Standing Stones of Stenness

Possibly the oldest henge in Britain, built around 3100 BC, connected to a Neolithic village, aligned to sun and moon, part of a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, and once home to oath-binding customs that survived into the nineteenth century.

Around 3100 BC, Neolithic communities on the Orkney mainland began constructing a monument on the promontory between two lochs. They levelled a platform forty-four metres across. They cut a ditch into the bedrock, two metres deep and seven metres wide, leaving a single entrance causeway on the north side facing the Barnhouse Settlement where they lived. They raised eleven or twelve thin stone slabs into an ellipse thirty-two metres in diameter, the tallest reaching nearly six metres. At the centre they built a square hearth, two metres across, and in it they burned fires, deposited pottery, and left the bones of cattle, sheep, and dogs. What they sought in doing this we cannot say with certainty. The statistical analysis of the monument's orientation suggests alignments with the summer and winter solstice sunrise and with major lunar standstills, events in the moon's 18.6-year cycle. The probability of these alignments being deliberate exceeds ninety-seven percent. Someone watched the sky for decades, noted patterns, and built accordingly. The site predates the main stone phase of Stonehenge by five hundred years. For centuries the monument served its community. Then Neolithic life on Orkney changed, and the great phase of monument-building drew to a close. But the stones did not lose their power over people. By the eighteenth century, local customs had attached to a nearby stone pierced with a circular hole, known as the Odin Stone. Couples clasped hands through the hole to swear the Odin Oath, the most binding pledge known in Orkney. No instance was ever recorded of anyone breaking it. Newborns were passed through the hole for protection. Offerings of food and ale were left. Then in December 1814, Captain W. Mackay, who had bought farmland near the stones, decided to remove them because local people kept crossing his land to use them. He smashed the Odin Stone first. The community's fury stopped him after he had destroyed one more stone and toppled a third. Walter Scott, visiting that same year, documented what remained.