Solving the Riddle

The Orkney Riddle 

Solving the Riddle 

The Riddle of neolithic Orkney is that there are insufficient significant structures on Orkney to support the huge numbers of hands that would have been been required to build the Neolithic monuments there, 5000 years ago.

The Orkney Riddle is a group of  blogs based on this theme. It is named for the strand of undersea shallow beach that leads off east, from the Pentland Skerries, above,  in the Pentland Firth which may be the last relic of land that once connected Orkney to Scotland. This undersea feature is called the Sandy Riddle. 

I started to research the geology of Britain over the last 100,000 years about 4 years ago. I began because I could find no real world evidence that Neolithic people had boats capable of transporting them and their animals across the Pentland Firth to Orkney in numbers sufficient to build the structures in Orkney that they clearly did.

In order to get to an evidence based theory of both the Archaeology and the geology of Britain I had to knock a lot of very worthy theories on the head, and replace them with some things that are more realistic, and grounded in what I saw as “logic”.

This led me to write a long and rambling series of blogs called the “Orkney Riddle”. 

[This research, with its sources, needs to be peer reviewed. I would welcome anybody who had an interest to challenge my work with additional or alternative evidence or interpretation.]

Orkney Riddle is long, detailed and possibly yawn inducing, so I have to take an additional approach, with the hope that people will help me by discussing issues with me, correcting me where I am wrong, and guiding me with their own inspiration. 

It didn't take long for me to cook up a theory with some bits of evidence which could be used to justify my belief that Neolithic people walked from Scotland to Orkney and back, becoming stranded on the archipelago when land joining the two places was removed by rising sea levels. 

When I popped this notion online, just to gauge reaction I was roundly dismissed. Some said “they had boats” others said “they must have had boats”, and one highly placed scholar demonstrated that some prehistoric people had crossed water to camp on an island off the Norwegian Coast. 

Yes, there were boats, big boats in the Mediterranean Sea 5000 years ago, but the Mediterranean is land locked, and only very slightly tidal. 

I was up against a lot of inertia!

A bit later on in my investigation I thought I had enough quite strong evidence to suggest that people were walking between Scotland and Orkney in neolithic Britain. 

I took myself to see if I could talk about this to a proper archaeologist, but when I found one, that person would not even discuss my findings, declaring from the outset that Neolithic people had boats, which I couldn't deny, because its true.

My argument was and is, that the boats that they had would not make a crossing of the Pentland Firth. Rowing across it now would be suicidal, same then!

Said archaeologist obviously viewed me as a crank, which I found a little hurtful, especially as I was offering a smorgasbord of evidence for my theory, and this person offered nothing to support his emphatic refusal to even discuss the topic.

The result of this and all of my setbacks was, and is, to redouble my research and plaster on more layers of evidence. 

To the extent that I am now considering a review of the evidence for the tectonics of the European Continental Shelf of the Atlantic Ocean and how the British isles broke away from Scandinavia and Europe in deep, deep geological prehistory. 

How i got there is a long story.

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The story became complicated by scientific research that found that a vole that is unique on Orkney, the Orkney Vole, was not related to the Common Vole of Britain.  This, to me and the original researchers at the time of me reading the original research meant that the Orkney vole was somehow transported from Belgium to orkney without landing on British soil.

This feat was thought to have been accomplished by boats travelling between the two places, or by animals being castaway on natural floating pontoons.

For me though this looked as if the vole had found a way to transit between mainland Europe and Orkney by walking along land that had remained at a high enough level with reference to ancient sea levels. I decided that this land ran up the centre of the North Sea from Dogger Bank and across to orkney in the northern North Sea,  without touching Britain. 

I set off looking for this land, and thought I had found it. 

Only at the latest stage of the research did I discover that the premise of the original evidence was wrong.

Bones of the same vole have been found in a cave in England. 

In spite of that revelation though I had still found a terrain that would have supported people and animals throughout much of the last ice age.

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The first part of the plan for my research was to find out as much as I could about Neolithic Orkney, reading about the monuments,  the henges, and the excavations. 

I began with Barnhouse on the shore of Harray Loch,  a group of small lightweight structures with a system of drains running into and between them. I looked on the plan that had been drawn, at the channels in the ground, and thought it unlikely these would have been useful during the worst of winter.

I was living in a caravan at the time and knew that if I were to try and walk on a home ground like that in a wet winter I would be arse over tit in short order. I therefore decided that this was probably a summer camp of some sort.

It didn't seem too unreasonable to me to suggest that the people who camped at Barnhouse were a seasonal workforce who were building the Stones of Stenness, or any of the other Brodgar monuments. 

