In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended

After my first stop at Stenness, I went to meet the archeologist Nick Card, the excavation director of the Ness of Brodgar project. He and his team are based in a small house south of Brodgar Farm, known as Dig H.Q. A laconic, mildly grizzled sixty-seven-year-old Scot, Card grew up in Ayrshire, to the south, but has lived in Orkney for three decades. He served me coffee in the kitchen, from which the previous homeowner, Carole Hoey, had observed the historic plow episode of 2003. After twenty summers, the dig had ended, and the trenches were being filled in. Nevertheless, some structures remained visible—lower parts of walls, hearths, clay flooring, drains, and other evidence of a prosperous daily life.

“This part of Orkney used to be seen as a ritual landscape,” Card told me. “We hadn’t found many signs of habitation—it seemed like the sacred had been kept apart from the domestic. Then, in the eighties, my colleague Colin Richards discovered a settlement at Barnhouse farm, down by Stenness. After that came the Ness, which was really next level. The area was much more densely populated than we thought. Something new and strange was going on here back then.”

We walked over to Structure 27, a single-room edifice measuring forty-nine by thirty-eight feet. The masonry of the walls, rising to about two feet, was so impeccable that it looked freshly done. “People passing by would sometimes ask what kind of thing we were building,” Card said. “We’d have to tell them it was thousands of years old.” He went on, “We found stone slate for a roof, the kind that’s still used in traditional buildings, but we didn’t find postholes for timber supports. So they must have had a roof truss resting on the walls—an A-frame. If you read architectural history, it says that the Greeks invented the A-frame, but—Tam, out!” Tam, Card’s black-and-white border collie, had jumped in the trench and was poised to undertake an unauthorized dig. “This wasn’t just thrown together,” Card continued. “It was planned, laid out, engineered. It’s a piece of architecture in every sense.”

Back at Dig H.Q., Card showed me a few of the hundreds of thousands of specimens that had been collected at the Ness. One was a polished, dark-streaked stone, with a perfectly drilled hole, which had been the head of a mace. It was fashioned from gneiss, a hard metamorphic rock. Boring the hole would have taken a very long time. Several gneiss samples found at the Ness can be traced back to rock formations more than a hundred miles to the west, in the Outer Hebrides. Pitchstone was brought in from Arran, two hundred and fifty miles south. “This wasn’t an isolated community,” Card explained. “You see artistic designs comparable to what you find in the Boyne Valley in Ireland. People must have come from all over. The trash heaps contain peat ash from innumerable fires, thousands of cattle bones from enormous feasting events. It’s conspicuous consumption gone mad.”

Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift. At the Ness of Brodgar, we can glimpse an ambitious, gregarious culture, perhaps a bit decadent, mixing the sacred and the profane. Mountains of data have identified the DNA of cattle bones, the microscopic qualities of soil, the geomagnetic properties of ash. Geometric designs hint at the contours of the Neolithic imagination. Beyond a certain point, though, the veil drops again. We cannot know who these people were or what they had in mind. “Not a word or a name comes out of the silence,” the Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown wrote of the prehistoric landscape. “We wander clueless through immense tracts of time.” It is a good way to travel.

The Orkney archipelago possesses a singular aura—luminous, changeable, dreamlike. I first fell under its spell in 1985, when I visited the islands as an archeologically curious teen-ager. Standing in the middle of the Mainland, as the biggest isle is known, you could be somewhere in Nebraska, with green fields undulating in all directions. Because of the Gulf Stream, the climate is much more temperate than at other locations along the fifty-ninth parallel, such as Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Homer, Alaska. At ocean’s edge, though, pastoral repose gives way to geological violence. Sheets of rock crash into the water at sharp angles or plunge straight down. On the isle of Hoy, sandstone cliffs rise more than a thousand feet above the sea.

