The Orkney Islands, located north of the coast of Scotland, is a unique place. While the Minoan culture in Crete was in its infancy, and the pyramid of Cheops was not even in the plans, there already existed a Neolithic civilization, which did not differ in any way in terms of living from the European Middle Ages. Orkney culture left behind solid mysteries, and in particular - how, with such a high level of development, did it never invent writing?
The islands have a rather distant relationship to Great Britain; Scandinavian influences are still felt in the architecture, city planning and even the rhythm of life of the Orkneans. No wonder - until 1468 the islands were part of Norway. Margarita, daughter of King Christian I of Denmark and Norway, married young James III, King of Scotland. It was a political marriage - thanks to it, Christian removed territorial claims to Scotland and pledged to pay a significant dowry in gold florins. As a pledge, he temporarily transferred the Orkney Islands that were in his possession to his enemies-relatives - and he never paid the dowry. He did not need cold and desert lands, and Christian regretted gold. So Orkney joined the Scottish crown.
In general, the Orkney Islands have three layers of historical interest. The second is just the Middle Ages, the stunning Kirkwall Cathedral of St. Magnus and the ruins of palaces. The third - the first half of the 20th century, because Orkney has always been the "muster point" of the British Navy and a strategically important command post - it is still a mecca for divers exploring ships sunk during both World Wars.
But most of all the mysteries and discussions were generated, of course, by the first layer. Orkney civilization, neolithic mystery, culture without writing, stone tale.
THE HEART OF NEOLITICAL SCOTLAND
The most famous Neolithic settlement in the Orkney Islands is called Skara Bray. When you walk to it from the administration house, stones with embossed dates are encountered under your feet, something like a timeline. Jesus was born - by that time Skara-Bray no longer existed; the temple of Solomon was built - by that time no one lived in Skara Bray; Stonehenge was erected - by that time Skara Bray had been in ruins for 400 years. This helps to imagine the streams of time, layered one on top of the other since then.
Skara Bray is called the "Scottish Pompeii" - primarily because of the excellent state of preservation of the village. It was discovered by accident, in 1850, when a powerful hurricane tore off a layer of earth from the coast, exposing the remains of stone huts. A local landowner, William Graham Watt of Scale, began amateur excavations, but soon stopped and seriously studied Scara Bray half a century later, in the mid-1920s, when the famous archaeologist Vir Gordon Child became interested in the settlement.
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The houses in Skara Bray are rather large dugouts, fortified with stones. People chose a convenient hill, "opened" it, covered the walls with masonry (surprisingly thin for 3100 BC), built passages and corridors, and covered it with turf, poles, moss; some houses are stone - not earthen! - floors. In most houses, the roofs have been removed for the convenience of tourists - stone furniture, reliable, preserved to this day - beds, tables, workbenches; one hut contains blacksmith equipment. It is interesting to guess why this or that household item was used 5,000 years ago. One house is particularly well preserved, down to the skins on the beds; the roof on it was restored and they are not allowed inside, but an exact copy of it for tourists was built nearby. The entrances are low, narrow so as not to lose heat, but at the same time the rooms themselves are very spacious, each with an average of 40 m2.
In total, there are ten houses in Skara Bray, excavated and rebuilt by stone. But few people look around - the next village, unexcavated, hidden under a layer of earth, just 100 meters from Skara Bray. And then another one, and another one. There are many of them - villages of a similar nature, several houses, a smithy and a complex drainage system that does not allow water to stagnate in the underground passages between houses.
The culture of Skara Bray looks very modern and rather complex - decorations, tools of labor, ceramic vessels and mysterious turned stones of an ornate shape were found in the houses, the purpose of which has not yet been understood. Similar artifacts are found in all Neolithic settlements in the north of Great Britain, they even received a separate name, "carved stone balls" and, most likely, served as objects of worship. But what kind of cult? Why are they chiseled and richly decorated in the spirit of fluted pottery? This is the lack of a lack of writing - we will never learn much about the Neolithic Orkney.
