Indiana Jones Would Love This Place

I wake to the sound of rain and wind lashing the apartment and wonder if we're in for a wet and miserable day. To my delight, the weather clears just as dawn is breaking. From my bedroom window I enjoy the view of rolling green hills and the North Sea off in the distance. 

The sun smiles on Kirkwall

This morning our itinerary takes us to Skara Brae, about half an hour's drive northeast of Kirkwall. It is a 5000-year-old Neolithic settlement (older than the great Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge) that was discovered only about 150 years ago and found largely intact. It sits on the edge of a blustery, smooth sandy beach and visitors can walk around the tiny settlement and peer into the sunken dwellings. It feels very remote here, and we're surrounded by pastures full of cows and rabbits, all manner of birdlife, and heather and other wildflowers still in bloom. Long, constantly wind-blown grass forms wavy clumps in the open spaces. I always get a strange sensation visiting places like these. Knowing people have lived here for so long, come and gone, and been almost totally forgotten from history makes my own life seem so small and insignificant. But rather than plunging me into nihilism, it gives me some peace and helps put things into perspective.

Where all the nice wool comes from

Long grass vs. the wind

Skara Brae Neolithic settlement

Looking into a Skara Brae dwelling

Entry to Skara Brae also includes entry to the nearby Skaill House, a 17th century manor that was inhabited well into the 20th century and is decorated like it. As far as historic houses go, it's par for the course, and only really interesting if you give a shit about the ruling class that has lorded over these lands for a couple hundred years (and pilfered the ruins). It's really hard to care about the relatively new artifacts of their fancy lifestyle when you've just seen inconceivably old human settlements showing the lifestyles of people who actually had to work hard to survive in this harsh environment. We breeze through the house rather quickly, and then head to our next destination.

About ten minutes down the road on a causeway between Loch of Harray and Loch of Stenness stands the Ring of Brodgar. It is a Stonehenge-like ring of stones stood upright in an almost perfect circle, dating from the Neolithic period (2500-2000 BC), and likely used for ritual purposes. It sits atop a small hill and is surrounded by a deep ditch covered in flowering heather. Again, I'm struck by the age of this place and the fact that it was a significant site for people who are long gone and mysterious. The dramatic surroundings just add to its mystique. We walk all the way around the circle and then return to the car to head to our next stop, driving past the nearby road-side Standing Stones of Stenness, a similar archeological site.

The Ring of Brodgar

Brodgar's stones standing amidst the heather

Enter at your own risk

Next we'll see Maeshowe, a Neolithic tomb that can only be visited by guided tour. We wait at the visitors' center and then load onto a shuttle bus with about a dozen other people. It deposits us maybe half a mile down the road, where we take a path through a cow pasture to a mound on the ridge line. The are several calves in the field, one of which is cuddled up next to its momma right next to the low barbed-wire fence. Taylor reaches in and strokes its head, which startles it to standing. Momma's eyes widen a moment, but she does not stir beyond that. I laugh and jokingly scold Taylor for scaring the poor baby.

Maeshowe visible beyond the cows

The calf Taylor scared

Beyond the pasture, we arrive at the entrance to the unassuming, grass-covered tomb. Our guide gives us a rundown of the general geography and points out some other unexcavated sites nearby. After the introduction, we duck into a long tunnel that forces us to crouch as we walk to avoid hitting our heads. At the end of this maneuver, we're able to stand inside the tall circular tomb. There isn't much to see to the untrained eye, but our guide gives us a thorough and interesting description of the construction and what is known about it. Most interestingly, he points out and reads Norse runic graffiti scratched into the soft sandstone walls nearly 1000 years ago, which includes the tags of a couple famous vikings: Harald Maddadarson, Earl of Orkney and Rognvald, Earl of Møre. The tags mostly read things like, "So-and-so was here," and there are a couple of rude jokes or humorous references. Doesn't seem much different from the graffiti of today.

The entrance to Maeshowe

Crouching to enter

During the tomb tour, the guide recommends another tomb just down the road, so after the shuttle deposits us back at our car, we drive down there to take a look. This one sits at the end of someone's private driveway (imagine having that kind of feature on your property) and is called the Unstan Chambered Cairn, built sometime between 3400 and 2800 BC. The entrance to this one is even lower, but shorter in length, thankfully, so we don't have to crouch long to get inside. As the name suggests, several half-walls divide the space into chambers and a couple of enclaves for human remains. Now that his eyes know what to look for, Taylor cleverly points out what appear to be more Norse runes scratched into the sandstone. There is also some later graffiti from the mid-1800s.

We've both got headaches now, so we return to the apartment for an afternoon rest and a cup of tea, and to do some laundry while we plan out our next day here. We also wisely make dinner reservations, as being turned away for not having one seems to be the norm in small tourist-driven villages like Kirkwall. After our rest, we venture out both too late to visit the early-closing shops and too early for our dinner reservation, so we end up wandering all the way down to the end of the pier and looking at the boats. Our reservation is at an Italian place on the main drag and they are able to seat us early. The food was pretty good but they were clearly struggling with staffing and it took a while, even with the restaurant mostly empty. We walk back up the hill to the apartment and take a load off for the rest of the evening.