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In mainland Britain and Ireland, when archaeologists excavate the remains of Neolithic buildings, they usually encounter only outlines formed from post-holes and beam slots: the ghosts of long-decayed timbers. In Orkney, though, contemporary communities seem to have done things differently. Stone structures – from the settlement at Skara Brae to individual houses like that at Smerquoy – have been identified across the archipelago, but they appear on another scale altogether at the Ness of Brodgar. This name officially refers to the thin strip of land separating the lochs of Harray and Stenness, but it has become inseparably linked with a remarkable archaeological site that was first identified there in 2003. Its discovery transformed our understanding of a landscape that had long been interpreted as an exclusive ceremonial space where funerary monuments and stone circles stood seemingly in splendid isolation (see CA 199 and 212).
Instead, geophysical surveys and initial excavations revealed that what appeared to be open, empty space had once been crowded with stone buildings whose remains are still preserved beneath the surface. Since then, two decades of fieldwork (managed by the Ness of Brodgar Trust in partnership with the UHI Archaeology Institute, and led by Nick Card, Mark Edmonds, and Anne Mitchell) has shed vivid light on a spectacular settlement sprawling over an area of around 2.5ha (6 acres). The site was as long-lived as it was large, with excavated evidence testifying to dozens of buildings big (sometimes extremely big) and small rising and falling over a period of around 1,200 years, about 60 generations, though perhaps not continuously. Many of them had been constructed over the remains of earlier structures, creating dense layers of archaeology that the team have been painstakingly unpicking for the last 20 years (see CA 241, 335, and 395 for various reports on this work).
The extent of this prehistoric palimpsest becomes clear when you appreciate that just 10% of the complex has been excavated to-date, but these investigations have produced a wealth of data, offering illuminating insights into diverse aspects of Neolithic experience and imagination, and of the architectural ambition of this particular lochside community. They were capable of creating soaring stone structures boasting metres-thick walls and flagstone roofs weighing up to 15-20 tonnes, all without the aid of modern tools and technology. These imposing buildings form the focus of Ness of Brodgar: Elements of Architecture, the latest publication in a planned series drawing on the team’s ongoing post-excavation research (see ‘Further reading’ below). In 2024, they made the decision to pause their long-running excavations and to focus on analysing what has already been uncovered. While digging has (mostly; see ‘News from the Ness’ below) stopped, this phase has already proven fruitful – complemented by a new programme of non- invasive investigations, including magnetometer, resistance, and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys that have revealed that the settlement was even more extensive than previously thought. While the results of this recent work are still being processed, footprints of further Neolithic buildings can be seen all across the Ness – and these only represent the remains lying closest to the surface: it is likely that they, too, cover further layers of earlier structures.
As for what has been learned from the 45 structures that have been excavated by the team, it appears that architectural traditions at the Ness of Brodgar evolved in broadly the same way as those recorded elsewhere in Neolithic Orkney. While this is a very simplified summary, Early Neolithic buildings tend to appear as long structures whose interiors are divided by orthostats (upright slabs) projecting from their walls. This design is strikingly similar to the layout of contemporary stalled cairns, hinting at intriguing links between residences for the living and resting places for the dead. Then, around 3200 BC, we see a shift towards sub-rectangular forms with cruciform interiors shaped by ‘piers’ of stone blocks. As this Late Neolithic change also coincides with the appearance of other innovations in Orkney, such as the emergence of Grooved Ware pottery, previous interpretations have suggested a model of ‘two Neolithics’ divided by a sharp shift that possibly signalled the arrival of a new group of people. More recent analysis, however, proposes a more nuanced story (CA 318). While the Ness of Brodgar fits into this general pattern, its builders can also be seen working in distinctively imaginative – and sometimes very ostentatious – ways.
If walls could talk
‘In Orkney, more than anywhere else in northern Britain, building in stone mattered,’ writes Mark Edmonds, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at the University of York, a co-director of the Ness of Brodgar project, and the book’s author. Why, though, did the islands’ inhabitants appear to favour this material when their contemporaries elsewhere were building houses and halls from wood? In fact, the people of Neolithic Orkney did use timber, and at the Ness it appears both in their early structures and as key components of later stone buildings. Beneath the collapsed roof slabs of Structure 27, for example, lay the preserved remains of a sturdy wooden frame that would have helped to support the flags’ weight. Wood was also used in running repairs, such as in Structures 8 and 12.
