Discover the Astounding Secrets of Scotland's Stone Age Settlements

One ordinary day in the spring of 2003, Carole Hoey was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when a sound, or rather a sudden absence of sound, caused her to glance out the window. She had lived here, on the land between the lochs, for six years, and she had become used to the view, Orkney’s everyday miracle: the hills of Hoy, the waters of Stenness and Harray, and, just up the road, the Ring of Brodgar—Scotland’s biggest stone circle.

What snagged her attention was the realization that she could no longer hear the tractor. It had been passing up and down, plowing a field belonging to her neighbors, preparing for the sowing of wildflowers in ground that, for years, had been given over to barley. Hoey didn’t yet know it, but the planned meadow would not now happen. A very different crop was about to emerge.

Rock Art — A decorated stone discovered Ness of Brodgar, one of 1,000-odd examples of “rock art” found at the site—more than the rest of Britain combined. Kieran Dodds

As the plow worked the southern part of the field, it had caught on something heavy and dragged it from where it lay. That was why the tractor had stopped. Hoey watched as the plow rose from the earth. There was a slab lodged between its blades. “It wasn’t any old stone,” she recalls now. “It looked like it had been deliberately made.”

The rectangular object was a little over five feet long. Four semicircular notches along one side appeared very like handholds. The Orkney Islands are rich in prehistoric sites, and it was thought, at first, that the slab could be the capstone of a type of Bronze Age burial known as a cist. The possibility of human remains prompted investigation, and when, a week or so later, two archaeologists arrived from the Scottish mainland, Hoey was given a trowel and invited to help. What was revealed, as she scraped the earth, was the top of a wall. “It was so exciting and enthralling. I was the first person to see that in thousands of years.”

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Geometry of discovery — Nick Card, the excavation’s director, beside the remains of a building known as Structure 27, with his border collie, Tam. Card has overseen the excavation since its inception in 2004. He now lives in an old farmhouse overlooking the site. Kieran Dodds

This was not a grave but a building, and not Bronze Age but older—Neolithic. And it was thought likely that there was more to be discovered. “I didn’t realize,” Hoey says, “how big it was going to be.”

No one did. How could they? The subsequent Ness of Brodgar excavation—“the Ness” to its familiars—would become one of the largest and longest-running archaeological digs in Britain. And what it has revealed is remarkable: a complex of monumental structures built, rebuilt and eventually destroyed with ceremony and purpose over a period of around 1,200 years. In their stately ruins, the remains of these structures offer glimpses of the Stone Age people who made them, people at once familiar and deeply strange, whose voices are lost but whose sharp minds and skilled hands can be inferred and admired. The Ness is a window into the ancient past. The view it offers is breathtaking.

Orkney is an archipelago of 70 or so islands lying off the northeast tip of Scotland. “Everywhere in Orkney there is the sense of age, the dark backward and abysm,” the late Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown wrote. “The islands have been inhabited for a very long time, from before the day of the plough.”

The largest island is referred to as the Mainland, though the Vikings knew it as Hrossey. Orkney is full of Norse names, and every map is a poem: Bay of Skaill, Water of the Wicks, Candle of the Sneuk. The Vikings, settling in the late eighth century, found the islands covered in prehistoric sites. The Orkneyinga Saga, an Icelandic text, tells the story of a raiding party, caught out by a snowstorm, who took shelter in what they called Orkahaugr, a Neolithic burial mound; there, in the dark of the dead-house, two of the warriors lost their minds. Orkahaugr is famous these days as Maeshowe, a popular visitor attraction. You can go inside the stone chamber and see Viking graffiti carved on the ancient walls—a dragon, a serpent, a forest of runes.

Map — The Orkney archipelago was an epicenter of Neolithic life. Guilbert Gates

I first traveled to Orkney toward the end of July, the ferry cutting a furrow through the Pentland Firth, the body of water that separates mainland Scotland from the islands. Puffins sat up on waves and beat their wings. We passed Flotta, a small island where oil from the rigs is piped ashore for processing; the gas flaring from its stack was orange as a puffin’s feet.

