Sharing Ness knowledge across Orkney

Monday, November 2, 2026 (1:17 PM)

Pupils experimenting with Neolithic roofing at the Dounby school.

From Stenness to Sanday, Orkney bairns have been continuing to learn about the Ness of Brodgar.

Ness of Brodgar Trust education officer, Katy Firth, started off the new term with some visits to Dounby School to work with the P4 class learning about Neolithic Orkney. This included trialling sessions which will be available on our new website as downloadable lessons.

Katy worked together with art teacher Mr Higgins to run a monoprint art lesson inspired by the decorated stones from the Ness. She also led a session on roof truss design to help develop the youngsters’ engineering skills.

Ms Purnell, the class teacher, went even further with the pupils, making their own section of walling, inspired by Dr Martha Johnson’s schematic drawings picking out different geological sources for the building stone.

Ms Purnell also brought the Ness of Brodgar into the 21st century by setting the pupils the task of writing ultra-detailed descriptive text about their own Neolithic characters, which she then used AI to create digital character drawings from. All of this was shared with the pupils’ families at a “Share the Learning” event.

Sanday's lower primary try their hand at creating and decorating with pigment. — Sanday’s lower primary try their hand at creating and decorating with pigment.

Next, Katy visited Sanday school with Professor Jane Downes, director of the UHI Archaeology Institute, to show how the large Neolithic building excavated this summer at Spurness relates to the sites in wider Orkney, including the Ness of Brodgar.

All pupils from P1 to S2 got involved in pigment making and the older pupils had a go at making nettle cord. The Lego model of Structure Ten even came on a Sanday tour and proved to be a very useful teaching tool.

The end of term saw Katy back at Stenness Primary School, this time accompanied by skilled knotwork and cordage/rope specialist Mark Cook of Afrayed Knot. Mark demonstrated the sorts of rope and cord which would have been available in the Neolithic and then the pupils practiced making braids and tying knots. With so many children wearing velcro shoes, knot tying is a dying art.

But it’s not just schools learning about the Ness! This month the Orkney Young Archaeologists’ Club met up for their first session of the academic year, where the focus was on Neolithic pottery. Inspired by the decoration on the Ness of Brodgar pottery, the group had a go at making their own. Thanks go to Fursbreck Pottery who has kindly agree to fire the completed pots.