Skara Brae

Skara Brae is a stone-built Neolithic village beside the Bay of Skaill on Mainland's west coast, the largest of the Orkney islands off the north of Scotland. Radiocarbon dates show that it was lived in from roughly 3180 to 2500 BCE, and it is often described as the most complete Neolithic village in Europe. Its ten structures, linked by passages and still furnished with stone beds, hearths and dressers, give an unusually close view of daily life some five thousand years ago.

The villagers made and used grooved ware, a style of pottery then new to northern Scotland. Once thought to have lived underground, they in fact built free-standing stone houses and packed them round with midden, a mass of household refuse, which gave insulation and stability. Each house was entered through a low doorway that could be closed with a stone slab and barred from inside, and drains ran beneath at least five of them.

Seven houses share almost the same layout: a central hearth, a bed on either side, and a stone dresser facing the door, the first thing a visitor would see. The bed to the right of the door is usually larger. The archaeologist Lloyd Laing compared this with Hebridean homes of the early twentieth century, where the larger bed belonged to the husband, a reading that finds of beads and paint pots in some smaller beds may support.

The people of Skara Brae kept cattle, pigs and sheep, and grain found in 1972 shows that they also grew barley. Fish bones and shells in the midden show that they ate seafood, and watertight stone boxes in the floors may have held limpets for bait. It is not clear what they burned: V. Gordon Childe assumed peat, but later study suggests thick peat had not yet formed nearby, and driftwood, dung and dried seaweed are possible alternatives. The finds include carved stone balls, tools of bone and whale and walrus ivory, ivory pins up to 25 centimetres long, and a rare piece of Neolithic rope made of heather. Spiral carvings and pins resemble objects from the Boyne Valley tombs of Ireland, such as Newgrange and hint at links between the two regions.

Around 2500 BCE, as the climate grew colder and wetter, the villagers seem to have left. A sudden great storm is a popular explanation, but Anna Ritchie rejects such catastrophic accounts. The sea was then further away; it has since eaten into the site, and an unknown number of buildings may already have been lost. The houses lay buried under a grassy mound while later peoples came and went. Orkney was part of the Pictish kingdom by the late Iron Age; in the ninth century it was settled by Norsemen and, by tradition in 875, annexed by the Kingdom of Norway. In 1472 the Earldom of Orkney was absorbed into the Kingdom of Scotland, after a dowry promised to James III went unpaid.

In the winter of 1850 a violent storm stripped the turf from the mound and exposed the outlines of roofless houses. William Graham Watt of nearby Skaill House, a self-taught geologist, dug out four of them before abandoning the work in 1868. In 1913 a party with shovels carried off an unknown quantity of finds in a single weekend, and in 1924 another storm destroyed part of a house. Childe, of the University of Edinburgh, then led excavations from 1927. He first dated the village to around 500 BCE; radiocarbon dating from new digs in 1972–73 pushed this back by more than two and a half thousand years.

Skara Brae is cared for by Historic Environment Scotland in the United Kingdom. In December 1999 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, together with Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. A 2019 assessment judged the site extremely vulnerable to climate change, from rising seas and heavier rain, and warned that one unusually severe storm could partly destroy it.