Orcadians, as residents of the islands are known, dislike hearing their world described as “remote.” They will ask, “Remote from what?” Yet they value their apartness. The genetic makeup of the population indicates extensive migrations from Scandinavia. The Norse ruled Orkney from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries A.D., when the territory passed into Scottish hands as part of a wedding-dowry transaction. Norse heritage remains popular: Viking festivals draw throngs, bushy beards are de rigueur. The islands’ flag is essentially the Norwegian flag with a splash of royal Scottish yellow. The Scottish National Party polls poorly; the Conservatives are all but nonexistent. Old-fashioned Liberal politics prevail. Proposals for greater autonomy, even for a secession in order to become part of Norway, have been floated.

For a place of only around twenty-two thousand inhabitants, Orkney has an impressive cultural tradition. The poet and translator Edwin Muir, a Mainland farmer’s son, won the admiration of T. S. Eliot and helped introduce Kafka to English readers. After Muir came George Mackay Brown, who, at first glance, is an archetypal “local” writer: he was born in Orkney in 1921, died there in 1996, and seldom looked beyond the islands for inspiration. Yet Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, among others, insisted that Brown, whose archaic-modern style telescopes entire epochs into a few flinty lines, belongs among the major twentieth-century bards. In “Brodgar Poems,” Brown evokes how generation after generation grew up in the Ring’s shadow:

She who threw marigolds over you, stone,
A child,
She is a crone now with cindery breath.
You, stone,
Two younger stones curve beyond you.

In 1971, the English composer Peter Maxwell Davies became so transfixed by Brown’s writing that he moved to a croft on Hoy and began producing works inspired by the author’s texts and by island lore. In his 1973 piece “Stone Litany,” Davies set to music some Norse runes that were inscribed on the walls of Maeshowe in the twelfth century: “Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Hlíf, the Earl’s housekeeper, carved.” You hear the somewhat desperate insolence of the medieval intruders, and, at the same time, the cosmic indifference of the Neolithic tomb.

Such time-collapsing epiphanies come easily because Orkney is strewn with detritus from every stage of human history. U-boat barriers and anti-aircraft batteries still dot the area around Scapa Flow, the former base of the British fleet. A half-dozen German battleships and cruisers lie at the bottom of the harbor, having been scuttled there at the end of the First World War. The landscape also offers up eighteenth-century farmhouses, lairds’ castles, Norse churches, Iron Age forts, and Bronze Age barrows alongside the Neolithic tombs, settlements, and standing stones—thousands of sites altogether, across twenty-odd inhabited islands. Many prehistoric structures were pillaged for rock, but a remarkable number are intact. At Skara Brae, northwest of the Ness, you can see a gloriously well-preserved complex of stone houses, complete with beds, seats, cupboards, and, as Indiana Jones once had occasion to mention, a drainage system.

Tom Muir, an Orkney-born writer and storyteller, can explain why so much of the deep past was left alone. “The simple reason is fear,” Muir told me. He was sitting in his study in Stromness, a pungently atmospheric fishing town that attracts Orkney’s artistic class. On his bookshelves, archeological works sat beside tomes on Greek, Norse, and Celtic mythology. “You don’t mess around with the other world,” he went on, with only a hint of a smile. “Fairies—trows, as we call them—were said to live in mounds. Children were warned away from going near one. The trows might steal you away and leave a changeling in your place. Those who suffered from dementia were said to be ‘in the mound.’ When people passed the Comet Stone, near the Ring of Brodgar, they’d doff their caps, and if you asked them why, they’d say they don’t know—it’s just done. It was about saving your own skin, which, in turn, saved the site.” This protective aura of spookiness goes far back. According to the Orkneyinga Saga, the islands’ medieval chronicle, when a Norse leader and his soldiers took refuge in Maeshowe during a blizzard, two of the men went insane.

