People have been living on the Orkneys for a very long time. The next day we set out to discover traces of Stone Age settlements. Fortunately the Orkneys are covered in such things. A gentleman with a gloriously waxed moustache and a minibus was waiting to ferry us to all things Neolithic. But first; the Italian Chapel.
During the Second World War the Orkneys had an influx of involuntary Italian immigrants as the British army tried to find somewhere to house the Italian prisoners of war they had captured in North Africa. For some reason a fair few of them wound up working on various defence installations in the Orkneys.
Feeling somewhat spiritually bereft the prisoners were granted permission to build themselves a chapel. They did this by the simple expedient of sticking a pair of nissan huts together and over decorating the result. The interior is beautifully decorated and indeed the prisoner responsible for the decoration stayed after the end of the war to add the finishing touches.
More importantly outside the chapel was a field with shaggy cows. Once we had recovered from our ecstasy (whether religious or bovine) we piled into our minivan and pointed our noses towards the Stone Age.
There are so many Neolithic sites in the Orkneys that one finds it difficult to understand how they squeeze the current inhabitants in. The Ring of Brogdar is a big attraction. Built several thousand years ago by people who had altogether too much time on their hands it comprises a deep ditch, an embankment and a ring of stones in a circle.
The “too much time on their hands” comment is absolutely true. Stone Age they might have been but the local inhabitants must have been doing very well indeed to allocate the vast amount of time, resources and manpower necessary to create the thing. According to our guide the ditch alone (carved five metres deep out of the bedrock) must have taken about eighty thousand man hours to create.
So what’s it all for? No idea. It might be religious, it might be cultural it might be an early attempt at a skate board park. Whatever it’s certainly impressive.
Just down the road (literally) from the Ring of Brodgar is the equally Neolithic village of Scara brae. This was discovered when a storm swept away all of the sand that had previously covered the place. There is a visitors centre and a replica of an intact house to assist tourists in imagining what life might have been like in Neolithic times just in case the sight of a number of anonymous holes in the ground doesn’t fill you with the sort of giddy excitement archeologists expect.
The village lasted for some six hundred years and we don’t know why it was abandoned although it’s entirely possible the inhabitants got sick of sweeping sand out of their houses. Again Skara brae shows signs of wealth in so far as it was too small to be (in the archeologists delicate phrase) genetically viable. To put it more bluntly incest will only take a community so far and then your only options are to acquire fresh breeding stock or get elected Holy Roman Emperor. The population of Skara brae were obviously able to source husbands and wives from elsewhere which implies being part of a wider, flourishing community.
After that we visited an eighteenth century manor house but were too late to see baby chickens being fed to the falcons.
No comments:
Post a Comment