Skara Brae Prehistoric Village

Skara Brae is a Neolithic village occupied from approximately 3180 to 2500 BC, located on the Bay of Skaill in Orkney. It is the most complete Neolithic settlement in Western Europe and part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site. Exposed by a storm in 1850 and excavated by V. Gordon Childe from 1928 to 1930.

The origins of Skara Brae lie in the Neolithic communities that settled Orkney's Mainland around 3180 BC. They chose a site beside the Bay of Skaill, protected from the worst of the Atlantic weather by the surrounding landscape. Over the centuries that followed, they built and rebuilt their homes, sinking them into the earth and insulating them with layers of domestic refuse. The village grew to perhaps ten houses, interconnected by covered stone passages, housing a community of fifty to one hundred people.

They were farmers who grew barley and raised cattle, sheep, and pigs. They were fishers who took what the sea offered. They were craftspeople of considerable skill, producing Grooved Ware pottery with its distinctive incised patterns, working bone and whale ivory into pins and beads, and carving stone balls whose purpose has eluded every attempt at explanation.

Their homes followed a shared design so consistent that it must have carried cultural significance. Every house placed its hearth at the centre, its dresser facing the door, its larger bed to the right. Whether this standardisation reflected practical wisdom, social convention, or cosmological orientation, or all three at once, remains one of the village's many unanswered questions.

Around 2500 BC, the community departed. The climate was shifting, growing colder and wetter. Sand was advancing over the land. Whether they left gradually or in haste is debated, but they left, and the sand that may have driven them away also sealed their homes against the passage of time. Four thousand years later, a winter storm peeled back the covering and revealed what lay beneath.