- Where
- Bay of Skaill
Mainland Orkney, Scotland - Coordinates
- 59.0486° N
3.3414° W - Biome
- North Atlantic coastal dune
- Occupied
- c. 3200–2200 BCE
roughly six centuries - Status
- UNESCO World Heritage, 1999
(Heart of Neolithic Orkney) - Best visited
- May–September
The village came with the furniture in — beds, shelves, a dresser facing the door so it is the first thing a visitor sees. Whoever lived here wanted guests to be impressed. I am a guest. I am impressed. I am also extremely late, which I have decided counts as fashionably late, provided one bows.
The short answer
Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill, on the west Mainland of Orkney. Ten dwellings are visible today, of twenty-eight structures Historic Environment Scotland records as having been found; how many more went into the sea before anyone was looking is not known. The houses are built of flagstone and linked by covered passages, and because Orkney has almost no trees the furniture is stone too — beds, dressers, hearths, tanks set into the floor. Radiocarbon dates from excavations in 1972–73 place occupation at roughly 3200 to 2200 BCE, which makes the village older than Stonehenge in its finished form and older than the pyramids at Giza. It was inscribed by UNESCO in December 1999 as part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney.
Why it's worth knowing
Most famous ancient sites are famous for what they are. Skara Brae is worth knowing for what it has repeatedly been mistaken for.
The man who excavated it, V. Gordon Childe — the first professor of archaeology at Edinburgh, and one of the most influential archaeologists of the twentieth century — concluded it was Pictish, and published a book in 1931 called Skara Brae: A Pictish Village in Orkney. He was wrong by roughly three thousand years. He was wrong for a defensible reason: radiocarbon dating did not exist, and the carved stone balls found at the site resembled objects associated with Pictish symbol stones elsewhere in Scotland. It was reasonable inference from the available evidence, and the available evidence was not enough.
The second wrong story is about the ending, and it is still the one most visitors arrive with: that the villagers fled a catastrophic sandstorm, abandoning their possessions mid-life, a Neolithic Pompeii. That reading also traces largely to Childe. The current position is duller and better supported, and the entry sets it out below.
What makes the site unusual as a piece of evidence is that the stone survived. Wooden furniture rots; stone dressers do not. The result is one of the very few Neolithic settlements in Europe where you can see not just the plan of a house but the arrangement of a room — where the bed was, what faced the door, where the water was kept.
The field notes
The storm of 1850, and how the story got tidier
The village was buried under a grass-covered dune known locally as Skerrabra. In the winter of 1850 a severe storm stripped the turf from the mound and exposed stone walling beneath. General reference accounts put the death toll of that storm across Scotland at over two hundred; this entry has not traced that figure to a primary record, and gives it as an attributed claim rather than a fact about Skara Brae.
What followed was not a single night's revelation. William Watt, laird of Skaill, began digging into the exposed structures, and four houses had been uncovered by the time the work stopped in 1868. The Orcadian antiquarian George Petrie recorded the site through the 1860s. A further storm damaged the exposed remains in 1925, a sea wall was built to protect them, and the construction itself turned up more buildings. Childe's excavation ran from 1928 to 1930 and uncovered most of what is visible now. The one-night version is a good story; the actual sequence took eighty years.
Off by three thousand years
Childe dated the settlement to the Iron Age — the early centuries AD on his reading, and his 1931 title said Pictish outright. The correction came in stages rather than at once. By 1936 the Grooved Ware pottery from the site had been recognised as very much older, pushing the village back into the Neolithic. Confirmation waited until David Clarke's excavations in 1972–73, when radiocarbon dating — still a new technique — produced dates for the excavated section of roughly 3200 to 2200 BCE.
There is a sting in that resolution. The 1972–73 excavation has never been fully published. The dates entered the literature and the site's interpretation; the excavation report did not. More than fifty years on, the dig that settled the single most-repeated fact about Skara Brae remains, in the strict sense, unpublished — which is a strange foundation for a certainty everyone now repeats, this entry included.
What the houses hold
The stone furniture is the reason people come. Each house follows a similar plan: a single room, a central hearth, a stone dresser facing the entrance so that it is the first thing seen, beds built into or against the walls, and small stone boxes set into the floor and sealed with clay. Those boxes are usually read as tanks for keeping shellfish bait alive, though that is interpretation rather than inscription. A drain runs beneath the village, and some houses have a cell off the main room that may be a lavatory connected to it.
One small thing worth knowing, because it shows how much of the site is still argued over: nobody is certain what the inhabitants burned. Childe was confident it was peat. Later analysis of Orkney's vegetation history indicates that thick peat beds did not develop in this part of the islands until after Skara Brae was abandoned, which leaves driftwood, animal dung and dried seaweed as the likelier fuels. The village is five thousand years old and the question of what was on the fire is still open.
The unanswered question
Why the village emptied is not known, and the honest answer is that the evidence does not currently support a single story.
The sandstorm-flight reading rests on the possessions left behind — beads, pins, tools — taken as signs of people leaving in a hurry. Historic Environment Scotland now describes the abandonment as gradual rather than sudden, and the objects have an alternative explanation: excavations at the nearby Ness of Brodgar have shown that Neolithic Orkney had formal practices for closing a building, and that significant objects were deliberately left in place when structures went out of use. On that reading, the abandoned necklace is not panic. It is procedure.