Arriving at the ferry terminal by the village of St. Margaret’s Hope, I went north through a chain of islands linked by causeways—South Ronaldsay, Burray, Glimps Holm, Lamb Holm, the Mainland—until I came to the Ness of Brodgar. Ness, another Norse-derived word, means “headland.” Brodgar is “bridge farm.”

The approach to the site, especially on foot, is like entering another world. There is a sense of a threshold crossed. A nearly 20-foot monolith, the Watchstone, stands sentinel at one end of a narrow bridge leading to the Ness; you half expect it to pose a riddle in return for passage. To one side of the bridge is the freshwater Loch of Harray, on the other, the saltwater Loch of Stenness; yin-yang lakes in a liminal zone.

I passed through an open farm gate and made for Carole Hoey’s old house, repurposed as “Dig HQ”—the headquarters of the excavation team.

Stones of Stenness — The 5,000-year-old henge monument was in use at the same time as the Ness complex. Excavations revealed Neolithic pottery and the remains of cattle, sheep and dogs (or possibly wolves). Kieran Dodds

Being on-site felt like walking through a major construction project. The Ness isthmus covers an area of seven acres, and large parts had been exposed—the ruins of a great settlement with origins in the mid-fourth millennium B.C. Forty buildings have been identified within the excavated area. Geophysical surveying—a variety of noninvasive imaging technologies to detect man-made structures underground—suggests a total of around 120, but it is thought that this is an underestimate and the true figure could be 200. Seen from above, a drone’s-eye view, the footprint of buildings with curved walls was clear, but from the ground it appeared a chaos of stone. The people of the Ness built new structures on the ruins of old ones, with the result that we now see remains from different periods in the same physical space. It is up to the archaeologists to make sense of it all.

RING OF BRODGAR — A circle of 27 standing stones, likely a ceremonial meeting place, that may once have contained as many as 70 megaliths. Researchers believe the ring was erected between 3000 B.C. and 2500 B.C. Imagebroker / Alamy Stock Photo

“Welcome to the Ness of Brodgar,” I heard a tour guide tell his party. “Most of the monuments you can see in this landscape date from the Neolithic—the New Stone Age. The earliest evidence of Neolithic activity in Britain is around 4100 B.C. The Neolithic is defined by the adoption of agriculture. We shift from being hunter-gatherers to settling down and farming. The earliest evidence of agriculture in Orkney is 3700 B.C., so it takes a couple of centuries to get here—like most things.” There was laughter at that. “But when it does arrive, it flourishes.”

A few dozen visitors stood at the lip of a trench, trying to make sense of the structures within. Diggers, bent to their labors, paid the onlookers no mind. They were five feet down and 5,000 years away. What’s more, they had a deadline. This was to be the last season. The Ness was in the final weeks of its strange second life.

THE WATCHSTONE — The nearly 20-foot-tall megalith stands where the lochs of Harray and Stenness meet. It was likely erected around 3000 B.C., give or take a hundred or so years—a symbolic doorway, perhaps. Will Craig

Unlike the prehistoric village of Skara Brae, six miles or so to the northwest, which was built from a hard, resilient stone gathered from the nearby coast, the buildings of the Ness were made from a softer, quarried stone that cannot be left exposed to the elements. “It’s going to turn to dust,” the guide explained, scooping up a handful of fragments from the top of a wall and letting it fall through his fingers. “Five, six years, I think a huge proportion of this would be gone. So it must return to the conditions that preserved it for thousands of years.”

Since its discovery, the Ness has been excavated for up to nine weeks during the summer, at the end of which the trenches are covered by tarpaulins held down by thousands of old tires. This year, however, would be different. All the trenches were to be backfilled with the material that had been taken out over years of excavation, and which had been piled in a huge spoil heap at the edge of the site. This season was, in a way, one long farewell. Some diggers had been crying. Others were philosophical. “It is going back into the dark,” one told me. “But hopefully we have illuminated some things.”

