Ness of Brodgar

A Neolithic ceremonial complex of unprecedented scale, active for over 1,300 years, ceremonially closed around 2200 BC, and rediscovered in the 21st century beneath an Orkney field.

Sometime around 3500 BC, Neolithic communities in Orkney began constructing buildings on the narrow isthmus between two lochs. This was already a significant landscape: the Stones of Stenness were being erected nearby, and the Ring of Brodgar would follow. The peninsula between them, naturally aligned to the midwinter sunrise and midsummer sunset, became the focus of architectural ambition that would continue for over thirteen centuries.

By 3300 BC, the complex was substantial enough to require definition. The Great Wall of Brodgar was raised across the width of the peninsula, seventy metres long and four metres wide, marking the boundary of sacred space. Within this enclosure, monumental buildings were constructed, modified, demolished, and rebuilt. Each generation inherited the work of the last and added its own contribution.

The buildings were remarkable. Structure Ten, dating from the later centuries of the complex, measured twenty-five by twenty metres and was the largest roofed structure of its era in Britain. The walls of multiple buildings were painted with pigments ground from haematite and mixed with animal fat, milk, or eggs, creating interiors coloured in red, yellow, orange, and black. Over a thousand stones were decorated with incised patterns. More than eighty thousand sherds of Grooved Ware pottery were produced and used. This was not a settlement but a gathering place, somewhere communities came together from across Orkney and beyond for feasting, ceremony, and exchange.

The ending came around 2200 BC. The community slaughtered approximately four hundred cattle in what radiocarbon dating suggests was a single event. The meat was consumed in a massive feast. The tibias were cracked for marrow. Red deer carcasses were placed atop the remains. The walls of Structure Ten were dismantled, the interior filled, the building transformed into a mound. The complex was closed with a ceremony as deliberate and significant as any of those that had preceded it across a millennium of use. Then the people walked away, and the Orkney grass grew over what they had built.