Capturing Orkney’s chambered cairns

Alone on an uninhabited island, Hugo Anderson-Whymark crouches within a Neolithic tomb. Crammed into a claustrophobic corbelled cell and covered from head to toe in mud, he hears nothing but the repetitive click of his equally mud-spattered camera. This is his second day of fieldwork inside the echoing depths of the 22m-long chambered cairn on the Orkney islet of Holm of Papa Westray – and over the course of two visits in the summer of 2017, Hugo has probably spent more time examining the drystone masonry than anyone else in the millennia since this Neolithic structure was last in use. Glimpses of the tomb’s interior come in intense bursts, as his camera flash illuminates the otherwise d