While early investigators like V Gordon Childe, excavator of Skara Brae, suggested that Neolithic Orcadians were forced to use stone because of a lack of good timber, imagining the islands as essentially treeless during this period, more recent environmental analysis paints a very different picture, one that shows stretches of mixed deciduous woodland. Driftwood harvested from the shoreline would have been another useful source of this material. The remains of timber structures are less likely to survive across the centuries, and where they do survive they are slighter and easier to overlook than stone foundations, which might go some way to explaining why they were thought to be rare in Orkney – though their numbers are growing thanks to the results of more recent excavations on the islands. None of this explains the unique character of the Ness of Brodgar, though, where builders were not simply using stone but consuming it in truly extravagant amounts. Their monumental constructions do not represent a pragmatic last resort, the team argue, but a deliberate choice: a statement of identity, authority, and intent.
An intriguing example of the shift from timber to stone is found in the overlapping outlines of Structures 41 and 5. Structure 41 was built first (numbering at the Ness reflects the order of discovery rather than construction), c.3300 BC. It was a wooden structure whose c.12m-long (40ft) footprint is dominated by two parallel lines of large post-holes that would have supported substantial timbers. When Structure 5 was later built on the same spot (the precise phasing is still being refined), these posts were retained and incorporated into its design, with the new construction’s 1.2m-thick (4ft) stone walls positioned carefully just outside their lines. Indeed, the timbers appear to have been so important that, when they were finally removed, a number of objects were placed in their sockets – including hammerstones and a whale vertebra – perhaps as some kind of closing gesture.
While traces of timber structures underlying stone successors have been identified at several other sites in Orkney – among them Eday, Green, Ha’Breck, Smerquoy, Wideford Hill, and Wyre (CA 268) – the transition between Structures 41 and 5 at the Ness is particularly striking in the way that the new architectural form intentionally absorbs the old one, creating a connection that goes beyond simply taking over its location.
Building on the past
Ideas of building and rebuilding, recycling and repurposing, are recurring themes across the Neolithic lifespan of the Ness. The project team have found repeated patterns of buildings collapsing or being deliberately decommissioned; their stone scavenged for other projects; the plot levelled with midden material heaped over the rubble and wall-remains; and a new structure rising on the same spot. This was an economical process, limiting the need for new stone, but it came with a cost: subsidence appears to have been a common problem, with many structures succumbing to gravity after only a few decades. These brief lifespans are surprising given the effort and resources that had gone into their construction – but perhaps that was not the point. It could be that creating continuity of fabric and location was more important than longevity, the team suggest.
While many of the buildings incorporate recycled stone, plentiful fresh stone was also being brought to the Ness. Ongoing analysis is working to pin down the origins of these materials: they include outcrops on the edges of nearby lochs, as well as more distant locations such as the shores of Scapa Flow and the coast north of Kirkwall, testifying to the site’s reach and influence.
What of the buildings themselves? While their size and their quality of construction vary, a number of common features can be seen. Many of the Ness’ structures have double-skinned walls with stone faces formed around a core of material salvaged from nearby middens. They are substantial creations, with cross sections of 2m (6.5ft) not uncommon and 4m (13ft) spans recorded in some places, perhaps to help spread the weight of their enormous roofs. Carefully laid areas of paving form external yards and working areas, and other practical features include the ubiquitous drains – neatly cut, stone-lined channels capped with slabs – that are seen across the site, snaking between and beneath most buildings. Some of these were clearly laid down early in the construction process, but others appear to represent later additions, such as the drain that carefully kinks around the hearth of Structure 27. Such fireplaces, usually preserved as slab-built boxes containing reddened ash and traces of peaty turf fuel, would have been vital sources of heat and light, as well as a focus for social activities. Some were evidently used for cooking, too; Structure 12’s two large hearths are surrounded by hundreds of stake-holes that may have once supported wooden racks and spits.