A telling incident took place at Stenness in 1814. An oblivious farmer decided to get rid of the stones, which then numbered six, and succeeded in blowing up two of them before the authorities intervened. Horrified Orcadians ostracized the miscreant and twice tried to burn down his home. Alexander Peterkin, Orkney’s learned sheriff, deplored such vigilante behavior but insisted that any attack on historical sites was an attack on collective memory. “A link in the chain of our associations is broken,” Peterkin wrote in 1822. “Something should therefore be done for preserving these stones for the future.” Sixty years later, Stenness, Brodgar, and Maeshowe came under the aegis of a new U.K. law, the Ancient Monuments Protection Act.

Orkney’s prehistoric heritage is now more prized than feared. Muir puts it this way: “People like to think—even if they have no interest in archeology whatsoever—that the place that they come from was a bit special at one time, even if you have to go back a thousand years or five thousand years to find it.” To some extent, the interest is pragmatic: the Heart of Neolithic Orkney attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, many of them day-tripping from cruise ships. But the Ness of Brodgar also became a native obsession. Hundreds of Orcadians volunteered at the dig, and local businesses supplied food, lodging, tools, and tires (to hold down tarps between seasons). Craftspeople stopped by to admire the work of their long-deceased predecessors. A stonemason came to examine Structure 27, where the walls gently curve and meet at an angle of a hundred and five degrees, rather than ninety degrees. Afterward, he said, “I’ve never been more proud to be Orcadian.”

“Wait a second.”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

Arnie Tait and Ola Gorie were hardly alone in their experience on Brodgar Farm: most landowners eventually stumble across an overgrown ruin or a smattering of artifacts. Traces of an Iron Age fort could be seen in the back yard of my B. and B., at Corrigall Farm. Maps of Orkney by the Ordnance Survey, the government mapping agency, are speckled with innumerable inscriptions in Gothic type: “standing stones,” “cairn,” “tumuli,” and the like. Scotland’s right-to-roam law allows recreational access to many private lands, meaning that archeological tourists can visit these sites, as long as they show respect. As a paranoid American, I hesitated to exercise this right, picturing someone coming at me with a shotgun. But only the cattle are likely to cause trouble. At the dilapidated Ring of Bookan, a herd of bulls trundled toward me and bellowed, forcing me to retreat.

Such expeditions can turn into a Buddhistic exercise in enlightened pointlessness. You trudge for an hour in cold rain, slipping in mud and ripping your jeans, only to find a few fallen stones buried in shrubbery and cow manure. Sometimes, though, the reward is gasp-inducing. When, in 1985, I went to the Tomb of the Eagles, on South Ronaldsay, the sea fog was so thick that I could see only a few feet ahead. I was following Ronnie Simison, the farmer who had discovered the tomb, and he had to holler to indicate the way. Inside, crisp stonework was on display. By the time I emerged, the fog had lifted, and I found myself looking out over a natural amphitheatre toward jagged cliffs and a seething ocean. Once again, a spectacular scene is being staged, to unknown ends.

The construction of the Stones of Stenness may have required around fifty thousand hours of labor, as slabs were extracted from quarries several miles away, transported by wooden sleds or some other conveyance, and hauled upright. Why did Neolithic peoples expend so much energy on undertakings of this kind? The standard explanation used to be that the diffusion of agricultural practices from the Fertile Crescent, starting around 10,000 B.C., brought about year-round settlements, complex forms of civic organization, and a symbolic representation of power in the form of large-scale projects. But the excavation of temple-like buildings at Göbekli Tepe and other sites in Turkey overturned that narrative; those structures, dating from as early as 9500 B.C., had been made by predominantly nomadic groups. The impulse to do extravagant things with stone must have had deeper, obscurer roots. Ultimately, the question of motive may be tautological, given the species in question. We humans routinely throw ourselves into enterprises that lack rational purpose: stone circles, cathedrals, opera, football, archeology itself.