Visitors to Skara Brae are often struck by its Hobbit-y appearance, but at the Ness one is very far from the Shire. These buildings, whatever their purpose, had been large and magnificent. Walls still stood to three feet or so in some places, but what impressed most was their footprint and finish. The best of them, Structure 27, was approximately 56 feet long by 36 feet wide, and its masonry, even now, was clearly masterful, the stone courses so elegant and smooth that it gave the curious impression of being newly made. Tourists had been known to ask bemused diggers, “Why are you building this, and when will it be finished?”

MAESHOWE — The Neolithic tomb appears as a tall, grassy mound. "Surely there could be no darker place in the be-wintered world than the interior of Maeshowe," wrote the poet George Mackay Brown. Kieran Dodds

As I looked down into the interior, an archaeologist was at work in an exposed hearth, a scatter of charcoal across its surface. It was easy to imagine people warming themselves in the glow of a fire that, thousands of years before, had burned out for the last time.

Inside Dig HQ, Nick Card was seated at his desk, his dog Tam, a border collie, chewing a bone (not Neolithic) by his feet. Card, a Scot in his mid-60s with silver hair and beard, is the director of the excavation and has been with it since the start. The Ness is, for him, not only a place of work and endless fascination; it’s also his home. For the last seven years he has lived in a farmhouse overlooking the excavation from the opposite side of the site to Dig HQ. He opens his curtains in the morning and looks out at the big skies and big stones of a prehistoric landscape. “It has a sort of magic,” he admitted. Every day, when he steps down into Structure 27, he can’t keep from smiling.

GATHERING PLACE — The area known as Trench P contains a cluster of buildings at the heart of the Ness complex. Structure 1, among the oldest, was built around 3100 B.C. Adjacent to its south entrance was a paved open-air area marked by a deco rated standing stone about three feet tall. Structure 8, 72 feet long by 31 feet across, was built on a monumental scale and included four large hearths and "painted walls-the first known such use of pigments (in this case, from iron ore) in Northern Europe. Structure 12, called "a masterpiece in stone by its excavators, is thought to have been used to prepare food on a sizable scale: Each room had its own large hearth and evidence of other wooden structures for cooking, including tripods, rocks and spits. Kieran Dodds

Trench P Map — Courtesy of Ness of Brodgar Project

His intellectual excitement was evident during our discussions, as was his admiration for the people who built these structures. The quality of the work suggested to him specialist trades: skilled masons, skilled quarrymen, even some sort of architect, perhaps sketching out the design with charcoal on animal skin. He insisted upon their sophistication: “We must never, ever underestimate what our ancestors were capable of.”

Yet while he praised the builders, Card was reluctant to speculate about the use and purpose of what they had built. He had once described Structure 10, the largest building, as a “Neolithic cathedral”—but now regretted that likening. He was coming to the view that it had been built as a residence for an individual or family of very high status.

“So, closer to a palace?” I asked.

He frowned. “I wouldn’t call it a palace. A house of renown.”

It is tempting for an outsider to look at the Ness, its grandeur, and conclude that it must have been a site of spiritual or political authority, or some mixture of the two, but those closest to the excavation are the most wary of conjecture. Card seems especially cautious of speculating beyond the known facts, as if to do so would be a disservice to the site. The furthest he would go was to describe it as “a place of gathering for masses of people.”

There is evidence for this: not only the size of the buildings, but also deposits that indicate preparation and consumption of food on a huge scale. Around 2400 B.C., at least 400 cows were slaughtered and eaten during one feast, or so radiocarbon dating and other analysis suggests. The bones of their shins, cracked for marrow, were then arranged around the perimeter of Structure 10—as if in celebration of wealth, abundance and appetite.