Other explanations in circulation include a colder, wetter climate around 2500 BCE, a move toward the individual farmsteads that characterise the Bronze Age, and simple demographic drift. None is settled. What can be said is that the village was not overwhelmed: it was left.
- Be impressed by the dresser, as intended.
- Find a beach cobble that fits the hand. Put it back exactly where it was.
- Ask the wind to let up. Record the answer. (“No.”)
- Decide which house I would have picked. (The one with the best shelf.)
- Leave before adding the whole of Orkney to the list.
The Skaill knife — a flake struck from a beach cobble, sharp enough to butcher with and thrown away once blunt. They turn up across the site in quantity because the raw material was the beach itself: split a suitable stone and you have an edge. You cannot handle the excavated ones, which are in the site collection, but the cobbles they were made from are still underfoot at the Bay of Skaill, and the technique is a five-thousand-year-old answer to a problem the beach still poses.
Tally, in the marginA knife made from the very beach it was needed on — the most sensible souvenir I have ever admired and left exactly where it lay.
Getting there
How to get there. Skara Brae sits on the Bay of Skaill, about eight miles north of Stromness on Orkney's west Mainland, and is reached by car or by tour bus — there is no useful scheduled service to the bay itself. Orkney is reached by ferry from Scrabster to Stromness or Gills Bay to St Margaret's Hope, or by air to Kirkwall from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. From Kirkwall the drive is roughly forty minutes.
When to go. The site is open year-round but the visitor centre and Skaill House operate reduced winter hours, and Skaill House — the seventeenth-century mansion of the laird who first dug here — is generally closed outside the summer season. May to September gives the long northern daylight and the best chance of weather that lets you stand still outside. It is also the busy period.
What to book ahead. Timed tickets are the norm in high season and the joint ticket covering Skara Brae and Skaill House is the one to take; Historic Environment Scotland sells them and an Explorer Pass is worth costing if you intend to see Maeshowe and the Ring of Brodgar as well. Maeshowe in particular must be booked in advance because entry is by guided tour only. Ferry crossings with a vehicle in July and August should be booked well ahead.
One thing to expect rather than assume: you view the houses from a walkway above them and do not go inside. A full-scale replica house at the visitor centre is where you get to stand in the room.
Mark this place
Common questions
How old is Skara Brae?
Radiocarbon dates from the 1972–73 excavations place occupation of Skara Brae at roughly 3200 to 2200 BCE, about six centuries of continuous use. That makes the village on Orkney's Bay of Skaill older than Stonehenge in its completed form and older than the pyramids at Giza.
Why did V. Gordon Childe think Skara Brae was Pictish?
Childe excavated Skara Brae between 1928 and 1930, before radiocarbon dating existed, and dated it by comparing its finds to material elsewhere in Scotland: the carved stone balls from the site resembled objects associated with Pictish symbol stones. He published the conclusion in 1931 under the title Skara Brae: A Pictish Village in Orkney. By 1936 the site's Grooved Ware pottery had been recognised as far older, moving the village into the Neolithic.
How was Skara Brae discovered?
A severe storm in the winter of 1850 stripped the turf from a dune known as Skerrabra on the Bay of Skaill, exposing stone walls beneath. William Watt, the laird of Skaill, then dug into the site, uncovering four houses before work stopped in 1868; the antiquarian George Petrie recorded the remains through the 1860s. The commonly told version in which a single night revealed the village compresses a process that ran for eighty years.
Why was Skara Brae abandoned?
It is not known. The long-popular explanation — that the inhabitants fled a sudden sandstorm, leaving possessions behind — traces largely to V. Gordon Childe and is not supported by current interpretation: Historic Environment Scotland describes the abandonment as gradual. Excavations at the nearby Ness of Brodgar have shown that Neolithic Orkney deliberately left significant objects in buildings being taken out of use, which offers a different reading of the objects found in place.
Why is Skara Brae so well preserved?
The village was buried and sealed by wind-blown sand for roughly four and a half thousand years, which excluded the air and water that destroy organic remains and held the structures in place. Because Orkney is effectively treeless, the fittings were built of flagstone rather than timber, so beds, dressers and hearths survive as furniture rather than as post-holes.
How many houses are there at Skara Brae?
Ten dwellings are visible at Skara Brae today. Historic Environment Scotland records twenty-eight structures as having been identified at the site in total, and notes that an unknown number were lost to coastal erosion before the village was found. Estimates of the resident population at any one time are usually put at no more than about fifty people.
What does the name Skara Brae mean?
The name is comparatively recent and its origin is not settled. The mound was known locally as Skerrabra or Skerrabrae before the village was uncovered, and ‘Skara Brae’ is an anglicised form of that. Nearby Skaill takes its name from the Old Norse skáli, a hall. What the inhabitants called the place is unrecoverable: they left no writing.
Can you visit Skara Brae, and can you go inside the houses?
Skara Brae is open to visitors year-round under Historic Environment Scotland, with a visitor centre and a joint ticket covering the neighbouring seventeenth-century Skaill House. You view the houses from a raised walkway and do not enter them; a full-scale replica house at the visitor centre is built to be walked into. Timed tickets are usual in the summer season.
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