Skara Brae

The name

People

• W

  William Graham Watt

  Son of the local laird (Skaill House) and self-taught geologist who began amateur excavation after the 1850 storm, uncovering four houses before work was abandoned in 1868

• 

  V. Gordon Childe

  University of Edinburgh professor who led the scientific excavation from 1927

• M

  Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy and Margaret Cole

  Childe's students, re-identified in 2019 as active participants in the excavation (long mistaken for tourists)

• G

  The Grooved Ware People

  The Neolithic pastoralist community that built and occupied the settlement

Cultural influences

• Grooved ware culture — the inhabitants made and used grooved ware, a distinctive pottery style that had recently appeared in northern Scotland.

• A pastoral, partly farming economy — the people raised cattle, pigs and sheep, ate seafood (fish bones and shells fill the midden), and 1972 excavations showed barley was cultivated.

• Cultural links with Ireland — spiral ornamentation on the site's carved stone balls, and ivory pins similar to those from passage graves in the Boyne Valley, suggest a connection between the two cultures.

Connections

• H

  Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site

  One of four principal monuments inscribed in 1999

• 

  Ring of Brodgar / Standing Stones of Stenness / Maeshowe

  Nearby Neolithic monuments connected to Skara Brae by a 'low road'; part of the same ceremonial landscape

• K

  Knap of Howar, Papa Westray

  Earlier, similar Neolithic farmstead (c. 3500–3100 BC), thought to be the oldest preserved standing building in northern Europe

• 

  Barnhouse Settlement

  Comparable settlement by Loch of Harray (c. 3000 BC) with similar hearths, beds, dressers and drains

• S

  Skaill House

  Adjacent mansion, home of excavator William Watt

Discovery & excavation

In culture

• The settlement inspired Kathleen Fidler's 1968 children's novel The Boy with the Bronze Axe, set during its final days, and Rosemary Sutcliff's 1977 novel Shifting Sands.

• It is referenced in the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and in the NCIS episode 'Murder 2.0'; the Irish folk group Skara Brae took its name from the site, and it lends its name to towns in the video games The Bard's Tale and Ultima.

What to look for

• Ten visible structures and four passageways, with stone furniture surviving in place.

• The standard house layout: a central hearth, a stone dresser against the wall opposite the low slab-doored entrance, and beds built on either side (a larger bed to the right, a smaller to the left).

• House 8 — a stand-alone above-ground structure with walls over 2 m thick and a 'porch', lacking dressers and storage boxes; thought to have been a workshop for making tools.

• Clay-sealed waterproof stone boxes (possibly for keeping limpet bait) and the drains running beneath at least five of the houses.

Standing there

• The settlement stands pressed right against the Bay of Skaill: the Atlantic breaks a few metres from the houses, so the dominant sounds are surf, wind across open machair grassland, and seabirds, with salt spray carrying on the breeze that strips this exposed Orkney coast.
• Looking down into the roofless stone rooms, the furniture survives in place — a central hearth, a stone dresser set against the far wall, and box-beds to either side — so the layout of a single low room reads at a glance, all of it grey local flagstone with no timber or thatch remaining.
• When the village was lived in around 3000 BC, the interiors would have been dim, smoky and warm: lit and heated by the central peat or driftwood hearth whose smoke filled the low roofed space, the air thick with the smell of burning fuel, cooking and the cattle, sheep and pigs the people kept.
• The everyday smells then were strongly of the sea and the midden: fish, shellfish and limpets formed much of the diet, and the houses were deliberately set into a mound of domestic refuse and ash that insulated the walls, so decaying food waste and woodsmoke would have hung close about the settlement.
• Moving between the houses then meant stooping through low, narrow slab-roofed passageways that could be sealed with a stone door — a cramped, sheltered, half-buried world moving from one warm hearth-lit room to the next out of the constant coastal wind.