An Oldie But A Goodie

My tour around this part of the Orkneys yesterday was all about the ancients.  I grabbed the hop-on, hop-off as planned.  It made quite a number of stops, but there was only three that I really wanted to check out.  Really, there was a few more, but I figured I could only cope with the three.

Skerrabra

I started out at Skerrabra.  This is the old name, the new is Skara Brae.  This is a Neolithic village approximately 5,000 years old, located in a cove in the Ness of Brodgar.  It isn’t a large place – about ten dwellings – so the population at the time may have been around fifty to seventy-five people.  These weren’t cave dwellers by any means.  The homes contained shelves and various nooks and crannies for storage of belongings.  Beds were constructed similar to a cradle and would have been filled with soft materials and skins used for blankets.  They made jewellery, pottery and other necessities in a workshop building.  It’s quite an incredible place and just to remind you how far back these people existed, there are a series of marker stones that take you back in time as you get closer to the ruins; first man on the moon, for example, then going back to the birth of Jesus, the Pyramids of Giza and so on. 

Ring of Brodgar

The second stop of my tour was at the Ring of Brodgar.  This is a site similar to Stonehenge and just as mysterious.  The stones are set in a perfect circle, 140 meters around with an outer ditch surrounding it and several burial mounds a short distance away.  There are two entrances into the ring opposite one another, but neither are where two sets of stones are placed closer to one another than all the rest. Interestingly enough, there is a row of single stones leading off down the road towards another smaller ring at Stenness.

Stromness was my last stop of the day.  This is a fishing village built into a cove and a steep hill.  The streets are a combination of cobble and flat limestone.  They are very narrow and twist and turn in every direction.  Alleyways and closes shoot off in every direction, some to another street and others to homes.  The Northlinks Ferry lands and can take you up to the Shetlands, if you’ve a mind.  I would have loved to have done that run, but the timing didn’t work out.  There are only specific days the service runs.  All in all, it’s a beautiful little town, but it would be harsh living in the winter months.  As everywhere I’ve been on the island so far, the wind blows incessantly.  The only difference is in the intensity.

One more quirky note that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post.  Just down the road a bit from where I’m staying in Holm, there is a totem pole.  It came about as a result of some type of project, but the work was done by some of the carvers of the Squamish First Nations.  Go figure – halfway around the world in a tiny wee burg like Holm and you find a piece of home.