The Orkney Riddle

  

The Orkney Riddle 

An Introduction 

I have called my story the Orkney Riddle.

In it, I speak of Neolithic Orkney, and the way in which I believe that, in prehistoric time, that archipelago was attached, and later detached from Scotland. This title might be thought to relate to some puzzle about Orkney that I try to extract meaning from, but in fact it is simpler than that. I called it the Orkney Riddle because there is a shallow water feature associated with the Pentland Firth called the Sandy Riddle that could very well be all that remains of a strand of beach that linked Neolithic Orkney to Caithness. 

  

To explore the possibility that (in my opinion) there had to be a walkable route from Caithness to Orkney when Neolithic people built the henges there, I had to research several areas of our knowledge and understanding.

Firstly, I would look for evidence in Neolithic Orkney, of whatever sort, that denoted a change in human occupation, or in animal or human behaviour, that might imply that Neolithic people came to Orkney in large numbers to build the monuments there. I did this simply because I did not believe that Neolithic people had boats (they did!) that would carry them safely and regularly across the Pentland Firth. Nor did I believe that there was sufficient evidence of habitations that would house a workforce on Orkney through winter for the construction of the monuments.

Even if I could prove that there were irregularities in the archaeological record that support my idea that an influx of people came to Orkney every year to build monuments, and that they came on foot, it was meaningless if I could not demonstrate how it was enabled by the geology that underpinned the region.

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This was a particular rabbit hole that I willingly descended into, and haven't emerged from yet.

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To proceed in this geological work I had to uncover how the geology of the north Atlantic coast of Europe was created. This entailed using geological data to decode how ice age landscapes were formed. My difficulty here was that I did not believe the currently accepted version of ice age history in Europe, and I had to use the readily available scientific data to rewrite the story almost from scratch.

Finally, I used the archaeological research I had done, in combination with the geological work, to look for actual events that might be interpreted as related to erosional processes that caused the physical separation of Orkney from Caithness.

Geology from 150.000BP to the present day

The story of the land that joined Orkney to Caithness is the story of the North Sea, which is the story of the glaciation of Britain, which is the story of.......etc.... So, it has to start somewhere, and is best started some 150,000 years ago at the end of the ice age that preceded the one from which we emerged. 

In general terms ice ages seem to have terminated themselves at some speed, and this one was no exception. When ice sheets melted, they melted fast. The effect of that melting was that ice-sheet edges collapsed at speed with shafts of ice falling from an ice cliff face hundreds of metres high, crushing the bedrock geology it fell onto. 

Huge volumes of meltwater loaded with sand, gravels, and rocks were cast out towards the sea.

When ice sheets on northern Europe had melted, sea-level rose to levels equivalent to our own and possibly higher. This fast paced melt took place at 140,000BP, and stripped the glacial ice sheet from Britain. The ice did not return for 20,000 years. 

A new ice age began at 120,000 years ago, gradually getting colder, and dumping hundreds of metres of snow on high ground across Britain and Ireland. At 70,000BP a peak of chilling had been reached, and temperatures rose again, causing the edges of the ice sheet to melt.

The ice sheets on the uplands, foothills of the heights, of Britain and Ireland collapsed leaving mountain top ice sheets standing proud. Huge waves of sludge and meltwater, loaded with ice and boulders, rolled off from the lowland mountains of northern England and Scotland surging south and east towards Europe, and settling as the Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea. 

From 60,000BP to at least 30,000BP Britain was a cold place, but it developed into a landscape of forests, moors, marshes, and rivers that carried meltwater away from the static ice-sheets on mountain tops. In this terrain Palaeolithic Hunters roamed in search of woolly rhinoceros, and other exotic species, living in bivouacs, and sometimes inhabiting caves.

At this same time an ice-sheet that sat on Shetland collapsed, reducing the area covered by that rocky outcrop significantly. Meltwater from that collapse dispersed in all directions, including west into the Atlantic Ocean, East into the Norwegian Channel along the coast of Norway, and south along the eastern coasts of Scotland and England. 

