathy, saint that she is, got it to the airport on time and for us, all that was left to do was chart my passport’s progress online. My passport had a connection to make in Cleveland, and even though it was August, we feared delays. We spent much of the day online, refreshing flight data pages to see if our flights were running smoothly.

The first flight to Cleveland appeared to have come off without a glitch, and the onward flight to Chicago left on time so we left for O’Hare full of hope that the passport would be there. We had to report to a cargo office on the periphery of the airport and as we entered the building, which was full of boxes and delivery people, I felt pretty certain we were the first people with a honeymoon riding on the arrival of a package.

The passport wasn’t there when we arrived at the office but the clerk verified that the flight had just landed. We had a little more than an hour before our flight to Cincinnati left and I explained our situation to the woman at the desk.

“Well, it takes a while for the packages to get here and be sorted,” she said, much to our chagrin.

About twenty very nervous minutes passed and finally the woman announced, “I have something here for you,” holding up a large white envelope. I have never been so excited to receive a package in my life.

“Now the honeymoon can begin,” my relieved wife said.

We dashed over to the airport in a celebratory mood, caught our flight and had a terrific time, despite the initial fright. Two months later, I took up my first job in the Foreign Service at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje and frequently dealt with Americans who had lost their passports. And while some of my colleagues were prone to scolding and hectoring Americans about taking better care of their passports, I was sympathetic because I had a dark passport secret of my own.

Read more from “A Traveler In The Foreign Service” here.

A Hotel In The Back Of A Truck

by McLean Robbins on




Taking budget-chic to a new level, this Scotland-based “truck-o-tel” has some unique amenities for those looking to take car camping for a test run.

Inverness-shire-based owner Walter Micklethwait turned his 1950s Commer Q4 into a moving hotel of sorts, complete with beds, chairs, a gas stove and a cabinet. The adjustments, he says, cost him £1400, and the hotel is dubbed the Beer Moth, for reasons, which we do not know.

The truck was formerly displayed in its original state in the Manston Fire Museum in Kent. Micklethwait raised the roof, added an oak parquet floor rescued from a Tudor mansion, a double Victorian bed, added snooker table slate to make a heart and put in a fire escape for a staircase.

He charges £450 per week for the accommodations.

What do you say, would you rent the Beer Moth for a week? You can book it via the reservations team at Inshriachhouse if you so desire.

Kelburn Castle To Lose Psychedelic Art, Going Old School

by Sean McLachlan on


Kelburn Castle isn’t your typical 13th century Scottish castle and aristocratic estate. It’s an example of some of the best street art in the world.

As you can see, it’s pretty trippy, the product of a group of Brazilian street artists in 2007. It was allowed by the local council on the understanding that it would be up for no more than three years. Generally, there are strict rules in the UK about changing the appearance of historic buildings.

Despite this, the castle’s owner, the Earl of Glasgow, has been fighting to keep it. Now it looks like the mural will have to go. It turns out the layer of cement that the mural is painted on is damaging the original medieval walls.

Being a modern sort of aristocrat, the Earl of Glasgow has launched a Facebook page to save the mural. So far it’s attracted more than 4,000 likes.

[Photo courtesy Iain and Sarah]

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