Every age fashions the Neolithic period in its own image. The Romantics conjured gatherings of noble savages; Walter Scott, in “The Pirate,” compared the Stones of Stenness to “phantom forms of antediluvian giants.” Early twentieth-century archeologists looked for signs of social hierarchy or, alternatively, evidence of a lost egalitarian utopia. The space age brought a spate of cosmological interpretations. At around the time the astronomer Gerald Hawkins hailed Stonehenge as a “Neolithic computer,” a retired Scottish engineer named Alexander Thom advanced even more convoluted theories about “lunar observatories” in Scotland. At the Ring of Brodgar, Thom claimed, lunar motions were tracked over a period of a hundred and seventy-eight years. Regrettably, Thom’s methods suffered from selection bias: many, if not most, of his astronomical alignments appear to be coincidental.

These days, amid resurgent nationalism, archeologists often emphasize the quasi-cosmopolitan character of Neolithic life—the way ideas and goods were exchanged among far-flung cultures. Many megalithic sites are by the sea, marking out a maritime network that stretched from Iberia and France to Ireland and the British Isles. Orkney’s prominence in that circuit is evident in the vogue for Grooved Ware, a style of pottery that originated there and then spread across Britain and Ireland. The bowls are flat-bottomed, making them more practical than the rounded ware that had earlier prevailed, and are decorated with intricate patterns recalling designs on Irish tombs. Grooved Ware is seen as far south as the area around Stonehenge, where local houses also recall Orcadian models. Recent studies suggest that the Altar Stone, a six-ton sandstone slab at Stonehenge, was quarried in northern Scotland and then transported five hundred miles, probably by boat. Almost nothing is known of Neolithic ships, but the woodworking must have been as excellent as the masonry in Structure 27.

Travellers navigating the sea lanes likely spread word of major ceremonial centers. People in Orkney surely knew about Stonehenge, and vice versa. The presence of gneiss mace heads in both places possibly honors a megalithic complex called Callanish, on the isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. That majestic array of green-gray gneiss sentinels may be the most conceptually elaborate Neolithic monument in Europe. In 1909, an Irish naval officer named Boyle Somerville surveyed Callanish and noticed a feature that is unlikely to be accidental: every 18.6 years, observers positioned at the end of an avenue would have seen the moon slide horizontally behind the stones at the center of the site. The builders of Callanish could not have known that Lewisian gneiss is among the oldest rock on earth, dating back three billion years, but they may have sensed it.

Almost every year, something new surfaces in the Orkney soil. In 2023, a team began excavating a Neolithic tomb at a farm called Blomuir, in East Mainland. The dig went on for two more summers. Leading the project were two English-born archeologists: Vicki Cummings, a professor at Cardiff University, and Hugo Anderson-Whymark, a senior curator at the National Museums Scotland, in Edinburgh. Students from the Archaeology Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands (U.H.I.) were on hand to watch and assist. I joined the group for several days.

At first sight, Blomuir was unprepossessing: a shallow cavity atop a glacial knoll, within which only some low fragments of walls were visible. In the nineteenth century, most of the stone was carried off to build a farmhouse. Yet enough is left to indicate a formidable tomb of the Maeshowe type, with a high central chamber surrounded by six smaller cells. When Maeshowe was excavated, starting in 1861, no human remains were found, probably because Vikings and other intruders had emptied the site. Blomuir has proved an excitingly different story: some two dozen skeletons were found in situ, exactly where they were placed more than five thousand years ago. In one side cell, a figure was in a curled-up position, its left arm lying against its rib cage. Almost touching its skull was the skull of a second body, clearly that of a child. They looked as though they were sleeping on their sides. You could sense the tenderness with which the bodies had been laid down.

Sam Walsh, an osteoarcheologist from the University of Lancashire, was crouched over the remains, preparing to remove them for study. She was dressed, like most people at the dig, in a knit cap, a high-visibility all-weather jacket, and waterproof pants. She picked up a disk of bone lying at the bottom of the larger figure’s legs. “The epiphysis is separate,” she said to two students, who were squatting next to her. “The long bones haven’t fused with it yet, meaning that this individual was still growing. Probably a teen-ager. The teeth are in good shape—no sugar in the diet.” She then pointed to the teeth in the second skull. “Two child molars, one permanent molar. Probably about six years old.” Walsh cleaned the bones with a brush, lifted them with a spatula or a stick, and then placed them in specimen containers. After an hour or two, the sleepers were gone.

