Maeshowe Chambered Cairn

Maeshowe was built circa 2800 BC by Neolithic farming communities on Mainland Orkney. It is one of four principal monuments forming the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site. Norse visitors in the twelfth century left the largest collection of runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia.

Around 2800 BC, Neolithic communities on Mainland Orkney began constructing a monument of extraordinary ambition. They chose a site on the low ground between the lochs of Harray and Stenness, within a landscape already marked by ceremonial activity. They quarried flagstone slabs weighing up to thirty tonnes and fitted them with a precision that required no mortar. They built a passage eleven metres long, aligned to the southwest so that the midwinter sunset would penetrate its full length. They raised a central chamber nearly five metres square with walls rising in corbelled courses. They created three side cells, raised above the floor, to receive what they chose to place within. Then they covered it all with earth and stone, creating a mound thirty-five metres across and seven metres high, encircled by a ditch.

The monument stood in its landscape for nearly four thousand years before it entered written history. The Orkneyinga Saga, composed in the thirteenth century, likely refers to Maeshowe in its account of Norsemen sheltering from a storm and being driven mad by the experience. In the twelfth century, Norse visitors broke into the chamber, possibly seeking treasure, and carved over thirty inscriptions in runes on the walls. They boasted, they declared love, they speculated about hidden gold. They carved a dragon, a walrus, a knotted serpent.

In 1861, antiquarian James Farrer opened the mound, breaking through the roof of the entrance passage. His methods were crude by modern standards. George Petrie, the Orcadian antiquary who followed in his wake, recorded what he saw with greater care. Few artefacts were found: horse bones, a fragment of human skull, and the runic inscriptions that Farrer had uncovered. V. Gordon Childe returned in the 1950s to place the monument in its broader Neolithic context.