Heart of Neolithic Orkney
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
How it came to be
People lived at Skara Brae on Mainland, Orkney's largest island, for about 600 years from around 3180 BC. Its stone houses are linked by narrow roofed passages, and seven of them have beds and a dresser built into the same positions. A severe storm in the winter of 1850 stripped the earth from a knoll on the Bay of Skaill and revealed the outline of the village.
Maeshowe, a chambered tomb built around 2800 BC, is laid out so that light at the winter solstice runs down its passage to the back wall of the chamber. In the 12th century Norse visitors broke in from above and carved more than thirty runic inscriptions. The antiquarian James Farrer opened the tomb in July 1861.
Nearby stand the Stones of Stenness, four surviving uprights inside a henge, and the Ring of Brodgar, where 36 stones survive in a circle. Some fallen stones at both were re-erected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Together the ceremonial, funerary and domestic sites of a culture that flourished from about 3000 to 2000 BC were inscribed in 1999.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).