Attraction in Orkney Islands

Maeshowe in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site is one of the finest Neolithic chambered cairns in Europe, a passage tomb of approximately 2800 BC whose combination of the extraordinary precision of the drystone masonry, the winter solstice alignment illuminating the chamber at the shortest days of the year and the remarkable twelfth-century Viking runic inscriptions carved into the walls creates a monument of quite exceptional layered historical significance. Historic Environment Scotland manages the site and guided tours are required. The quality of the masonry at Maeshowe surpasses that of any other Neolithic monument in Britain, the large flat stones fitted with precision to create walls and a corbelled roof of remarkable structural elegance. The monument was built approximately 500 years before Stonehenge and the engineering knowledge required to align the passage with the winter solstice sunset demonstrates the mathematical abilities of Orkney's Neolithic builders with unusual clarity. The Viking runic inscriptions, carved by Norse explorers who broke into the tomb in the twelfth century, include some of the longest runic inscriptions in existence written in colloquial Norse. They range from boasts about treasure to descriptions of a woman recorded as the most beautiful in Orkney.

The Ring of Brodgar on the Mainland of Orkney is one of the largest and most impressive Neolithic stone circles in Britain, a ring of originally sixty standing stones set within a circular ditch cut from the bedrock approximately five thousand years ago on an isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray. Twenty-seven stones survive standing in a circle of over 100 metres diameter, their weathered flagstone pillars rising to varying heights from the closely mown grass of the archaeological site in a landscape of extraordinary quality and resonance. The Ring of Brodgar forms part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside Skara Brae, Maeshowe chambered cairn and the Stones of Stenness. The monument was built in a position of considerable visual power, the isthmus between the two lochs framing the circle on either side with water and the wide Orkney landscape opening in every direction beyond. The choice of this specific location, neither the highest ground nor the most sheltered, implies that the relationship between the stone circle and the water on either side was deliberate and meaningful, the lochs perhaps representing boundaries between different conceptual domains in the cosmology of the builders. The deep ditch surrounding the circle, cut into the bedrock with antler picks, would have created an even more powerful sense of boundary and enclosure in its original form. The standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar are formed from the local Old Red Sandstone, which splits naturally into the flat-faced slabs that the Neolithic builders exploited for their monument stones throughout Orkney. Each stone has a distinctive shape and many bear later carvings by Viking settlers who added runic inscriptions and other marks to monuments already two thousand years old when they arrived.