Skara Brae is a stone-built Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of Mainland, the largest of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. People lived there from about 3180 BCE to about 2500 BCE, which makes it older than the sarsen circle at Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Ten structures linked by covered passages survive, still furnished with stone dressers, box beds, hearths and watertight stone boxes, and the site is described as Europe’s most complete Neolithic village. It was uncovered by a storm in 1850 and has been part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site since December 1999.
The Winter Storm of 1850 on the Bay of Skaill
Skara Brae owes its rediscovery to bad weather. In the winter of 1850 a severe storm struck Scotland, killing more than 200 people. On the Bay of Skaill, a crescent of sand on Orkney’s Atlantic shore, the wind and waves tore the turf and sand from a large, irregular grassy knoll that local people knew as Skerrabra. When the storm passed, villagers could see the tops of stone walls: the outline of several small, roofless houses packed tightly together.
The name itself carries Orkney’s layered history. The first element comes from older recorded forms such as Skerrabra or Styerrabrae, which referred to the mound before anyone knew what lay inside it, while brae is the Scots word for a slope or hillside. The bay’s name is Norse, from Bugr Skála, and Skaill House, the 17th-century laird’s mansion that still overlooks the site, takes its name from the Old Norse word for a hall.
From William Watt to V. Gordon Childe, 1850–1930
The first person to dig was William Graham Watt of Skaill House, the son of the local laird and a self-taught geologist. He cleared four houses before stopping in 1868. In 1913 a party with shovels plundered it over a single weekend and carried away an unknown quantity of artefacts, and in 1924 another storm washed away part of one house. That loss persuaded the authorities that the village had to be secured and properly investigated.
The job went to Vere Gordon Childe, the Australian-born Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He first travelled to Skara Brae in mid-1927 and excavated there from 1928 to 1930, publishing his results in 1931 in a monograph, Skara Brae: A Pictish Village in Orkney. He also made one large error: he dated the village to the Iron Age, around 500 BCE, roughly 2,700 years too late. Photographs from the dig, re-examined in 2019, carry a note identifying four women at the site as Childe’s students rather than visitors; they have been tentatively named as Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy and Margaret Cole.
Inside a Skara Brae House: Dresser, Box Beds, Hearth and Stone Boxes
The villagers built their furniture from stone, the same material as their walls, so the fittings have survived along with the houses. The houses were once thought to be underground, but they are now understood as free-standing stone buildings packed round with midden, the village’s own heap of ash, shells, bones and refuse, which insulated them from the wind and held the walls steady.
Seven of the houses share almost the same plan. A low doorway, closed by a stone slab held with a bar of bone sliding into holes cut in the door jambs, opens into a single room. Facing the door stands the stone dresser, its shelves built of stone slabs, the first thing a visitor sees. In the middle of the floor is a square hearth. On either side of the hearth stands a box bed, built from upright slabs.
The beds are not identical. In each of these houses the larger bed lies to the right of the doorway and the smaller to the left. The archaeologist Lloyd Laing pointed out that this matched Hebridean custom into the early 20th century, in which the husband’s bed was the larger. Beads and paint pots found in some of the smaller beds may support that reading, and stone boxes placed to the left of most doorways would have steered anyone entering towards the right-hand side. Stumps of stone pillars at the front of the beds may once have held up a canopy of fur, another link with recent Hebridean custom.
Inside the homes are small boxes of thin slabs, their joints sealed with clay to make them waterproof. Limpet shells are common in the village, and one explanation is that the boxes held limpets soaking as fish bait. Beneath at least five of the houses runs a system of drains, though its full extent has never been mapped. Pottery jars holding up to 30 litres stood in several homes.
House 8 and the Covered Passages
One building breaks the pattern. House 8 has no dresser and no storage boxes. Its interior is divided into small cubicles, and the floor produced fragments of stone, bone and antler, along with heat-damaged volcanic rock and what appears to be a flue. Archaeologists read it as a workshop where tools such as bone needles or flint axes were made. It also stands alone: rather than being buried in midden, it rises above ground with walls more than 2 metres thick and a porch sheltering its entrance.
The other houses are joined by low, narrow passages roofed with stone slabs, so that a villager could move from one home to the next without stepping into an Orkney gale. Today four passageways are visible.
What fuelled the hearths is still argued over. Childe assumed peat, but studies of the island’s vegetation suggest thick peat beds did not form in this part of Orkney until after the village was abandoned. Driftwood, animal dung and dried seaweed are the main alternatives.