I then turned my attention to the Stones of Stenness, a small stone circle from which a significant number of its standing Stones had been removed. Also, in a couple of places, where we might reasonably expect to find a stone, holes seem to have been dug, but nothing lasting had been placed in them.

Here I concluded that the henge had actually never been completed, and that since the dating for Barnhouse tended to precede 3000BC, that it was likely that work on the project had ended at around that time.

Looking at the Ring of Brodgar I found a much less orderly design of stone circle in which it was very unclear exactly how may Stones were raised for the monument. 

At a place called Vestra Fiold, a stone was found though that was laying flat on ground close to where it had been hewn from bedrock. It had the same size and general shape of many of the remaining Brodgar stones, and again it suggested that any work on the monument itself had been abandoned before its completion.

I then turned my attention to cairns. 

In Britain these monuments are quite monumental, but in Orkney they become more numerous and alongside simple passage graves, a small but varied group are diverse in their layout and construction,  including the greatest of them all, the Maeshowe Chambered Cairn. 

Analysing the dates of bones found in these structures i found that the human bones generally came from before 3000BC,  but any animal bones in them usually died sometime after that date. To me this suggested that the idea that the animal bones were associated with the interment of human skeletons was not feasible. 

-×-

Working with the idea that something happened in the North Sea to transform a vast landscape in the area to a seascape I began studying the seabed and coastal features of that area. 

Quite by chance I came across the report of an excavation of a beach deposit in Rogaland,  on the Norwegian Coast on which the roots of an Alder tree were found where the tree itself had been ripped away, leaving only said roots.

It seemed reasonable that this broken tree would have been subject to some sort of tsunami, and it was interesting that it was dated to around 3000BC.  

In my estimation it seemed possible that this tsunami may have occurred as a result of a cliff collapse on the west wall of the Norwegian channel,  the deep and wide trench that runs along the Norwegian Coast, and out to the Atlantic Ocean at the North. 

In my mind this established interesting evidence for turbulence in the north sea that might have lead to an erosive episode breaking through between Orkney and Scotland. 

-×-

Up to this point I cannot say that I had actually proved anything, and even now proof is probably somewhere out of reach.

If there has been material, sand, clay, and silt, in the floor of the North Sea that has, on a millennium scale, been washed away by rising sea levels, it seemed to me to be necessary to establish where that material came from, how it arrived where it was, and how it was removed.

This was the call that demanded that I look at geological sources. These I found in online searches, articles from sources like the British Geological Survey, and the Journal of Quaternary Science. Reports about field work that has been conducted for various reasons, including oil exploration and testing for placement for wind turbine platforms. There is also research with the intention to attempt to predict the effects of climate change on global sea levels.

I'm afraid that as I began to read through these articles, looking at the pictures, the plans, the sections, and the lines on maps I grew more and more dubious about the reliability of what I was studying.

Physically, the science that I was being asked to believe did not make sense. Not to me anyway.

I was on very dodgy ground. I was saying that a huge scientific subject, some of which I had learned as a child, was wrong. The lives, education, and careers of hundreds,even thousands of people were based on a false theory. 

I wasn't backing down though. 

The existing theories could not be justified without ignoring some pertinent observations. Obviously these people were honourable in their work, but often I would read their reports to discover what they believed, and why they believed it.

This usually meant that they make a statement with a reference to another author, someone who had asserted an observation which justified their own theory. This reference though was often dubious, stated as a possibility rather than a fact, or did not actually mean precisely what the authority asserted.

The worst information available was the lines on maps. These are often a result of computer modelling,  and if the information fed into the program that produced the model was inaccurate the result would be meaningless. 

-×-

Given the lack of coherence I found in the story of prehistoric ice ages I started looking at my own experience in the landscape of Britain. 

As an archaeologist I had frequently been up close and personal with the geology of Britain, its what you arrive at when you run out of human influenced soils.

One place where the geology of Britain was particularly present was at Longtown Castle which is at the Welsh border of Herefordshire. There the castle that I worked on sits upon a ridge that carries a prehistoric track from Abergavenny to Hay on Wye. On both sides of the ridge with the track on it are long valleys. The valley on the west side is the Olchon River valley, and on the west side of that is the massive Black Mountain on which the actual border between Wales and England lies.

At the time that I was working at Longtown I would gaze at this valley and wonder at its formation, understanding that it would probably be regarded as a glacial valley. 

Knowing that it was thought to have been created by glaciers I had to recognise in myself serious skepticism about the theory.

I couldn't see where any ice that formed in this valley was coming from, why it was moving, how it was cutting the valley, and why it was flowing at all in that precise location. 

