Ring of Brodgar

Listen first. Wind moves across open water on both sides of you, and the heather crackles softly underfoot. There are no trees here to break the sound. Only sky, two lochs, and a wide circle of tall grey stones standing in the grass. You are a short drive northeast of Stromness, on a narrow strip of land in the heart of Orkney's Mainland. This is the Ring of Brodgar, and people have walked to this spot for well over four thousand years.

Look at the setting before you look at the stones. On one side lies the Loch of Stenness, which is slightly salty because it connects to the sea. On the other side lies the Loch of Harray, which holds fresh water. The ring sits on the thin neck of land between them, a place called the Ness of Brodgar. The builders chose this spot carefully. Water on both sides, a huge bowl of hills all around, and the sky overhead like a lid.

Now turn to the circle itself. It is very large, roughly one hundred metres across. That makes it one of the largest stone circles in the British Isles. Archaeologists believe it once held around sixty stones. Today a little under thirty still stand, and others survive as broken stumps low in the grass. Walk slowly and count them. The gaps matter as much as the stones. Each empty space is where a stone fell, broke, or was taken away long ago.

The stones are not rounded boulders. They are thin, flat slabs, like enormous pages standing on end. This is Orkney flagstone, a sandstone that splits naturally into layers. The same stone gives Stromness its walls and its paving. Here, Neolithic people levered slabs out of the bedrock and raised them upright. The Neolithic is the late Stone Age, when people farmed but had no metal tools. The tallest stones rise well above a person's head, and their edges were left sharp and uneven.

Here is something most visitors miss. The circle sits inside a deep ditch, and that ditch was cut straight into solid rock. Without metal tools, people dug it with stone, antler, and bone. Some estimates suggest the work took tens of thousands of hours. Today the ditch is softened by grass and often holds water after rain. But stand at its edge and imagine it bare and freshly cut. It would have been a dramatic barrier around the stones.

As you walk around, notice two places where the ditch was left unbroken. These are causeways, natural bridges of rock that lead into the circle. They were the entrances. Archaeologists call this kind of monument a henge, which means a circular space enclosed by a ditch. At Brodgar, the ditch probably once had a bank as well, but little of it is visible now. The causeways show how people were meant to approach the stones.

When was it built? Honestly, nobody can say exactly. The Ring of Brodgar has never been precisely dated. Most specialists place it somewhere in the third millennium before Christ, roughly four and a half thousand years ago. That makes it later than its smaller neighbour, the Stones of Stenness, which you can see across the water. It may also have taken many generations to complete. Some believe it was never fully finished at all.

That neighbour is part of a much larger story. Stand facing southeast and look along the strip of land. Between Brodgar and Stenness, excavations at the Ness of Brodgar have found the remains of large stone buildings, painted walls, and decorated stones. Nearby stands Maeshowe, a great chambered tomb. Together with Skara Brae, a village on the west coast, these sites form the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. UNESCO named them a World Heritage Site in 1999.

Now come closer to one of the stones and look carefully at its surface. Lichen covers much of it in pale green, grey, and soft orange patches. On one stone, people found carved Norse runes. Runes are the old letters of Scandinavian languages. Vikings and their descendants settled Orkney more than a thousand years ago, and these carvings come from that much later period. So the stones carry marks from two very different worlds, separated by thousands of years.

The ring has a quieter, more modern story too. In 1980, a bolt of lightning struck one of the stones and split it. Think about that the next time a storm rolls across these open lochs. On this flat, treeless ground, the stones are often the tallest things for some distance. Wind, rain, frost, and lightning have all shaped what you see. The circle is not a frozen object. It is still changing, very slowly, in front of you.

What was it for? Here we move from evidence into ideas. Many people link the ring to the sun, the moon, and the turning seasons. Eighteenth and nineteenth century antiquarians even called it the Temple of the Sun, and named Stenness the Temple of the Moon. Those are later labels, not ancient ones. Local folklore offers another story. Legend has it the stones were giants who danced through the night and turned to stone at sunrise.

Look outward from the circle too. Low grassy mounds lie scattered across the surrounding land. Many are thought to be burial mounds from later periods, built by people who chose to rest near the stones. A single stone known as the Comet Stone stands not far away, on its own. This whole landscape seems planned around the ring. Turn in a full slow circle and notice how the hills enclose you, almost like the walls of a giant room.

Before you leave, stand still for one more minute. Feel the wind on your face, the same wind that blew across this ground when the first stone was raised. Listen to the birds over the water and the hiss of the grass. As you walk back along the path, glance over your shoulder. From a distance, the stones seem to close together again into one dark ring, standing between two lochs, under a very big sky.