Birsay to Stromness

Brough of Birsay

The Brough of Birsay is a tiny tidal island off the coast near Birsay. We had to find out when low tide occurs as you have to walk across the ocean floor to reach the island. There is a concrete walkway for part of the way otherwise we would have been wading in water.

There is evidence of a pictish settlement, the picts lived in the area during the 600's and 700's. The Norse arrived and built over top the earlier pictish structures. A pictish stone was found but the original is in the museum in Edinburgh and a replica stands on Brough of Birsay. The Norse built dwellings, a church, a smithy and possibly a sauna and bathhouse. One interesting thing to note is how square the corners are and how straight the walls lie, all completed in dry stack stone.

A walk up the hill to the lighthouse gave us great views of Birsay on the main island and of the Atlantic ocean. The place is loaded with rabbits as well, we cannot seem to get away from the little beasts. The weather was fine, a bit cool but as we left it started to rain a bit.

When we walked back across the concrete walkway, a young Historic Scotland worker was scrapping the sea plant life off the walkway so we stopped to chat. He was hilarious and we had to strain our ears to understand him. He had been to Canada and told us he had never heard of Wayne Gretzky before, hahahaha. His workmates, three older men, sat in the truck on the main island the whole time we were there so John knocked on their window and said something like 'what, he works and you guys watch,' they said they were waiting for the tide to come in so they could rescue him, hahahahaha, we all had a laugh.









Skara Brae

By the time we drove over to Skara Brae it was getting windy and raining. Skara Brae was not discovered until 1850 when a huge storm stripped the grass from a mound known as Skara Brae. What the ocean revealed was a perfectly preserved village, some 5,000 years old.

Skara Brae was inhabited for 600 years, between 3,100 and 2,500 BC, but was then abandoned. There is really no way to determine why the village was abandoned but theories abound. The people who lived in Skara Brae were farmers, there is evidence that they grew barley and wheat. There was some barley put into a display case with a milling stone, of course we checked out the barley and it looked like total shit, definitely would not make malt, as John put it! The people also raised cattle, sheep and a few pigs.

Every dwelling is of the same layout so there is speculation that those who lived in this society were equals; as well, there were no weapons found. I guess the thing that freaks people out about Skara Brae is the furnishings in the dwellings, they had beds, a stone dresser, nooks built into the stone walls and a central hearth, not unlike more modern homes. The dwellings were also linked together with low passageways.

Skara Brae is a hot-spot on the tourist trail, it is more intensively managed by Historic Scotland which makes it less inviting to us. We enjoy the less visited sites with no tourist infrastructure where you can just go and look around without being roped off from this or that and without Historic Scotland guards around to tell you were you cannot go.







Stromness

This is a really neat place, in the old section by the sea the streets are very narrow and there are really interesting street names like Grieveship West and Hellihole Road.

The cannon was supposedly salvaged from the American ship `Liberty`in 1813. It was used to fire a salute to the Hudson`s Bay Company ships. HBC ships also took fresh water from the well in the other pic, they also took on young Orcadian men to work in HBC posts in Canada, such as my gg grandfather, but we will get into that later.











Maeshowe Chambered Cairn

OMFG, the most managed site by Historic Scotland, you have to be guided at set times and generally have to book ahead but not at this time of year, thankfully. There is really nothing to be guided to, you enter this cairn like all the others, via a low passageway, but this cairn is huge compared to the others we visited. There is a barrier between us and the walls so we stand like cattle wondering why the hell they do this while the guide stands on the other side. No touching the stones, no crawling through or even looking in the side chambers which, we are told, are L-shaped, they take all the fun out of it! It gets worse, the guide then puts his christian spin on the use of the cairns, complete with total bullshit theories. Interestingly, there are low passageways connecting the dwellings in Skara Brae but low passageways into a chambered cairn, according to the theorizing guide, have a religious significance and we are supposed to be reverent about it, omfg, in reality, they have no clue what the ancient people believed or did not believe.

The cairn was closed up and the Norse broke into the roof when they arrived. There are interesting Norse runes on the walls, the guide went into a long dissertation about the runes, yada, yada.

The construction of the cairn is quite something, very fine builders worked on this cairn, the dry stacked walls were built with very large stones at the lower level, they were levelled with shims so that they are actually tilted slightly out, so no water seeps in and the chamber remains dry and the corners are square. The stone slabs are very long and fit so perfectly together that one would think they had used diamond saws on them.

Sheep with a guest on board