I wasn't a deep thinker. That was 1978, long ago, and far away, I just filed this particular nugget into a box in my brain along with a lot of other nuggets of useless information. 

When I started developing an alternative narrative to describe how the British ice age worked, I came here first to test the theories that I was working on.

Another place though, that triggered the whole process was on top the Cotswold hills where I excavated a pit that had clearly been formed by water falling on a surface,gouging out a hole and smoothing the sides of the pit. To me this had to be glacial meltwater runoff, and the fill of the pit, a pale yellow homogeneous silt must have weathered out of the glacier that had melted to erode the pit.

The germ of an idea began to form that the Olchon Valley at Longtown might have been cut by the fall of melting ice, solid blocks of ice, as it was undercut by meltwater puddling at its edge.

This melting water event, and falling ice, may not have been continuous, but may have happened more quickly in summer, and more slowing in winter.

If an edge were formed along which the ice collapsed it might cause a valley to be cut in the underlying geology. The valley might be cut more deeply in summer when the ice was melting more quickly, and less deeply in winter. 

Where the ice was melting along a receding front this would theoretically create a series of parallel valleys, a new valley cut every year. 

Once I had conjured up the idea of parallel valleys I set out in search of them, and found them all over northern Europe and Southern Europe. Where there were mountains the foothills had valleys that ran along the contours , rather than down the slope.

There were islands where valleys crossed from side to side. By traditional means the glaciers in the valleys would have to be pushed uphill, and then slide downhill for this to be possible,  and I'm deeply skeptical of any theory that makes this suggestion. 

Conversely there are ribbon lakes where linear valleys are blocked at both ends. 

I have been told that the thickness of the ice sheet over Scotland was up to 1500 metres  or one and a half kilometres.  Whether this is true or not I do not yet know, and perhaps I never will. It is enough to say that impacts of small areas of thick ice falling from hundreds of metre heights will have been enormous on solid geology above sea level. The power lost in this collapse could have equated commonly with the most powerful atomic bombs we have ever detonated.

We commonly see videos of ice edge collapse into sea water, at the ends of rivers of ice but the impact of these falls will have been muted by it landing in water.

The impacts that I am describing here would have been largely onto dry land.

-×-

Having discovered that not only were there parallel valleys either side of the Longtown Castle ridge, I looked on topographic maps of the area and found that these ridges and valleys continued into Herefordshire quite some way. Half a dozen parallel valleys  running north to south parallel to the Welsh border on the Black Mountain. 

Now I was hooked on the hunt for valleys that were parallel to each other and that sometimes followed contours on rising ground.

I found them almost everywhere across northern England, Scotland, Wales,  northern Ireland, southern Europe, and Scandinavia. 

I didn't find them anywhere else on the planet, simply because I wasn't looking .

It is highly possible that these valleys are unique to this area  the European Coast of the Atlantic Ocean. As far as I understand it this, the Atlantic Ocean, is the only deep water crack in the earth's surface that joins the oceans that circle the southern hemisphere with the North Pole. Warm water will have ( I believe), always found a way to embrace this coastline,as it does now, with cyclonic storms roaming up from equatorial seas.

The other place that I found parallel valleys was in the North Sea and the English Channel. 

By reading reports about the geology of the North Sea and Britain I began to piece together a story of Britain in the last ice age. The story was a bit furry round the edges as the timeline disappeared into the distant past, and I began to wonder how this was helping me on my original quest, about land bridges between the islands of Britain. I was now sucked into it though. Everything that I was uncovering was in complete opposition to everything I learned at school, and everything that masters, professors and students imbibe today in educational institutions .

Gradually though,  I began to draw a map in my mind of the ice sheet that covered Britain before, and then during the last ice age.

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Until about 70,000 years ago the thickest snow was on the mountains of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It is not clear how much snow was landed on the remainder of Britain,  but the thickness of the ice sheets on the mountains would have been significant, several hundreds of metres. These ice sheets would, except in exceptional circumstances have been static. The ice sheets on the mountains did not move, and there is no evidence that they did.

At 70,000 years ago there was a sharp thaw at which the edges of the mountain ice sheets collapsed sending mud and rocks in all directions around the mountain tops. From Scotland and Northern England tidal waves of sludge caused by this melt and collapse, were propelled across the dry North Sea to dump the raised ground of Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea. 

Thereafter the remaining ice sheets on the mountains continued to add height while the lowlands of southern and Eastern England were cold with snowy winters, but probably summers that thawed the snow making year on year build up of snow discontinuous.