In addition to Skara Brae, the Orkney Islands have dozens, if not hundreds, of such places - less worn out by hiking boots and sometimes more interesting. For example, the Barnhouse settlement in the heart of Mainland, the main island of the archipelago, has fifteen houses, very similar to Skara Brae, but much worse preserved. Or the stone houses of the village of Nap of Hawar, which have survived to this day in almost perfect condition, founded much earlier around 3500 BC! There are fewer houses in the Nap of Hawar - it is more of a farm farm than a village, but the walls in its buildings have retained their original height (about 1.6 meters); furniture, ceramics, and household items have survived to this day. Interestingly, the stone structures of Neolithic Scotland are not just boulders dumped somehow; stones were processed and split into narrow strips,then they were turned and turned into a kind of bricks. This gives the ancient villages a neat look - it feels like there were professional architects among the people who lived five thousand years ago.
But if the villages are mainly understood by researchers, and one can guess the purpose of household items without written explanations, then Orkney religious buildings - tombs and cromlechs - carry much more mysteries.
HILLS HAVE EYES
Tombs of the Orkney culture belong to the so-called corridor type. There is a cairn (a large pile of stones) with a crypt underneath. A narrow corridor leads into the crypt, through which the body was carried - in fact, the Egyptian pyramids are similarly arranged. The largest such tomb in the UK and in the world is Meishow in Mainland, 10 kilometers from Skara Brae.
Having made his way through an eleven-meter corridor no more than a meter high, a person finds himself in a spacious room with a tall - almost four-meter - ceiling. Once it was even higher, but sloppy researchers of the middle of the 19th century brought down the original ceiling. A tomb built around 2800 BC. The Vikings were also plundered, so it is not possible to find out who was in Meishow. But the laying of the walls of the tomb by its principle corresponds practically to our time - perfectly fitted stone-bricks, a perfect structure with a floor in the form of a regular rectangle. It is not clear how all this, including the overlap, was calculated without writing. Most likely, numerical cuts were made on wood and walls. Today, the walls of Meishow are decorated with a runic letter - these are the Vikings frolic; and I must sayit is one of the largest sources of runes in the world.
In addition to Maeshau, two dozen Orkney tombs are known, for example, the Tomb of the Eagles. In addition to human bones, thousands of bird bones were found in it - apparently, birds were sacrificed during burial rituals. The Tomb of the Eagles shed light on one of the secrets of Orkney burials - it was clearly used by several generations of local residents as a common burial place, that is, it served as a kind of "cemetery", and was not intended for any one high-ranking person.
The Coyness Cairn Tomb on Sunday Island and the Ansten Tomb on the Mainland have also survived in excellent condition. In the latter, the original type of decorated ceramics, called Anstenskaya, was first discovered. Interestingly, the tombs were located both near settlements and on remote islands where no one lived. For example, on the tiny islet of the Hill of Papa, there are as many as three underground necropolises. All of them are public, the bones of dozens of people were found in them, and they are all made of hewn stones with the same care as the residential buildings of Skara Bray.
ISLANDS OF STANDING STONES
When the famous Stonehenge was not yet in the plans, stone cromlechs were already being erected on the Orkney Islands - huge circles of processed vertical stones, megalithic structures of the Neolithic. Surprisingly - although there are hundreds of similar cromlechs, there are no sensible assumptions about what rituals they were coping with. It is not even known whether they belong to religious buildings. These are just circles of stones - years of human labor are embedded in them, and this underlines their importance, hidden for us behind the veil of millennia.
The largest cromlech of the Orkney Islands is the Brodgar Circle, 60 megaliths neatly arranged in a circle 104 meters in diameter. True, only 27 stones have survived to this day - only the foundations have remained from some of them, some were knocked down by careless tourists in the 18th-19th centuries (by the way, the stones were signed with autographs in the spirit of “Vasya was here”, only scratched, say, in 1750-1780), some were struck by lightning. They are majestic and huge; You need to go to them along the wooden flooring so as not to crush the grass, and when you stand nearby, you understand what an inhuman labor it took to stand upright and dig these 3-5-meter blocks into the ground. It is interesting that in the early Middle Ages, even in the pre-Christian era, pagan rituals were carried out in the cromlechs of Scotland, but they, apparently, were radically different from those that took place 3000 years before,immediately after the construction of the "stone rings".
