Orkney Riddler

  Unstan Cairn  Unstan Cairn sits on land adjacent to the Stenness Loch. It is a neolithic Cairn, famous for the pottery that was found in it. The interior is a long room divided into five compartments by upright stone slabs projecting from the side walls. Entry to the cairn is made into the second of the five compartments through a low passage from the ground outside.  It was excavated in the 19th century by Robert Clouston, and in his report he gives a powerful impression that the roof was intact, and he describes the floor that he found, the skeletons lying on it, the pottery lying around, and the ash floor adjacent to the entrance.  The skeletons in this cairn are usually in a foetal position. In other cairns human bones were found to have been moved around in prehistory, sometimes artfully, sometimes randomly. Here though the bones seem mostly as they were laid. The complete skeletons, from memory, are in the end stalls of the cairn, and there are a couple more ...

  Sepulchral Monuments   In 1975 I excavated a Dorset Barrow, in which i uncovered no bones, no pottery, no urn, no skeleton, no cremation,  nothing! In 2020, when I had leisure for research, I read every learned article or excavation report that I could find that might tell me if I was unlucky, or if the empty Barrow was a common problem.  I was looking for definite evidence that any barrow had been built with intent to bury a body in it. One great example of this was Sutton Hoo, the ship burial ,but this and other similar monuments are quite late in historic time. I looked at simple earthworks of bronze age or earlier, looking for evidence that when someone died in prehistory a team of folk went out onto the landscape of a territory that they felt at home in, dug a hole, buried their relative, and built a Barrow on top of them. I found nothing like that, but I did find lots of burials of bodies and urns, haphazardly inserted into existing earthworks.  I also f...

  Maeshowe Misnomer Maeshowe is quite an amazing structure, and its' fame is promoted by being regarded as a "type" of cairn, where a number of other cairns are known by their structural layout to be of the Maeshowe Type. In a very simplistic sense I suppose there is a typological similarity. Maeshowe has an internal central room with smaller rooms off from the centre, through three of the four side walls. The fourth wall is that through which the entrance is made. Cuween is a Maeshowe Type cairn,  in that it has a similar arrangement, a central room surrounded by satellite rooms accessed from the centre. The difference between the two cairns is that Cuween and other Maeshowe type cairns have satellite rooms tjat are clearly intended to be used on a continuous basis. In Cuween one of the satellite rooms looks very like a bedding space. On the other hand in Maeshowe itself the quite spectacular central room appears to be the main feature of the structure from which the sa...

 The Stones of Brodgar  When I went to the Ring of Brodgar today I took a photo of each stone from outside the ditch. I have a theory that the Stones of Brodgar were set in their places with a sloping edge facing in the same relative direction in rotation around the circle. They obviously don't all have an obvious slope on one side. Also at least one of the stones fell over in historic or prehistoric times, and may have been re-erected by Historic Scotland staff. Could they have put them up wrongly? I don't know if my theory works. What do you think? Jeffery Nicholls 

  Barnhouse Drains Barnhouse, the Neolithic "Village" on the coast of Harray Loch has about 13 structures, and r unning between the tents and structures are the drains. These are open gullies, channels designed to allow surface water and personal waste to flow away, across the site, and towards Harray Loch.  The Ness of Brodgar, and Skara Brae both have more complex drainage systems designed for more permanent usage. At Barnhouse,  there is a structure literally outside the entrance of Structure 2 , whose perimeter is defined only by the drains that encircle it. In the middle of the drain encirclement is a set of stones on edge that we might assume to be a hearth, because they are set in a square arrangement similar to hearths elsewhere. This arrangement differs though, in that it is the start point for one of the drainage channels that flow out of the site.  The site reports states that there were voids of some sort underneath these stones, and the plan registers a ...

  Barnhouse "Dormitory?" One of the most interesting structures at Barnhouse is Structure 2, which has some affinity with buildings that are found at the Ness of Brodgar.  The design layout excavated suggests that this is a ridged roof structure with a box section of timbers supporting roof timbers at each end with another cross member in the middle position. This divides the interior into two parts ,each containing a hearth. The floor of the hut is otherwise divided by several orthostats, long flat stones laid on age ,seeming to create divisions inside the building. I have been known to be wrong, but my impression is that this layout may have been used as a Dormitory, a hut where half a dozen people would sleep, all together. The structure, being a bit more solid than the huts elsewhere might have been used for longer periods than the lighter weight tents. It seems possible that some people may have inhabited the Neolithic "Village" earlier in spring, and later int...