Older Than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid: Dating 3180–2500 BCE
Childe’s Iron Age date was overturned by new excavations in 1972–73. Radiocarbon results from samples collected then showed that occupation began about 3180 BCE and continued for roughly 600 years, to around 2500 BCE. That places the village alongside the earliest phase of Stonehenge, the circular bank and ditch dug around 3100 BCE, and well before the sarsen circle raised between 2600 and 2400 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2600 BCE, when Skara Brae had already been lived in for nearly six centuries.
Skara Brae is not the oldest house in Orkney. The Knap of Howar on Papa Westray, a farmstead dated from about 3500 to 3100 BCE, has a similar design and is thought to be the oldest preserved standing building in northern Europe. At Barnhouse, beside the Loch of Harray, excavations from 1986 to 1991 revealed at least 15 houses from around 3000 BCE with central hearths, wall beds and dressers.
Grooved Ware, Whalebone and Barley: What the Villagers Left
The people of Skara Brae made and used Grooved Ware, flat-bottomed pots with straight sides sloping outwards and grooved decoration around the top. The style seems to have developed in Orkney early in the third millennium BCE and then spread across Britain and Ireland.
They were mainly herders of cattle, sheep and pigs. Childe believed they did not farm, but the 1972 excavations recovered barley grains from the midden. Fish bones and shells show they ate seafood too. From animal and fish bone, whalebone, walrus ivory and orca teeth they made awls, needles, knives, beads, shovels and small bowls, as well as ivory pins up to 25 centimetres long that resemble pins from the Boyne Valley passage graves in Ireland. The Skaill knife, a sharp flake struck from a sandstone cobble, is named after the bay. Waterlogged layers reached in 1972 preserved a twisted skein of heather, one of very few pieces of Neolithic rope known, and a wooden handle.
Other finds include carved stone balls, red ochre and a small whalebone figure, the Skara Brae Buddo, rediscovered in a box at Stromness Museum in 2016.
Why the Village Emptied, and Why the Sea Threatens It Now
Around 2500 BCE the climate turned colder and wetter, and the village was abandoned. A popular story has the villagers fleeing a great storm: the writer Evan Hadingham pictured a woman whose necklace snapped as she squeezed through a doorway, scattering beads down the passage. The archaeologist Anna Ritchie rejects that picture, arguing that the sand covered the village gradually after people had already left, for reasons no one can identify.
In the village’s lifetime the sea was further away, and the village may have stood beside a freshwater lagoon behind the dunes. Today the sea is much closer: from House 1 the beach and the breaking waves are in plain view. Some buildings may have been lost before 1850, and other remains of uncertain date can be seen eroding out of the low cliff a little to the south. A 2019 risk assessment by Historic Environment Scotland, Orkney Islands Council and partners judged the whole World Heritage Site, and Skara Brae above all, “extremely vulnerable” to climate change, warning that a single exceptionally severe storm could partly destroy it. The same kind of storm that revealed the village in 1850 is now one of the main dangers to it.
Skara Brae in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney
UNESCO inscribed the Heart of Neolithic Orkney on 2 December 1999. Skara Brae is the domestic piece of a group of four monuments on Mainland. Maeshowe is a chambered cairn aligned so that its central chamber is lit at the winter solstice; Viking visitors later left one of the world’s largest collections of runic inscriptions on its walls. The Standing Stones of Stenness keep four megaliths, the tallest about 6 metres high. The Ring of Brodgar is a circle 104 metres across, originally of 60 stones set inside a circular ditch up to 3 metres deep. Between the last two lies the Ness of Brodgar, not part of the inscription but excavated as a complex of large Neolithic buildings that adds much to the picture.
A Neolithic “low road” runs from Skara Brae past Brodgar and Stenness to Maeshowe, and the archaeologist Euan MacKie once suggested the village housed a priestly elite who ran ceremonies at the stone circles. Graham and Anna Ritchie found no archaeological evidence for that. Historic Environment Scotland, which manages the site with Orkney Islands Council, NatureScot and the RSPB, keeps it open all year. For a comparison with another monument from the same centuries, read our guide to Newgrange in Ireland’s Boyne Valley, whose ivory-pin parallels link it to Orkney; the timeline above also connects the village to Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain and the pyramids at Giza.