There are enough "standing" stones on Orkney. No less famous are the Stennes megaliths - the preserved part of the standing stones of the Neolithic henge. Henge differs from cromlech in that it is a ring-shaped earthen embankment with cut entrances, and stones may or may not be present; at the same time, cromlech is necessarily a stone circle. In one of the Stennes stones, nicknamed "Odin's stone", there was a round hole - lovers came to it to shake hands and pass a ring through the hole. True, in 1814, the owner of the land, a certain Captain McKay, decided to get rid of the stones and broke Odin's stone. The authorities stopped him, but what has been done cannot be returned; Today, monuments in the form of a stone of Odin can be found in various settlements, including in the capital of the Orkneys - Kirkwall. In different places,driving through the islands by car, you can find single standing stones; the most famous is Mor Stein, a three-meter stone on Shapinsay Island.
NATURE AND WEATHER
What is there in the Orkney Islands besides the historical heritage? Of course, their endless calmness. Hilly land without a single tree, covered with grass, rocky in places. Fields and pastures. Farmers' houses flashing through the windows of the car. Orkney is very soothing - nothing happens here, eternal peace reigns here, as in the famous painting by Levitan.
Orkney residents almost never change their clothes from summer to winter, because eternal autumn reigns here. There are very few sunny days, and annual temperatures range from 2 to 16 degrees - such a difference for the human body is almost ideal. The idyll is disturbed only by rather strong winds coming from the ocean - after all, we are in the north, no matter how warm the waters are warmed by the warm current of the Gulf Stream.
The main animal of the islands is the domestic sheep. However, this can be said about the whole of Scotland. Sheep graze everywhere, run across the roads and even appear on city streets like the famous Indian cows. Wildlife begins mainly along rocky shores - puffins, gulls, various pinnipeds, typical northern marine fauna. They are not afraid of people, because no one touches them - in fact, they even look a little like Orcneans. Everyone on the islands - both people and animals - lives in their quiet, neat eternal autumn, which came here in the Neolithic era and remained forever, because she really liked it.
Kirkwall Cathedral
The medieval layer of the history of the Orkney Islands is less mysterious than the Neolithic, but no less interesting. The capital of the islands, Kirkwall, is home to barely 9,000 people, and the majestic Cathedral of St. Magnus, a gem of medieval architecture in the north, seems a bit big for the town. This gigantic building was erected from 1137 to the middle of the 15th century from a variety of materials - bricks, stones of various trimmings, pieces of Roman columns, and wooden elements can be found within its walls. Saint Magnus Erlendsson himself was the Earl of Orkney at the beginning of the 12th century and led a cruel and riotous lifestyle typical of a medieval feudal lord, but was canonized as a martyr, having been treacherously killed by order of his brother Hakon.
The remains of Saints Magnus of Orkney and the founder of the cathedral, Saint Regnwald of Orkney, rest in two symmetrical columns. In addition to them, as in all classical European cathedrals, there are a number of local celebrities, such as John Ray, the Scottish physician and traveler of the 19th century. The tombs are strange, mostly primitive, made in the spirit of the XII-XIII centuries, but in fact they date back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
In general, most of Kirkwall was built in the XVI-XVIII centuries, each building breathes history. The ruins of the earl's and episcopal palaces, the house where Walter Scott dined, the whaling ships in the port and the memorial plaque telling about the Kirkuloll castle destroyed in the 1620s - everything smacks of tranquility and beauty.
CHURCHILL DAMS
The Orkney Islands are one of the most important diving areas in the world. All islands are connected by the so-called Churchill barriers. When in October 1939, the German submarine U-47 sailed unnoticed between the islands, sneaking into the heart of the main naval base of Great Britain, and sank the battleship Royal Oak, Churchill ordered to block the inter-island straits, leaving only one way. First, in the straits, they hastily flooded outdated ships (block ships), and then they built barriers, which now serve as highways from island to island.
But a significant part of the sunken ships was not removed - their masts, wheelhouses, hulls just stick out from under the water; they are visible from almost every island. It is these dead ships that are of great interest to divers.
Tim Korenko