By the time that the Shetland ice-sheet collapse had run its course there a mixed landscape, including woodland in an area of the North Sea 100 kilometres east of Orkney. It is likely that this landscape spread across most of England, across to the Norwegian Channel, and south down to Dogger Bank, and mainland Europe beyond. However, a shallow lagoon was maintained by meltwater from the mountains of Britain, just off the Aberdeenshire coast. 

Between 30,000BP and 20,000BP a short period of continuously cold and snowy weather covered the whole of the British and Irish landscape with an ice-sheet. This added hundreds of metres of ice to the higher ground, and widely varying thicknesses on lower ground. Southwestwern England and southern Ireland probably had thicknesses in terms of metres, or nothing at all. Further north and east thick snow landed on low gound but the lagoon alongside the Aberdeenshire coast remained unfrozen, and probably had a shoreline with a restricted vegetation and wildlife population. A rodent , the European Vole, may have survived here, migrating to Orkney as sea levels rose, and evolving as the Orkney Vole. 

Between 21,000BP and 11,000BP  the deglaciation of the last ice age took place, a mobile event retreating destructively from lowland England,  Wales,  and Ireland,  and finally busting the last ice sheet from the mountains of Scotland,  mostly. The collapse of the ice sheet that took place at this time created the existing submarine landscape of ridges and palaeovalleys around the British coasts. The English Channel was mostly severed, dividing England from France, and most of the coasts of northern Britain have deep undersea gullies alongside their coasts caused by a combination of icesheet collapse and scouring by the ice streams that flowed off land into coastal seas. Every last trace of the landscape that had existed in the lowlands of England was swept away by the huge volumes of rapidly melting icewater escaping to the North Sea and the English Channel. 

Only three areas of coastline were not heavily scoured in this way. One of these was a narrow passage off the Norfolk coast which may have allowed migration of all life forms from Holland to England. 

 

On the west of Scotland an area of shallow sea lies between Islay and the north coast of northern Ireland which also may have allowed people to walk to Ireland. 

 

At the north of Scotland the east coast of Caithness has a relatively shallow coastal waters. 

  

    

There is a specific reason for this in that the collapse of ice sheets on Caithness receded from the northeastern tip of the county in a south westerly direction causing shallow parallelvalleys to cut inyo the geology there. As the east coast of the county is markedly higher than the North coast all the spoils from melting ice fell off the county to the north, carving out the Pentland Firth. 

As a result of this there are shallow waters along both the east coast of Caithness and Orkney, only severed by the Pentland Firth. 

A depth of 40 or 60 metres in the present day may seem to be an inconceivable depth for the possibility of a land bridge in prehistory,  but the tides that circulate around Britain are hugely powerful and remain a massive erosive force for sediments on our shores. The groynes that victorian engineers built along our seaside coasts were placed there precisely to prevent the removal of sand from these locations.

But the question remains, did this severing of land linking Caithness and Orkney happen, and if so when did it happen? 

Archaeology from 3500BC to 2500BC 

The prehistory of Orkney begins at around 3500BC with the death of a pig at the Knap of Howar. 

It wasn't until slightly later that larger groups started to arrive , and the first community to set up was at a shoreside location on Harray Loch. This was a place now called Barnhouse where a group of light structures has been found. There is evidence here that these house like structures were quite temporary, but had been repeatedly modified. There is also evidence that these may have been surviving fragments of a much larger group of similar structures gathered along the shoreline of the Loch, under the famous Ness of Brodgar settlement, and beyond. 

 

The position of these structures puts them strategically central to the major world heritage site monuments, the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, and Maeshowe Chambered Cairn. These monuments may not have firmly defined dates, being dated by material found in ditch infill, and similar sources. 

 

They are however firmly Neolithic. 

The first assumption I am proposing, is that the Barnhouse Neolithic Village was a work encampment that was used annually for a short period as a seasonal living place for the temporary housing of the large groups of people involved in the building of the Brodgar monuments. 

The Barnhouse Settlement is dated to very late in the 3000s , and it was abandoned by about 3000BC. The site was simply left at that date, and allowed to collapse. Rain leaked through rooves, puddling on the floor. There was a building there that had good evidencethat it was a sweat lodge (top left of image) and all the equipment for the sweat lodge ceremony was simply left in place when the site was abandoned. 

