Link: ‘Orkney – Centre of the Stone Age’ podcast
A new podcast from History Hit, looking at Orkney’s Neolithic remains, including Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar, Skara Brae and a section on the Ness of Brodgar, featuring Nick Card and Roy Towers …
The Staneyhill stone (and round about)
A solitary megalith towers over a Neolithic quarry about 350 metres to the south-east of the Staneyhill horned cairn …
North of the Unstan stalled cairn is an enigmatic earthwork that separates the landward side of the Ness of Onston from the headland. This arc of two banks and ditches runs across the width of …
The Ness of Brodgar from above
Structure Twelve supervisor Jim Rylatt is in Orkney at present, juggling hundreds of contexts to piece together a phased timeline for the building. On one of the few reasonably pleasant days we’ve had recently, Jim …
Spirits of the Standing Stones
The early antiquarians who documented Orkney’s ancient monuments paid little attention to the local beliefs surrounding the sites …
Traditional names or just another ‘Loda’ old nonsense?
Is there any truth to the antiquarian claims that the two Stenness circles were traditionally known as the ‘Temples of the Sun and Moon’? …
Digging into henges and henging…
The Ring of Brodgar and Stones of Stenness have been classed as “henges” since the term was coined in the 1930s. But are they really? And what exactly is a henge? …
The centre of their world – a place where heaven, earth and people met
By natural coincidence the Ness of Brodgar peninsula roughly lines up with a solstice axis. Is this one of the reason’s the area became a magnet to people for millennia? …
100 years on: the discovery of the ‘Brodgar Stone’ at Ness complex site
100 years ago this week the ‘Brodgar Stone’ was found – a taste of things to come …
Fruitless and forgotten – the 1861 excavation inside the Ring of Brodgar
For many, many years, the uncertainty surrounding what, if anything, lay inside the Ring of Brodgar has been put down to the fact the interior is unexcavated. But now, it seems, that is not the …