Anderson-Whymark became aware of the tomb a few years ago, when he came across an 1896 article in the Orkney Herald, reporting that the antiquarian James Walls Cursiter had learned of artifacts being found at Blomuir, including a “finely polished hammer head of gneiss.” Cursiter’s field notes pinpointed the tomb’s location: “150 yards East of Blowmuir.” A geophysical survey revealed an anomaly at exactly that spot.

A chilly drizzle threatened to turn into steady rain, which would require the skeletons to be covered. “It’s likely to be bucketing down by one,” Anderson-Whymark told the team. “We need to get as much done as we can.” Team members sifted through nine cubic metres of backfill, searching for bits of bone or pottery. The students made sketches of the site, honing their faculties of observation. One of them was Kat Nickola, who writes for Stars & Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper, and who had earned a master’s in archeology at U.H.I. As she drew the stonework in a notebook, Nickola told me, “I think you get a sense of how things were visualized and made by copying them.”

Although a few interesting objects had turned up—notably, a handsome stone ball, of unknown purpose—the human remains were the main event. Cummings, the Cardiff professor, said, “We have a strong feeling about relatedness among these people. Last year, we had a case where one person’s hand had been very carefully placed upon another person’s knee. This year, we see skulls set down close together.” There were few signs of aberrant mortality or violence. “In the early Neolithic, they were always bashing each other over the heads and shooting each other with arrows,” Cummings said. “Things weren’t so bad in the late Neolithic.” Still, it wasn’t an easy life: fused vertebrae testify to severe back problems, and many died young.

Antonia Thomas, a specialist in prehistoric visual culture at the Archaeology Institute, arrived to examine markings inside the tomb. Thomas has a knack for picking out incisions that have gone unnoticed. Neolithic art in Orkney tends to be angular and abstract—less florid than the spirals seen in Irish tombs. Thomas has catalogued chevrons, zigzags, saltires, opposed triangles, lozenges, and lattices. The patterns occasionally resemble the doodles of Paul Klee.

Thomas hadn’t visited the site before, and she marvelled to Cummings, “You think everything in Orkney has been found, but there’s always more.” She zeroed in on a two-foot-wide slab of flagstone resting atop a wall in the north cell. Scratched on the stone’s outer face were three short, sharp parallel lines. On the top, a lattice of faint lines ran parallel and perpendicular to the outer face.

“You can tell that they are marking the stones as they go along,” Thomas told me. “The top of this one would have been completely covered by the next one. We saw a lot of this ‘hidden’ art at the Ness, too.” Needless to say, it’s unclear why the builders worked in this way, but Thomas believes that in the Neolithic mind-set the finished product mattered less than the process. Marking the stone imbued it with a kind of life. Medieval carvers had a not dissimilar approach to design, fashioning grotesques for obscure nooks in cathedrals.

The excavation was completed this past summer, but a welter of material awaits study. Preliminary radiocarbon dating suggests that the burials were performed sometime between 3300 and 3100 B.C. Analysis of ancient DNA will reveal whether those clustered bodies belonged to the same family. Cummings hopes to create a “family tree,” like one that she and others developed for Hazleton North, a chambered tomb in Gloucestershire. “At Hazleton North, we found one main guy who had offspring with four different women, which tells you something,” Cummings said. “He and three of the women were buried at the tomb along with at least seven of their sons, and some of their offspring.”

I returned to Blomuir two days later. The floor of the tomb had been swept and tidied. Anderson-Whymark was taking pictures with a camera affixed to a telescopic pole, gathering data for a 3-D digital model of the site. Tom O’Brien, an Orkney photographer who plays in a punk band called Dirty Røtters, had launched a camera-equipped drone to map the area from above. No skeletons were left. It struck me that every excavation is also an act of destruction: much is learned, but the status quo is lost. Then again, much else waits in the earth for future archeologists, who will have even more refined methods at their disposal. A geophysical survey shows anomalies all over the field around Blomuir. An unknown settlement could come to light.

