Orkney

Orkney holds one of the most complete Neolithic ritual landscapes anywhere, and the reason is partly geological. The islands have almost no trees and abundant flagstone that splits naturally into slabs, so what was built there was built in stone and much of it is still standing. Skara Brae, a village of stone houses with stone furniture still in place, was occupied from roughly 3200 BCE. The Stones of Stenness and the much larger Ring of Brodgar are stone circles set on a narrow isthmus between two lochs, and the Ness of Brodgar between them has produced a walled complex of large buildings in use for something over a thousand years.

Maeshowe is a chambered cairn a short distance away, entered along a low passage aligned so that the setting sun around midwinter shines down it and lights the back of the chamber. Whatever was meant by that, it was meant: the alignment is a design decision taken by people who had watched the sun for years and then moved a great deal of stone accordingly.

UNESCO inscribed the group in 1999 as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, treating the monuments as one landscape rather than as separate sites, which is increasingly how they are read. What none of it states is what anyone believed. The buildings, the deposits and the alignments are evidence of organised practice at scale over many generations, and the atlas holds them on that basis rather than attaching a reconstructed theology to them.

Orkney was Norse for six centuries and did not pass to Scotland until 1468. That inheritance is visible inside the Neolithic monuments themselves. Norse visitors broke into Maeshowe and cut runic inscriptions on its walls, around thirty of them, which together make one of the largest single collections of runes outside Scandinavia. They are not solemn. They record that treasure was carried off from the mound, that a named woman was fair, and that the man cutting the letters considered himself the best rune carver in the western ocean.

The islands were Christianised during the Norse period, and their principal religious monument grew out of a killing inside the ruling family. Magnus Erlendsson, joint earl of Orkney, was killed on Egilsay in 1117 in a dispute with his cousin Hakon. Miracles were reported at his grave, he came to be venerated as a martyr, and his nephew Rognvald began the cathedral at Kirkwall that carries his name in 1137. It is built of local red and yellow sandstone and remains in use. Bones found inside one of its piers in the twentieth century include a skull with a wound consistent with the account of Magnus's death, which is as close to corroboration as a case of this kind usually gets.

The result is a small archipelago carrying two complete religious layers, five thousand years apart, within the same few square miles of low green islands.