Many structures present strange mysteries. Inside Structure 1, an infant was buried around 2800 B.C.; elsewhere in the building were the remains of a calf fetus and a newborn deer. Kieran Dodds

Who were these feasters? Perhaps not only people from the islands. Material found at the Ness, such as glossy volcanic glass from the island of Arran, hint at social and trade links with Scotland’s west coast, but the connections go much farther. Orkney seems to have been a cultural and technological innovator during the Neolithic. It has been argued that the nearby Stones of Stenness is the earliest stone circle in Britain, a few hundred years older than Stonehenge. Similarly, so-called Grooved Ware, a distinctive style of flat-bottomed pottery, appears to have originated in the archipelago and spread across Britain and Ireland.

Ideas—and the people who carried them—were on the move.

That the Ness was a gathering place, something akin to a pilgrimage site, is an attractive thought. Indeed, there is a certain poetry in the way that, for the last two decades, it has exerted a similar pull on those who have come, summer after summer, to dig there. The wind howling across the lochs is a sort of call to prayer.

SUPERLATIVE STONEMASONS — Structure 27, measuring roughly 56 feet by 36 feet, is celebrated for the high quality of its Neolithic stonework. Like Structure 10, it shows signs of having been demolished intentionally, perhaps during a ceremonial ritual. Kieran Dodds

During excavation season, there have been up to a hundred or so people working at the Ness at any one time, volunteers mostly: a mix of students, locals and archaeologists from elsewhere in Britain.

For some it has offered a first taste of a real excavation—and the chance of an electrifying find. Jessica Heupel was a 20-year-old archaeology major at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, when, in 2012, she discovered the so-called Sky Axe. This is a polished stone axe head, patterned blue-black and white, which, when she lifted it from the earth, appeared to reflect the clouds passing above. The look on her face as she held it, Card said, would stay with him forever.

Anne Mitchell, a co-director of the excavation. Kieran Dodds

When I called Heupel in St. Louis, where she works in the family business and is no longer involved in archaeology, she was still buzzing as she recalled that moment: “You really do feel connected to the past. You’re like, ‘Holy cow! This was something someone held, like, 5,000 years ago.’ To find an axe that beautiful and intact, and to feel the weight of it, I was kind of in awe.”

The Sky Axe was not lost or discarded; it was made from a type of stone not native to Orkney, and it seems to have been placed in Structure 14 as part of a ritual deposit marking the end of that building’s life before the interior was filled with rubble. Neolithic axe heads were not always made for use, but rather for aesthetic power; they may have been given as gifts, expressions of alliance and esteem, and it is possible that some had a symbolic importance—carrying associations with particular people and places.

This is the elegant serendipity of archaeology. A person is born toward the end of the 20th century, on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, and through a series of choices and coincidences happens to be in precisely the right spot at the right time—not a foot to the left or right, not five minutes later coming back from a break—to uncover an axe head that someone, around 2800 B.C., had put into the earth for reasons of their own. The Sky Axe may have spoken, to those who knew its origins, of distant horizons; and now, thanks to the young woman who found it, the skies of the American Midwest are part of its story, too.

Bounty — Researchers recovered a bounty: 100,000 pottery sherds, 2,500 tools, human and animal remains, decorated stones, and dozens of small clay balls—possibly game pieces or counters or, some argue, little “feet” on which to rest hot vessels during cooking. Kieran Dodds

Heupel is not the only one moved by a personal discovery at the Ness. Jo Bourne, an archaeologist and writer from the southeast of England, was a week or so into the first of ten summers at the site when she found the “Butterfly Stone”—a heavy slab incised with two examples of the motif that has become emblematic of the Ness. The main “butterfly” is, from wingtip to wingtip, about the length of a human hand, and it has been deeply carved, probably with a piece of flint.

It was a cold, wet day when Bourne found the stone. She had been tasked with removing a pile of rubble blocking an entrance to the annex of Structure 12. She had taken away the first couple of stones when she saw the butterfly. There was a woozy unreality about that first glimpse. “It was,” she recalls, “like going underwater in a swimming pool when everything is kind of loud and noisy around you, and you just dip into some more silent place.”