Toward the end of my Orkney stay, I stood with the archeologist Mark Edmonds at the Ring of Brodgar—twenty-six megaliths and assorted stumps arranged in a nearly perfect circle, with causeways on opposing sides leading over a circular ditch. We had a commanding view of the Ness of Brodgar, the two lochs, the Stones of Stenness, and the green mound of Maeshowe. If Stenness is a cool enigma, Brodgar invites interpretation, speculation, storytelling. Each pillar seems to have its own personality. As you walk around the circumference, the stones gather and retreat in quirky groups, with vistas shifting behind them.

“They’re all Devonian sandstone and flagstone,” Edmonds said. “But, when you go up close, you see enormous variety—in size, in shape, in physical texture. Some look like a book that’s been left on a windowsill and gotten damp—the pages open up. Others are so tight and dense that the weather will never do anything to them. In the Neolithic, they understood that variety, and they brought in rock from at least half a dozen sources—some from quarries to the north of Skara Brae, some from that ridge you see beyond Maeshowe, some from places farther around the Mainland. The geology of the circle ties the islands together.”

It was also a place where people came together. “Some of the mounds you see all around were made in the Neolithic, and we think they served as viewing platforms—as performance platforms,” Edmonds explained. “You can picture people from all over the islands—maybe a thousand or more—gathering in this great bowl, camping, putting up temporary shelters, tethering their cattle, exchanging news, exchanging gifts, holding tournaments.”

Edmonds, who is sixty-six, has a wiry mop of silvery hair not unlike that of the conductor Simon Rattle, and habitually wears striped Breton shirts. In 2009, he retired from the University of York to settle with his family in Orkney, where he’d done decades of field work. He co-directs the Ness of Brodgar project and in his spare time helps run the West Side Cinema, an art-movie venue in Stromness. Showing that week was “Sisters with Transistors,” a documentary about female innovators in electronic music.

When Edmonds first made his name, he belonged to a school of thought known as “post-processual” archeology, which caused controversy around the turn of the millennium. Much like post-structuralists in literary studies, post-processualists rejected master narratives and embraced a diversity of perspectives. For Edmonds, this meant reaching past the accumulation of data and seeking a way into the Neolithic mind. “I realized,” he told me, “that, if I really wanted to find out what I thought about a past landscape or an artifact, I had to try to find the right way of working—poetry, painting, making music.”

In 2019, Edmonds published “Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney,” which translates decades of research into fluid, lyrical prose. The narrative is organized around quotations from George Mackay Brown, who cherished the islands’ prehistory. “It’s not just that these texts are very beautiful,” Edmonds said. “As an archeologist, I can learn from them.” He singled out a Brown poem about Skara Brae, where snug, podlike homes conjure idyllic fantasies—you feel that, with a few trips to ikea, you could make them eminently livable. Brown, though, had a crucial insight. Years before the grand houses at the Ness were excavated, he intuited that Skara Brae had been on the margins of a bigger social order:

Here in our village in the west
We are little regarded.
The lords of tilth and loch
Are Quarrying (we hear)
Great stones to make a stone circle . . .
They come here from Birsay
To take our fish for taxes. Otherwise
We are left in peace
With our small fires and pots.

In “Orcadia,” Edmonds quotes these lines and proposes that Skara Brae was “caught up in the cycles of exchange, ceremony, feasting and feuding that lay at the heart of the wider political process.”

