Skara Brae
Skara Brae on the west coast of Mainland Orkney is the finest Neolithic village surviving in western Europe and one of the most remarkable prehistoric sites in the world, a settlement of eight stone-built houses connected by covered passages and preserved in extraordinary completeness by the sand dune that covered and protected it for five thousand years until a storm in 1850 exposed the site to the modern world. The houses, their stone furniture, hearths and fittings still largely intact, provide a uniquely direct and intimate insight into daily life in a Neolithic farming community of approximately 3100 to 2500 BC.
The stone furniture of Skara Brae is the feature that most immediately distinguishes it from other prehistoric sites. Because the settlers had no timber available for furniture on the treeless Orkney landscape, they built their beds, shelves, dressers and hearths from the same flat flagstone that provided their building material, and this stone construction has preserved household arrangements that would normally have long since decayed. The dresser of the largest house, a stone cabinet of two shelves facing the entrance, is one of the most vivid surviving objects from prehistoric domestic life anywhere in Europe.
The site lies at the edge of the Bay of Skaill, the beach immediately adjacent, and the proximity of the Neolithic village to the sea it would have overlooked five thousand years ago gives the site a quality of temporal compression. The stone walls of the houses, their interiors visible from the viewing path above, feel inhabited rather than abandoned, the permanence of the stone construction creating a sense of presence that the decayed remains of similar settlements elsewhere rarely achieve.
Skara Brae is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, which also includes the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness and Maeshowe chambered cairn.