There is an intimate moment when a digger finds something, when it is just them and the object and the hovering ghost of whoever touched it last. Then they finish troweling it from the ground and it belongs to the world, destined for the museum storage box, or, in the case of special finds, the exhibition case and the memory of a million phones.

The Sky Axe, a polished stone axe head said to reflect the sky. Kieran Dodds

The Butterfly Stone, being special, falls into the second category. I had seen it in London, in the British Museum, cocooned within glass, as had Jo Bourne, almost ten years after its discovery. “I found that, on a dig in Orkney,” she had told a little girl who was looking at it. Having come into its presence once again, she didn’t want to walk away. Numbered and recorded, the stone was now part of the material culture of human civilization. But does Bourne feel that, on some level, it is hers?

“Secretly, I do,” she replies. “There’s a feeling of ownership even though, intellectually, I know that’s not the case. Yeah, I kind of love it.”

More Neolithic “rock art” has been discovered at the Ness—in excess of 1,200 examples, of which the Butterfly Stone is the best known—than in the rest of Britain put together. In addition to the butterflies, there are scratches and incisions of various kinds—crosses, diamonds, triangles, zigzags—as well as the pecked and ground depressions known as cup-marks. These shapes don’t seem to be representational, nor are they a language, and even the word “art” is probably the wrong way to think about them. “‘Art’ is a very post-Renaissance term that we’re putting onto the ancient past, and it may not apply,” says Antonia Thomas, an archaeologist at the Ness who has studied Orkney’s decorated stones. “But there’s something fundamentally human about our need to make a mark, to decorate, to leave our imprint for the future. That’s why these carvings speak to us now, I think, and transcend the millennia.”

Looking for meaning in the carvings is a frustrating business, but they certainly have a tone. There is something anxious about them, something nerve-jangling and twitchy. Some, Thomas suggests, may have been apotropaic—that is, intended to ward off evil. A number of the diggers, I noticed, had commemorated their time at the Ness with tattoos of designs discovered at the site. One, though, explained that she wouldn’t be comfortable having a butterfly inked on her body, because she simply did not know what it had meant. What if it was a spell? A warning?

The Neolithic mind is unknowable. We are so like and yet so unlike those people. We can walk within their buildings, pick up their tools, look out over the same water and hills as they once did, and yet how they saw their world, on a deeper level, is beyond us. They did some really weird things.

Skara Brae — Some six miles from the Ness, this Neolithic village was naturally preserved in sand for 5,000 years, complete with stone rooftops, intact passageways and interior stone furniture. Each single-room hut contained a hearth and, apparently, a toilet hole leading to a common sewer. Kieran Dodds

One day, around 2500 B.C., four centuries after it had been constructed, Structure 10—the building Nick Card had called “a house of renown”—was abandoned. Its walls were brought low, and its interior, where who knows what chief or priest held court, was filled with rubble and a substance known as midden—rotted refuse and ash. Buried, it became a great mound that, until 20 years ago, was thought natural, just another swell in the Ork-ney landscape. The archaeologists, digging into it, found the house; within the house they found a hearth; within the hearth they found an object placed there long ago as, one assumes, some sort of closing offering: The skull of a cow, inverted. Whether this was an act of propitiation, remembrance or thanksgiving is uncertain; at the time, no doubt, the gesture would have been well understood, its meaning and resonance clear, but it has come down to us, the forgetful inheritors, as an object that perplexes and disturbs.

Cattle were fundamental to Neolithic Orkney. They provided leather, milk and meat, but their value, according to Mark Edmonds, co-director at the Ness, was more than physical and economic. The emphasis on breeding and bloodlines, he thought, would have made herds proxies for human communities: “So, yes, they are a great source of material wealth, but also a rich source of metaphor. You talk to farmers here in Orkney, and they get that.” That skull in the hearth could well have been a known beast—an animal with a name and life history, associated with a particular person or family. There could even have been something sacred about it.