One of the site’s most enigmatic features is the ‘artwork’ found within many of the buildings: Antonia Thomas has catalogued almost 1,200 examples, with over 70 seen in Structure 1 alone. They take diverse forms, including parallel lines, chevrons, triangles, zig-zags, and cupmarks. Some of the motifs suggest that people in Orkney were aware of artistic traditions in the wider Irish Sea Zone, but others are ‘as distinctive to the region as a dialect’, Mark notes. Markings – variously cut, ground, and pecked – are seen on both interior and outer walls, with a particular concentration around thresholds, but some are positioned in ways that mean they would not have been visible once construction was complete. Does this reflect the unthinking placement of a recycled stone, or might it hint at a significance that goes beyond decoration?
News from the Ness
While excavations have officially paused at the Ness of Brodgar, last summer the team opened a new trench a few hundred yards north-west of the main settlement – and uncovered the remains of two previously unknown structures.
The excavation was sparked by a GPR survey led by Time Team’s Dr John Gater (who had also been involved in the surveys that originally identified the settlement) in July 2025; the episode is available at http://www.youtube.com/c/timeteamofficial. This revealed a circular anomaly around 9m (30ft) in diameter, and in July and August this year a four-week dig set out to investigate it, partly funded by Time Team via their Patreon platform (CA 435). Theories abounded as to what the anomaly might represent, but when evidence of orthostats and a hearth emerged from the centre of the feature, it was clear that it was a building – now dubbed Structure 44. Although its walls had been robbed away, surviving foundation slabs preserved its footprint, and other familiar features including drains and an external paved area were present.
This was not the end of the team’s discoveries, though: unexpectedly, they realised that a curving section of wall actually belonged to a second building – Structure 45 – that lay a short distance to the south and continued outside the trench’s extent. The buildings do not intercut and are thought to be broadly contemporary, though stratigraphy indicates that Structure 44 was built first. Then, as is so often the way, the dig’s last day brought one final surprise: a large post-hole, about 30cm (1ft) across, which could have held a sturdy, tree-trunk-sized timber. It may represent a structural repair, but it could also be a relic of an earlier wooden phase for Structure 44.
Monumental constructions
Around the end of the 4th millennium BC, the site saw a flurry of particularly elaborate construction. These include Structure 8, measuring c.20m by 10m (66ft by 33ft), whose interior boasts numerous examples of incised art, as well as evidence that its walls were painted with haematite, ochre, and galena pigments. Rather than the austere grey stone that we see today, it appears that some of these buildings were colourfully adorned with shades of red and yellow, brown, black, and white. Structure 10, built c.2900 BC, was even larger at c.20m by 19m (66ft by 62ft), with 4m-thick (13ft) walls – a truly ostentatious display – though the current culmination of architectural skill that the team have identified is Structure 27, whose exterior features ‘the most elegant Neolithic walling’ that they have ever seen. Its stones are placed in regular courses, forming impressively even surfaces, and the care taken in their creation is highlighted by the presence of clusters of peck marks at the end of larger slabs, left by stone hammers tapping them into place. Inside, the walls appear to have been lined with thin sheets of stone held in place by massive prone orthostats.
Archaeologically speaking, the Ness of Brodgar is unique – but its specialness seems to have been ‘built in’ from the beginning. The narrow neck of land that its buildings occupied already gives a sense of separateness, lying ‘between two lochs, set within a wider bowl of ridges and hills’, Mark writes. Yet its inhabitants chose to add to this exclusion very early in the site’s history by enclosing the complex within a huge stone wall c.3300 BC. The northern stretch (dubbed ‘The Great Wall of Brodgar’) was built from sandstone blocks around a core of boulders; at its peak it measured 6m wide (20ft), and although its remains are heavily robbed, steps built into its inner face hint at an imposing height. The boundary’s southern extent (narrower and more finely built, it is known as the ‘Lesser Wall’) has also been excavated, about 125m (410ft) to the south, and linear traces along both shorelines hint at a complete circuit. Given that the settlement was already flanked by water, the team suggest that the wall would have been a symbolic rather than defensive feature – albeit one representing a huge investment of time, effort, and resources. Once again, the Ness of Brodgar’s architectural feats appear to have been designed with visual impact in mind – and the settlement’s remains continue to impress today.
• Mark Edmonds, Ness of Brodgar: Elements of Architecture (Think Digital Books Ltd, £22, ISBN 978-0993275784: http://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/product/ness-of- brodgar-elements- of-architecture).
• Antonia Thomas, Art and Architecture in Neolithic Orkney: process, temporality and context (Archaeopress: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvxrq0z3).
