A Very Brief History of Orkney: More than Megaliths
Ten Miles North of Scotland Lies Humanity’s Biggest Questions
Pentland Firth has a power to it. It seems always to be streaked with white-topped waves chopping in all directions at once. When you travel by ferry from Scotland to Orkney, Pentland Firth is one of the many reminders that where you are headed is nothing like where you’ve been. As windy, as choppy, as dangerous as the Firth feels, though, there is a certain magnetism here: one is compelled to cross the water by the cliffs of Hoy, by the rocky shores of Mainland, by the promise of something untamed. The very geology itself is a siren’s song from a land that is in equal measure ancient and modern, near and far, wild and tame, inspiring and frightening.
This magnetism must be ancient, must be powerful. How else can one explain Orkney’s untold histories? What else but something supernatural and primal could compel man to not only venture to ancient Orkney but to settle it? But settle man did. Across Orkney lies megalith upon megalith. “Tombs,” some are often called, but who knows? Is everywhere a skeleton’s found a tomb? Cairns, stone circles, brochs: all words the builders of these enigmas never spoke. The Stone-Age settlers left us no stories, no names, just architecture. Norsemen carved mentions of treasure into the walls of Maeshowe. We doubt the treasure, but then again we also never consider maybe they were referring to the structure itself. After all, one does not leave a megalith less rich than when one entered, even if one leaves without any gems.
In the Neolithic, ancient Orcadians built in circles: on mounds and in the ground. Skara Brae, a village of several permanent dwellings dating back 5,000 years, is one such place. It’s hard to say what compelled people to settle here. Harder it is still to imagine what compelled people — maybe the same people — to dig henges, to erect stones several meters in height around them, to build cairns of stunning complexity. Scientists say the climate was more agreeable 5,000 years ago. Agreeable is relative, however. Regardless, all we know is what remains: the stones, the circles, the hearths, the mystery. Digging reveals skeletons, arrows, once or twice a figurine. But there are no answers in the ground at Brodgar or Stenness: just questions, reminders that this too shall pass, that Sooner or later the standing stones will all fall. Many of them have already.
The Ring of Brodgar, an enigmatic stone circle 100 meters in diameter, surrounds a manmade henge like a crown. Perhaps half the original stones still stand. Lightning, wind, farming, and time have diminished the monument, but its biggest loss was incurred long before the first stone tumbled. At some point humanity forgot what the ring was for. We have yet to excavate the center, but logic tells us there’s nothing there to find but uncertainties. But then again maybe we are wrong to ask what Brodgar was “for.” Maybe the ring wasn’t for anything, maybe the construction itself was the point. Is it not possible that what drove humans to construct these circular megaliths was not some end result but rather the community created in the act of building such a monument? In this view, perhaps the value of all of Orkney’s Neolithic structures is self-evident.
The circles stopped not with the Stone Age. In the age of iron the Broch Builders peppered Scotland with stone circles of their own design: tapering drystone structures twice the height of anything at Brodgar. These brochs — fortresses or homes or both or neither — also were erected on Orkney on hilltops and by the sea. Little is left of their former glory. But like the small homes of Skara Brae, like the family dwelling at the Knap of Howar, the hearths remain, a central and familiar fixture encircled by ancient stone. What thoughts, what fears, what connections did these walls once encase? What evils did they keep out? Humans sat around these fires just as humans once sat around the ones at Skara Brae, just as we now sit around campfires. The brochs, like Skara Brae, now are roofless and seem to fear the sea they once overlooked as it every day encroaches further on their domain, the shore slowly receding.
Like all of the ancient stone builders of Orkney, frustratingly little is left of their life and culture. Like the cairn builders before them, they bequeathed to posterity only ruins. Yet somehow the Brochs feel less foreign than what one finds in the various cairns and ancient dwellings that litter Orkney. At Midhowe Broch on Rousay, one can find stairs, drains, hearths, and, most human of all, a mistake. To this day, large, out-of-place-seeming stones still hold up a leaning exterior wall.
Eventually, the Broch Builders were replaced. The Norse built longer, squarer. But the hearths were the same: central and familiar. On Westray sits the remains of a longhouse whose central hearth and stone-separated chambers eerily remind one of structures already ancient when the Vikings arrived. Perhaps one did not inspire the other, but they still remind visitors of the carnal needs of man: shelter, company, food, and fire.