“Holy cow!” as Jessica Heupel had said.

I returned to the Ness at the end of summer. Cattle lay in cold fields; black ribbons of geese streamed through a pale sky. The farm gate was closed and locked, the excavation over.

Trench P, seen last year during excavations. Kieran Dodds

Trench P after it was permanently refilled in September. Kieran Dodds

Nick Card was in Dig HQ. On the desk was his favorite trowel, his first name carved into the handle, which he intended to bury on-site as a token of his involvement. “In hundreds of years, perhaps someone will dig it up and go, ‘Nick who?’” We walked through the house to the kitchen and stood by the window. “So,” he said, “this is where it all started.”

He pointed to where Carole Hoey saw the tractor stop and where the first stone must have come up. We were looking out at what was, once again, farmland. The spoil heap was gone. Most of the trenches had already been filled, and over the next week or so, if the weather held, the rest would be put back underground. A goose flying overhead would not, now, make much of the Ness. Just another field on the way to the wintering grounds.

But for Orcadians, hardly that. This place makes you proud to be an islander, is how one local digger, Sigurd Towrie, had summed it up. Why proud? Something to do with the enabled connection to Orkney folk of the past. “They undoubtedly went through the same things as we do,” Towrie said. “The darkness of midwinter, the joy of equinox, when the days are equal and you know that the daylight’s coming back; midsummer and knowing that darkness is coming. Cold, wind. They knew this place. It’s the continuation of a long, long human story.”

Card and I went outside. Mud squelched underfoot. Trench J was gone, and Trenches X and Y, and Trench P—where the Sky Axe and Butterfly Stone had been found—was almost completely covered. All that remained was the center of Structure 10, and there, in the weak morning light, was the hearth where the cow skull had been placed upside down.

The director led the way past Dig HQ, past the two lichen-shaggy standing stones in the garden, and down a slope to Structure 27, Tam running ahead and stopping at the edge of the trench. Work had not yet begun on backfilling this building. It was the last to be excavated and would be the last to be buried.

For Card, the Ness is his legacy. Even though there were many structures that hadn’t yet been excavated, even though it was frustrating that he would never explore them, he knew that covering the site was for the best. It had to be returned to the earth’s protective embrace. Besides, there were years of post-excavation analysis ahead. There were books to be written, stories to be told. And yet he was finding it difficult to witness the buildings disappear. He had often been close to tears during our conversations. “The Ness has been such a big part of my life for the last 20 years,” he said. “It’s filled many of my waking hours and sometimes sleeping hours as well. It has fulfilled many boyhood dreams, when I thought about being an archaeologist, and making a discovery like this. It’s the discovery of not just one lifetime, but several.”

Card with his dog, Tam, beside some of the last remaining exposed stones. They have since been covered over. Kieran Dodds

We walked down some steps cut into the earth bank and stood by a large upright slab that had formed one side of the building’s narrow entrance. Card invited me to notice the inner edge, how rounded it was. He said it had been worn by thousands of people brushing against it as they passed in and out. This is what we leave of ourselves: a smooth edge on an old stone.

Very early the next morning, as I drove through the dark to catch the ferry home, I passed the road leading to the Ness. There was a single light on, out there on the isthmus, and I wondered if it was Card. It must surely be strange for him to live there now, overlooking the buried site, no longer able to see the buildings he loves. Yet it feels right that he will have their keeping, like the Watchstone on the other side of the bridge. I had told him, the last time we spoke, that I imagined him, in years to come, as a watcher or guardian of the Ness.

He is a highly practical person, and I had expected him to dismiss this as whimsy. But he nodded.

“You don’t own the land. You don’t own the house. You are just here for a fleeting moment in the history of this landscape. So, a guardian? Yeah, I’d go with that.”

Discover the Astounding Secrets of Scotland’s Stone Age Settlements

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