Off the northern tip of Scotland lie some
of the most important islands in the world. Orkney may not sound like much on paper: a
mere 990 km2, home to fewer than 23,000 people. But go looking into its history, and you’ll
discover a past of unparalleled vitality. 5,000 years ago, a Neolithic culture arose
here that was unsurpassed in Ancient Europe. Starting in 3,600 BC, they raised great henges,
built barrows, and created vast temple complexes that could rival anything in Egypt. When they finally vanished, they left behind
ruins that were preserved for millennia. The greatest of all these ruins? Skara Brae. An ancient agricultural settlement, Skara
Brae spent 43 centuries buried beneath shifting sands. When it was uncovered in 1850, it transformed
everything we knew about Scotland’s past. So perfectly had this village been frozen
in time that seeing it was almost like traveling back to the dawn of civilization. But what really was Skara Brae, who built
it, and how does its story connect to the rest of Neolithic Orkney? Join us today as Geographics travels to Britain’s
far north, and uncovers a culture so ancient, it makes Stonehenge look practically modern. The Ancient Revolution The fantastically grumpy-looking Scottish
poet George Mackay Brown once wrote that “The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.” He wasn’t wrong. Although only separated from Scotland by a
mere 10.5km of sea, the Orkney archipelago is a place drowning in prehistory. There are so many ancient sites here - over
200 so far discovered - all clustered so close together, that it’s been called “the Egypt
of the north”. But what are these ancient sites, and how
did they all come to be clustered on these remote Scottish islands? We’re glad you asked. Around 3,700 BC, the first neolithic farmers
arrived on Orkney, a mere 300 years after the Stone Age reached the British Isles. These first farmers would’ve come in boats,
sailing the treacherous Pentland Firth with pigs, cows, grain, ploughs, and all the other
stuff you need to start an agricultural lifestyle. In Orkney, they found their Garden of Eden. Although the words “north of Scotland”
might conjure images of a place so perpetually cold and wet you might as well rename it Seattle,
Orkney’s climate is actually rather mild. It was even milder 5,000 years ago, a time
when its islands were almost uninhabited. The few Mesolithic hunter gatherers who’d
made that far were replaced, and Orkney’s new farmers quickly settled down to a life
of… well, farming. However, first they had to adjust to their
new environment. One of the reasons the British Isles have
very few remaining Neolithic houses is that they tended to be built of wood. And what does wood do over the course of 5,000
wet years? Yep, it rots. Luckily for us history lovers though, that
wasn’t an option on Orkney. At some point in the past, the constant blowing
winds left Orkney almost devoid of trees. That meant almost no timber for building,
which in turn meant other materials had to be found. The material those long-dead farmers settled
on was stone. When they built a structure, they inadvertently
built it to last. The first of these long-lasting buildings
was the Knap of Howar. An ancient farmhouse, the Knap was first inhabited
around 3,600 BC. If you’ve watched our Newgrange video, you
might remember that cool bit where we told you how Newgrange was so ancient that the
builders of Stonehenge would’ve found it as old as you find Machu Picchu. But Newgrange was built 400 years after the
Knap of Howar. Those Stonehenge dudes who felt like Newgrange
was their Machu Picchu? They would’ve been roughly as distant from
the Knap’s construction as you are from the founding of the Holy Roman Empire. Over the next few centuries, Orkney’s neolithic
culture grew increasingly complex. Around 3500 BC, work started on the temple
complex known as the Ness of Brodgar. Other sites soon followed. New villages grew up. Then, finally, in 3100 BC, work began on Skara
Brae. Construction wasn’t like anything we’d
consider house building. Rather than being independently-standing structures,
the entire village was built inside a raised mound known as a ‘midden’. If that sounds rather pleasant, know that
a midden is just a fancy name for a gigantic pile of crap. We mean that literally, at least, in part. Skara Brae’s midden was made of dung, compost,
random stones, and broken up animal bones. Rather than just to gross future people out,
though, this was done with a specific purpose: to protect the interlinked houses from the
punishing Atlantic winds. So, what was life like inside this pile of
prehistoric dung? Let’s find out. Into the Past The first thing you need to understand about
life in Skara Brae is that it was weirdly close-knit. In this time period, villages weren’t much
of a thing. Most people lived in separate farmsteads,
so the mere fact you had eight homes clustered together, with maybe 50-100 residents spread
between them would’ve been impressive. But Skara Brae wasn’t just weird conceptually. Were you to visit, you’d discover that there
was only one way into the midden; a single, sealable passage that you had to stoop to
enter. Once inside, it would’ve been dark. Dark, and mighty disorientating. The network of passages connecting the houses
was winding and narrow, like an ancient Kowloon Walled City. But once you overcame your nervousness and