The Norse conquered the islands and expanded their dwelling places over generations. The Broch Builders, by now called Picts, were replaced— likely through murder, imprisonment, and forced marriage— by conquerors who did not stop at Orkney and did not stop at land. Here maybe the Vikings give us an answer to one of Neolithic Orkney’s greatest questions: perhaps these settlements weren’t vacated willingly. Of course, all one can do is speculate. But we do know that the Norse brought with them new building techniques, brought with them new gods, brought with them new language, language whose legacy is still stamped on island maps, road signs, and names: Kirkjuvagr, Scapa, Rognvald. Though Norn, in full, is forgotten, the last resident on the grounds of the Westray longhouse vacated not even a lifetime ago. The past lingers here, is alive, is woven into the present.
The Norse are memorable also because they are where Orkney’s literate history begins. Orkney’s epic, The Orkneyinga Saga tells us that Vikings took shelter from a storm in a Neolithic cairn we today call Maeshowe. Around 4,800 years ago ancient man built this chambered tomb-like structure a few miles from Brodgar. Some 3,000 years later, Vikings dug in from the top and carved runes into the walls of a structure whose true age they had no way of knowing. The graffiti is still visible, a reminder that once man has food, shelter, and company, he desires next to be remembered. “Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up,” one tag reads. Eventually, Maeshow was again forgtoten and Orkney’s relentless wind filled it with earth.
Eventually Christianity was brought to — forced upon?— the Norse who continued building with stone. St. Magnus Cathedral is a monument not just to the god of Rome, but to the islands’ greatest martyr. Betrayed and brave, Magnus was too proud to lose his head. Instead he took the axe blow to the forehead. His cathedral — uniquely yellow in a town of gray — at once eschews and preserves Orkney’s pagan past. The crosses and pews are of Christendom; the names on the tombs are of something else. Buried here are people who kneeled before Christ but remembered Odin. Within the sandstone walls one stands under vaulted ceilings— architecture of a magnificence the Broch Builders and the Neolithic folk before them could not dream. But like the ancient cairns, St. Magnus Cathedral hides secrets. Those who say Magnus’s martyrdom was a myth are left to explain the skeleton found in the walls there with a caved-in forehead.
With the annexation of Orkney by Scotland came winds of change. But Orkney thrives on vicissitude and on wind. What are these islands but the embodiment of change? Standing stones, once meant to bring together or bring to life some idea or some peoples, are now monuments to a forgotten past that can be spoken about only in probabilities. Homes with heated floors are built over Pictish graveyards. Ancient peat is still burned under barley whose end product is sold in airports. The very islands themselves change shape at the whims of the sea. Change is a wind, yes, but Orcadians are conquerors of land, of sea, of language, but, especially, of wind.
Wind is perhaps what brought man to Mainland. Perhaps then it is wind that kept him there. Wind, being inhospitable to tree growth, is what turned ancient Orcadians attention to stone. It is wind we must thank then for the immortalized ancient stone past of Orkney. And it is wind that today is the engine of the island. Turbines — white and tall and freestanding — are the islands’ new megaliths, its new monuments both to the pagan gods of wind and sea as well as the modern gods of technology and progress. On Orkney, gods and language and customs change, but nature, perhaps the only true god in such a place, must always be revered. And though modern Orcadians have harnessed the archipelago’s relentless wind, the sea remains constant and fierce.
Scapa Flow, Orkney’s natural harbor, may offer respite from the turbulance of the North Sea and the Atlantic, but Orkney’s remoteness proved no safe haven during the World Wars. Scapa Flow is a graveyard for German steel as well as British. How many more lives have the choppy waters here claimed? How many monuments now line the sea floor beneath the modern salmon farms, fast ferries, and fishermen? When one flies over Orkney, one sees only what the sea has yet to claim, what the wind has yet to weather. Skara Brae and the Knap of Howarr, once built comfortably away from the water, now sit precariously close to the sea. Nothing here but change is permanent.
On the Eastern half of Mainland sits Kirkwall Airport, a modern gateway to these ancient isles. Planes now carry residents, tourists, and mail from airstrip to airstrip. Modernity has closed the gaps between the islands: now visitors can travel back in time 5,000 years in one minute on the world’s shortest flight to Papa Westray to see one of Europe’s oldest homes or watch the ancient flock at North Ronaldsay eat seaweed behind a 200-year-old stone dyke. The journey through the air diminishes the megaliths below but puts into perspective the relationship on Orkney between the land and the sea. The islands wear the sea like a necklace. It is from the sky, then, that we learn what Orkney truly is. Orkney is, despite what some Viking graffiti claims, a treasure that cannot be plundered, a reminder of a past that is both tangible and immaterial. Orkney is a fierce place whose very ferocity is its own fragility — nothing except the wind lasts forever. Orkney is 5,000-year narrative of creation and destruction whose moral is that change, that death, is neither good nor bad: it just is.