Although Edmonds has a poetic streak, he doesn’t sentimentalize the past. Visitors to the Ness, he said, often pictured the Neolithic era “as a golden age, where these very sophisticated structures were built consensually, in some form of primitive communism.” He continued, “People are nostalgic for a world without hierarchies and classes. In reality, I suspect the Ness was not like that at all. It’s hard to believe that a building like Structure 27 was open to just anybody. Terrifying amounts of labor would have been required, and I doubt that all of that was consensual.” Similarly, Edmonds said, tourists liked to believe that the residents of the Ness must have been living in sustainable balance with nature. “But then you look at these gigantic mounds of peat ash, thousands and thousands of tons. You see hundreds of cattle being slaughtered in one go. It’s a monument to unsustainable living.”

Neolithic society, as Edmonds depicts it, was beset by the same contradictions that mark every phase of human existence. Brown, in the preface to his “Brodgar Poems,” sagely commented, “People in A.D. 2000 are essentially the same as the stone-breakers and horizon-breakers of 3000 B.C.” Yet early Orcadians showed a compensatory reverence for their environment. At the Ring of Brodgar, Edmonds pointed at the slanted tops of the stones—the same shape that, at Stenness, had put me in mind of guillotines. “That’s just the way a piece of flagstone naturally splits when you remove it from the bed,” he said. Antonia Thomas, the Neolithic-art expert, has noted that many abstract-seeming scratchings on stones resemble geological patterns. These sites were built not in defiance of the land but in solidarity with it.

“The natural assumption with a place like Brodgar is that it was made to last,” Edmonds went on. “If stones are missing from the circle, it must be because of later interference. In fact, chances are that a lot of stones actually came down in the Neolithic. Some have solid foundations, but others aren’t set very deep. If you were concerned about long-term stability, you wouldn’t have done it that way. Which tells us that a place like Brodgar is really a performative space. The making of it is what counts. New stones are added, others are taken away. There’s a fluidity to it all. That’s what we can never see but have to try to imagine.”

I followed Edmonds down to the Ness, where the past was going back underground. An earthmover operator was filling in the excavation trenches and restoring Brodgar Farm to its former state. Structure 10, an imposing ceremonial building that I had earlier toured with Nick Card, was no longer visible.

“The question of permanence comes up here, too,” Edmonds said. “After a couple of generations, Structure 10 was suffering from subsidence and had to be partly rebuilt. Over time, it fell out of use. Finally, around 2400 B.C., it was sealed up in a huge ceremony that involved that massive slaughter of cattle.” Such “decommissioning” festivals were common in the Neolithic: they involved the razing of roofs, the trampling of pottery, the breaking of gneiss mace heads. Now, in an epochal recurrence that would have pleased George Mackay Brown, Structure 10 had been sealed up again.

The last redoubt was the masterly Structure 27. After greeting Card and Tam at Dig H.Q., Edmonds headed there to take some final soil samples. “Architecture with a capital ‘A,’ ” he said, as if still surprised by the sight. Less subsidence had occurred here. The megalithic slabs that anchor the building differ in level by only a few centimetres.

“The orange-looking earth is ash from peat fires,” Edmonds said, scraping at the trench wall with a trowel. “There’s a layer of burnt bone. That’s a big slab of pottery, which is decaying back into clay, leaving dark bits of igneous stone that were used for the temper of the ceramic.”

Becky Little, an artist who leads classes in traditional methods of working with clay, was visiting the Ness that day, and she came over to say hello. “We’re in our final days here,” Edmonds told her. “By the middle of next week, it will all be gone.” Little climbed into a trench and bent over a vertical stone that was incised with a web of typically Orcadian geometric patterns. “I hadn’t seen that when I was here before,” Little said.

“The light’s just perfect for it now,” Edmonds replied. Orkney was having one of its rapt pastoral hours, the afternoon sun fashioning a world of pure green and blue.

I stopped one last time at the Stones of Stenness, which have dwelled in my memory since I was seventeen. Despite the deluge of new data, the megaliths had given up none of their obdurate strangeness. They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead. I had the sense that my own life had been a couple of shadows flickering across the rock. Preoccupied with thoughts of time and death, and also worried about missing the ferry, I got into my car and disappeared. ♦