ventured on, you’d soon discover oases of light. Each branching passage led to separate homes,
each of which would’ve been lit by a fireplace. Without windows, these homes would’ve been
dark and smoky, the single fire casting strange shadows. Stone seats were set up by the hearths, where
you may have glimpsed the head of each household, watching you pass with an unreadable expression. But while visiting might have been intimidating
for the newcomer, those who knew Skara Brae probably found it cosy. Rather than being to confuse visitors, the
winding passages were to stop the wind from howling in. Combined with the insulation the midden provided
- and the heat from the fires, obviously - the homes were surprisingly warm. They were also big. At 36 m square, there was space enough for
all sorts of extras. There were stone cupboards and stone beds,
the latter padded with heather, bracken and animal skins to make them comfortable. Fish may have hung from the ceiling, so the
smoke from the fire could cure them. Speaking of the ceilings, they are the one
parts of the homes that haven’t survived into modern times. Built of turf, they were probably supported
by timber or whalebone. Incredibly, the houses even came with modern
amenities. Despite being built so long ago that there’s
almost no existing comparison point, Skara Brae had rudimentary plumbing, and even what
appear to be indoor toilets. Indoor toilets! Modern Britain didn’t even start regularly
pooping indoors until the late-19th Century, and here are a bunch of ancient farmers inventing
it like it’s no big deal. Jesus, Victorian Brits. Get your act together. Outside the individual homes, there are signs
that life in Skara Brae may have been community based. Archeologists have noted the fittings and
sizes of the dwellings are more or less the same, with nothing that looks like a chief’s
home. As a result, it’s thought that Skara Brae
was a relatively equal society, although maybe not quite a socialist utopia. We know, for example, that most of the stone
dressers had secret compartments, where things were presumably kept that families didn’t
want their neighbors to see. There’s also the mystery of House Seven. Unlike Skara Brae’s other homes, House Seven
has a door that could only be sealed from the outside. What sort of building needs a door that the
occupants can’t open at will? The obvious answer would be a jail, but we
don’t know that for sure. It could be that important rituals took place
in House Seven. Maybe to do with growing up; or with death;
or even with childbirth. One last, intriguing thing about Skara Brae
is that it never experienced warfare. No weapons have ever been uncovered here,
no signs that the inhabitants feared their neighbors. But that doesn’t mean everything was hunky
dory. Ancient Life, Ancient Death With all this communal living and neighborly love,
it can be tempting to see Skara Brae as an ancient paradise, one it’d be great fun
to get blasted back in time to, Outlander-style. But, no. While Skara Brae might’ve had its upsides,
it would still suck for anyone used to non-Stone Age living. Thanks to the bones we’ve recovered, we
know that villagers often suffered painful arthritis, or even had skulls that became
grooved by lugging baskets around using their heads. Then there was the miserably low life expectancy. The majority of people living in Neolithic
Orkney died in their 30s. A huge proportion died even earlier, in childhood. Getting to the age of 50 was as impressive
as reaching 100 today. So, while we’re gonna keep coming back to
what a complex, vibrant culture Skara Brae and Orkney’s neolithic residents enjoyed,
don’t make the mistake of thinking you’d find it anything but short, miserable, and
agonizing. Still, if you were going to get Outlander-ed
back to the Neolithic era, Skara Brae would probably be the best of a bad bunch. Its inhabitants had leisure time, for starters,
as evidenced by the art we’ve found - something you tend not to bother with if you’re struggling
to merely stay alive. Their diet, too, was remarkably varied. There’s evidence these guys not only ate
the cattle and sheep they reared, but also seals, goats, red deer, and possibly even
the odd beached whale. The crops they grew also returned good yields. We can guess this because they were some of
the first farmers in Europe to use manure as fertilizer. On top of that, there were shellfish in the
nearby sea, and limpets they cultivated in special waterproof tanks built into their
houses. Skara Brae, then, was a village in decent
shape. A place any Neolithic farmer would be happy
to call home, even if it meant living in the remote north of the British Isles. Well, in the north, at least. Despite how we may think of the Orkneys today,
“remote” probably wasn’t an accurate descriptor in Skara Brae’s time. If anything, the place was almost crowded. It’s been estimated there were 10,000 people
living on Neolithic Orkney, a huge number in an era when villages of 100 people were
unusual. And that’s not even including the visitors. Over the centuries, pottery styles and types
of monuments that originated on Orkney have been found across the whole of Britain. In other words, Skara Brae was less “the
arse end of nowhere” than it was “suburb of Neolithic Paris” - a place everyone was