By this date the Maeshowe Chambered Cairn was apparently complete, but the henges, Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar show signs that they too were abandoned.

The Stones of Stenness consists of positions for twelve Stones in a circle. Most of these are no longer standing,  some remain as stumps, but there is only archaeological or physical evidence for 10 stones. 

 

The hole for one stone has simply been backfilled with no evidence that a stone was ever in the hole, and another stone position presents as little more than a stake hole.

 

The number of stones at the Ring of Brodgar remains a bit of a mystery. It is certainly incomplete. At a place called Vestra Fiold , at least one slab of stone, clearly shaped for moving to Brodgar has been cut out and abandoned in place. Another indication of possible evidence that the engineering of the Ring of Brodgar was also cut short.

  

The assumption then is that the abandonment of the henges coincides with the abandonment of Barnhouse, and that Barnhouse was the temporary encampment that housed the builders of the henges. 

 

Comparing the images of Barnhouse and Skara Brae (above) rather demonstrates a stark difference in purpose for the two Neolithic habitation sites. Barnhouse leaves no evidence of weather-hardy structures while Skara Brae is clearly a place that has been designed to protect people from ferocious Orkney weather. With this in mind, I tend to assume that Barnhouse and many other lightly clad buildings of the Neolithic were also not inhabited in an Orkney winter.

The other common Neolithic monument on Orkney and elsewhere, is the cairn. There are over 80 of these structures on Orkney, and the dates of the bones inside them suggest that they were built by the same kind of people that occupied Barnhouse. There are human bones and animal bones in the cairns, but I am not a believer in the idea that the structure was designed and built for storing bodies. The dates of the human bones though , when they are in the cairns, not buried, cremated, or otherwise inserted into the structure at a later date, are generally pre-3000BC , while the animal bones are almost always after 3000BC. 

Structures that are most famous now, at the Ness of Brodgar and Skara Brae are clearly monstrous undertakings intended to be large enough and strong enough to withhold the lives of people living there from the famously fierce Orkney winter. 

Both of these sites have their roots in small settlements that were in place before 3000BC, but it wasn't until well after that date that the rugged structures for which they are famous were built. 

My assumption here is that at a date after 3000BC a majority of Neolithic people visiting Orkney on an annual basis, walking on land that linked Caithness to Orkney, decided that making that journey was no longer safe. They now thought that if they made the crossing, then the remaining land bridge might well be washed away, leaving them stranded on Orkney. They may have also have understood that over-wintering on Orkney would be seriously difficult when compared to more sheltered locations in Scotland and further south. 

Over the next three or four hundred years, but probably a lot less than that, structures at the Ness of Brodgar and Skara Brae were built. These were timber structures, and huge. The trees from which they were made would have been very sturdy, for Orkney, but would have suffered from various forms of rot over time. The structures are unlikely to have remained standing for more than avfew tens of years.

Towards the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, about 2500BC the structures at Skara Brae and Ness of Brodgar had been abandoned.

At this time, 2500BC, seaworthy boats had been developed and the Orkney archipelago was being visited regularly by seafarers from elsewhere, who came to harvest wild livestock, and in some places to settle.

It is possible that these early Bronze Age travellers may have found remnant populations of Neolithic castaways on Orkney, meeting face-to-face. 

Two worlds, two technologies, and two cultures. It is interesting to speculate how that meeting played out, if it did!

I would love to be able to say that I have found some sort of proof that people walked from Neolithic Scotland to Neolithic Orkney. 

That, I cannot do!

and in fact I can prove nothing!

I do hope though that this off-beat research gives other people a clue as to the possibilities that prehistory,  as it is presented to us might not be accurate.

Come to Orkney "So, this is Orkney"

Warning, this group of blogs is under continuous review. Mistakes and misunderstandings are corrected when necessary. Comments are welcome.

All views and opinions my own.

Jeffery Nicholls 

Orkney 

Jiffynorm@yahoo.co.uk