Skara Brae

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Neolithic village of Skara Brae is one of Orkney’s most-visited old sites and regarded by many for one of the most remarkable monuments in Europe. Skara Brae is a large stone-built Neolithic settlement, it consists of ten clustered houses, and was occupied from roughly 3180 BCE–2500 BCE.

In the wintertime from 1850, a severe storm shoot Britain making widespread damage and over two hundred deaths. In the Bay of Skaill, the storm stripped the land by an big irregular knoll, known in Scottish as a howe, which had been a local landmark. When the storm cleared, local villagers discovered in place of the howe an intact village, albeit without roofs.

 All house have the same basic conception – a big square room, with a central fireplace, a bed on either side and a shelved dresser on the wall opposite the doorway. On average, the houses measure 40 square metres in size with a large square room containing a hearth which would have been used for heating and cooking. Given the number of homes, it seems likely that no more than fifty people lived in Skara Brae at any given time.

The dwellings contain a number of stone-built pieces of furniture, including cupboards, dressers, seats, and storage boxes. Each dwelling was entered through a low doorway that had a stone slab door that could be closed “by a bar that slid in bar-holes cut in the stone door jambs”. A sophisticated drainage system was even incorporated into the village’s design, one that included a primitive form of toilet in each dwelling.