looking to for inspiration. It’s even thought that it was on this archipelago
that henges originated. If you’re thinking, “wait, what’s a
henge?”, well you already know the most-famous example. Stonehenge wasn’t just built after Orkney’s
monuments, it was probably inspired by them. So, yeah, sorry about that Scotland; you guys
go and invent henges, but now the whole world thinks us English were the ones responsible. Oh well. At least you’ve still got Irn Bru. We’ll let you keep that. Speaking of henges, it’s time we talked
about the most-impressive aspect of Skara Brae. Not the village itself… but what the villagers
were likely involved in. It’s time to talk about Orkney’s megastructures. Before the Pyramids In 1999, UNESCO designated Skara Brae part
of a World Heritage Site called “Heart of Neolithic Orkney” - and yes, we absolutely
ripped that off for this video’s title. Although Skara Brae is part of the site, its
boundaries extend much further, covering a whole swathe of monuments within 10km of the
village. That’s because, as impressive as Skara Brae
is, it wasn’t just a neolithic village surrounded by grassland. It was on the fringes of some of the greatest
Stone Age building projects ever undertaken. Before we visit those, just a quick note. Throughout this video we’ve been using a
lot of words indicating probability. Words like: probably, presumably, likely,
we assume that… and so-on. This is because the people at Skara Brae left
behind no records. We don’t even know what they called their
village - Skara Brae is a mid-20th Century corruption of an old Orkney word. Over the next couple of minutes, that vagueness
is only gonna increase as we tiptoe into speculation. Although please be assured this is speculation
from actual archeologists, and not from the writing team simply getting their pet monkey
to throw darts at random words taped to a board. Disclaimer over, we can start with the biggest
speculation of all: that the residents of Skara Brae helped build these megastructures. The magnificent Stenness Stone Circle, for
example, has been dated to around 3,000 BC; a century after Skara Brae was built. Although the circle stands over 10km from
the village, identical grooved ware pottery has been found at both sites, indicating a
connection. There’s also the sheer size of it. The circle is so big there’s simply no way
a single village could’ve built it. It seems more likely it was a team project,
involving villages from all across this corner of Orkney. The same goes for Maeshowe. A gigantic cairn constructed around 2800 BC,
Maeshowe is perfectly aligned to the winter solstice, allowing the sun’s weak rays to
penetrate its entrance once every year. Yet the greatest megastructure of all predates
Skara Brae by centuries. A mere hundred years after the Knap of Howar
was built - remember? The place even Newgrange’s builders were
like damn, that’s old - Orkney’s residents got started on their masterpiece: the Ness
of Brodgar. Only discovered in 2002, the Ness Brodgar
is one of the single most important archeological finds in Scottish history. Apparently a temple complex, it lay a short
walk from Skara Brae, protected from the elements by great walls 4m high. Individual temples were crammed together at
the site. In its heyday, it must’ve looked like a
scaled down version of Mecca. We can only speculate on how this vast complex
would’ve appeared to the farmers of Skara Brae. Seen from afar, these monuments would have
dominated the landscape. Did they inspire fear? Hope? Feelings of piety? Obviously, we have no way of knowing. All we know is that these monuments, all visible
from Skara Brae, must’ve held tremendous importance to its inhabitants. For 500 years they existed together, enough
time for generation upon generation of villagers to grow up, get old and die, comforted by
the knowledge that even after they were gone, their culture would survive. And it did. At least, for a while. But the iron law of the universe is that everything
dies. When the end came to Orkney, it would be spectacular. The End of Days When Armageddon reached Orkney, it came not
in the form of tragedy… ...but in the form of a party. By then, Skara Brae was already long gone,
vanished into history. Despite what you may have heard, Skara Brae
didn’t end in cataclysm. Instead, it seems to have been slowly abandoned
over centuries, before at last being forgotten all together. The likely trigger for this? All those damn megastructures. When Skara Brae was first built, the social
model was based around hyper-local communities, often no bigger than a single village. But the construction of the grand monuments
was such a massive undertaking that it must have involved some regional organizing body. The theory is that Skara Brae appeared at
a time when this authority was slowly coalescing. This would explain the lack of violence. The neighborly vibes. It might also explain Skara Brae’s abandonment. Perhaps, as the decades marched on, Skara
Brae’s residents began to identify less with their village and more with their wider
culture. Maybe it began to feel like you could move
across the island without leaving home. Maybe opportunities began to arise elsewhere. It could be that Skara Brae suffered the fate
of so many depressed small towns today: all the young folk moving away until there’s