Between 30,000 years and 20,000 years ago colder climate controlled the laying of snow. Up to this time the ice sheet over Shetland collapsed breaking up a much larger area of land than is present as the Shetland Isles today.  

At this same time a ridge of land joined Dogger bank in the southern North Sea to a promontory between Shetland and Norway facing the north Atlantic Ocean. 

Dogger Bank was connected to Britain and Europe at this time,  but would be separated  from them both as deglaciation proceeded.

Between the ridge running north from Dogger Bank and the east coast of Scotland a shallow lagoon remained unfrozen during the last cold snap of the glaciation. 

Around this lagoon, and in an area north of it near Orkney there is likely to have been a woodland environment.

The last period of cold weather, that ended at around 21,000 years ago, saw more snow landing and compacting on British mountains,  thin or absent snow in the south west, and thicker deposits on eastern and southeastern England. The high ground in the north sea area, from Dogger Bank up to the Atlantic Ocean also saw thick ice sheets. 

From about 21,000 years ago these ice sheets started to collapse creating parallel valleys in the north sea, and offshore from England and Scotland. The English Channel was also cut at this time partially severing Britain from Europe.

By about 16,000 years ago the ice sheets were restricted to the mountains of England and Scotland.  At about this time the amounts of water running from melting ice sheets was raising sea levels locally around British and Norwegian Coasts. 

The final flush of raised sea levels occurred around 11,000 years ago.

Throughout these times the collapse of the ice sheets, and the cutting of the valleys  with the huge volumes of meltwater, sent ice streams loaded with rocks, sediment, and ice downhill towards coastal waters. Where these ice streams were intercepted by the water's edge, linear moraines were laid. As these mobile ice streams passed over exposed rocks the sludge and rocks they carried scarred the surface of the stones (striations).

In Scotland, where the ice sheets collapsed, in some places the resulting rock, ice, and sediment stream became stuck in the valleys that had been cut. 

Meltwater then drained off from the collapse,  leaving the "glacier", a river of ice, cool in the valley floor.

Gradually,  from about 9000 years ago these rivers of ice melted in place,  dropping their contents on the valley floor. This was an uneven deposition of material which remains as hummocky moraine. 

-×-

After deglaciation,  habitats like woodland and marshes, extended out from northern Europe to much of the British Isles and North Sea. 

As sea levels rose Doggerland was lost, but a thin strand of woodland at the southern coast of the North Sea remained,  linking Holland to Lincolnshire and Norfolk. 

Mammals, reptiles, plants and trees migrated along this corridor of land in the early post-glacial period, followed by people with sheep and dogs.

The corridor of land was gradually eroded away as water depths either side of it increased, allowing greater wave energy to develop in the North Sea, and stronger tides to filter along the English Channel. 

Cores have been drilled into the seabed at locations near the Norfolk coast to analyse the nature of geological deposits there. The findings indicate, in general terms that there are buried peats there which were drowned at a depth of around 20 metres in about 8000 years ago. No peat are present at shallower depths, or later dates, leading to the suggestion that sea level reached 20 metres below our sea level at 8000 years ago.

At that date marine agitation was sufficient to flood the existing peats, and to crop off any later peats at shallower depths.

In a few other places large thicknesses of sediments are added to the seabed, at a date in the 4th millennium BC, suggesting that sediments have been eroded from elsewhere to be dumped in a large scale submarine event.

There is probably evidence to provide a reasonable assessment that the English Channel was gradually eroded away from about 8000 years ago, and was finally broken through in the 4th millennium BC,  at a time when early neolithic people were still extending their ranges into Britain,  and out of Europe. 

Following the breakthrough of the English Channel from the Atlantic Ocean to the North Sea,  the latter became fully tidal, with complex tidal flows around all of its shorelines, including the Pentland Firth between Orkney and Scotland. 

-×-

When I began to research the Archaeology and geology of the British Isles,  to comprehend where land was, until early neolithic dates, I knew it would be a challenge.  Looking for something that isn't there any more but once was there, is obviously fraught with problems. The evidence that I had to be contend with would be shadows and footprints, scars and halos.

Also obviously, the discovery of a single footprint does not make a human civilisation. I had to find a fabric of shadows to feel for the landscape that time had eliminated.

I believe that I have provided the fabric. I hope you agree, but even if you don't I will continue to explore, looking for a solution to the Riddle. 

Jeffery Nicholls 

South Ronaldsay 

Orkney 

The Orkney Riddle (indec here) is a series of blogs promoting the notion that Neolithic people walked from Scotland to Orkney to build the Ring of Brodgar. 

Email jiffynorm@yahoo.co.uk 

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