First let me say - please try to spend more than two days on Orkney, you'll get to slow the pace down a bit and really savor all the sights. Second, if you don't have the time (and if you do not have your own car), I would recommend a 6 hour tour with Craigie's Taxis to maximize efficiency, get some local knowledge and maybe explore things you hadn't thought of. Archie was my taxi driver on my arrival, and that's when we set up my itinerary for the next day; I told him what I was interested and and in a general sense, what I wanted to see. Voila.
We started the morning promptly at 9:30 to make it to Skara Brae by 10:00 am (as of this writing, it is recommended to book your tickets online). You check in, get your ticket, go through the exhibit which has replicas of what the Neolithic houses looked like, the interior design, etc.; there are also storyboards throughout with information on what they might have eaten, worn, farmed. As you head outside, you follow the path to the settlement, which is over 5,000 years old. The day was gorgeous, windy, but sunny and the sky was so blue. I tried to imagine what it was like 5,000 years ago, and all I could think of was how cold it would be in the winter.
Skaill House is on the same ticket, so just follow the path and you can go into a 17th century mansion that contains many artifacts from the Lairds of the estate including uniforms, place settings, painting and photographs. It was the 7th Laird of Breckness, living at Skaill House, who discovered Skara Brae in 1850.
After my time at Skaill House, we drove over to Broch of Gurness, an Iron Age village with roundhouse structures.
The next stop was the Ring of Brodgar Stone Circle, a Neolithic stone circle and henge, similar to Stonehenge. By this time my brain was on Neothlithic overload and it was hard to keep everything straight. Archie was very helpful and patient as I started to take some notes. You can tell it got a little gray and rainy, but it didn't last long.
The Ring of Brodgar and Standing Stones of Stenness are very near to one another, and we headed to the Standing Stones of Stenness which were being protected by a flock of sheep.
All of these sites that we visited are considered to be part of the
Heart of Neolithic Orkney when UNESCO declared the area to be World Heritage Site. I know they just look like rocks or boulders, but they held huge importance thousands of years ago; and then imagining how they got these heavy slabs of rock from one place to another, similar to the mystery of Stonehenge. This was a whirlwind of a morning, and there were still more places to see. I'll cover those in my next post.
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