nothing left but the elderly and their memories. Finally, even they disappeared. Throughout its existence, sand had been a
fact of life in Skara Brae. It blew across the midden on windy days, likely
crept its way into the passageways, requiring plenty of work to sweep it back out. With everyone gone, the sand was finally free
to claim its prize. Free to slowly bury the village. Skara Brae disappeared around 2,500 BC, after
six centuries of continuous occupation. At the moment it was abandoned, Stonehenge
was still under construction. The Pyramids were just about to start taking
shape. But even as great monuments rose in England
and Egypt, the last traces of Orkney’s Neolithic masters were being swept away. About 200 years after Skara Brae was buried,
the gigantic temple complex at the Ness of Brodgar met its fate. On one random, weird day lost to history,
some 400 cattle were driven into the temple and all slaughtered at once. Then they were cooked and eaten in a gargantuan
feast the likes of which the British Isles had probably never seen. Thousands of people would’ve been able to
take part. Once the cattle had all been eaten, the feast
goers took their tools, and smashed their temple to pieces. We don’t know how long it took to destroy
the work of twelve hundred years. Don’t know how it felt to these people,
to symbolically tear down a building as ancient to them as the oldest cathedrals of Europe
are to us. Once the temples were in ruins, the bones
of the cattle were piled up in mounds, upon which deer carcasses were draped. A single cattle skull was carefully placed
in the center of it all. And then they buried the ruined temple. Shoveled rubble atop the ruins until they
were lost to history. It was the final, weird end of Neolithic Orkney. After that, the focal point of British Isles
culture would shift south, to the mainland. But while Skara Brae would be forgotten for
a long time, it would return. There’s simply no way such spectacular remains
could be lost forever. Rediscovery It’s hard to grasp just how impossibly long
Skara Brae lay hidden by the sand. 43 centuries ticked by before it was rediscovered;
a passage of time almost beyond comprehension. Think back to 1920. See how delightfully old fashioned it is,
with all those flapper girls dancing to jazz and everything looking like a silent film? Well, now try picturing 1820. How weird it is to imagine a world where Napoleon
is still alive, wars are fought on horses, and nobody has ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. It’s possible you’ve managed that. OK, well now try imagining 1720. We’re guessing it’s just too alien for
you, too far back to conjure anything except vague images of dudes in powdered wigs. That’s only three centuries ago and it’s
already so distant your mind can’t forge a meaningful connection with it. And you still need to repeat that process
forty more times - adding a single century each time - to get a sense of how long Skara
Brae spent buried. But while 43 centuries is a stupidly long
time, it’s still just the blink of an eye to eternity. That aeons-long blink finally ended in the
winter of 1850. That year, the storm of the century lashed
Orkney. Winds battered the islands, tearing sand away
from a large mound known locally as “Skerrabra.” When the gale finally ceased, the local laird,
William Watt of Skaill, was astonished to see traces of ancient stone walls sticking
out the sand. It was the beginning of a long process of
rediscovery. Thanks to the cocoon of sand - and the fact
everything was made of stone - the houses at Skara Brae had been almost perfectly preserved. The first four were excavated in the aftermath
of the storm, although the remaining homes weren’t brought to light until 1927. At first, everyone was all like “huh, this
is pretty cool. What is it, some iron age settlement from,
like, 500 BC?” It wasn’t until the early 1970s that radiocarbon
dating was conducted and the world realized just how impossibly ancient the settlement
was. Today, Skara Brae is widely acknowledged as
one of the best Neolithic sites not just in the British Isles, but the whole of Europe. Almost nowhere else on the continent do such
complete ruins exist. Taken alongside the other treasures of Orkney,
it constitutes a site easily as important as Stonehenge. But, great as those other sites are, in some
ways Skara Brae may be even more interesting. While other great cairns and henges exist,
Skara Brae is unique in that it’s not an ancient megastructure, but simply a small
village, preserved exactly as it was when Stone Age farmers still lived there. Looking down into its rooms, still complete
with their stone furniture, it’s possible - for a moment - to almost feel what life
must’ve been like for those who lived and died here. To picture their daily lives, to sense what
made them tick. With a channel like this, we usually focus
on the big stuff; the places that made history, or where something extraordinary happened. But Skara Brae shows that you don’t need
to look at the big stuff to be overawed by the past. Sometimes, just catching a glimpse of an ordinary
person’s life is interesting enough. The ancient culture that built Skara Brae
may be long dead. But, by looking back at the traces of their
lives, we can see that they weren’t all that different to us. That, despite the centuries separating us,
they were human too.
