Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 98

The discoveries of Grooved Ware from Orkney at Stonehenge,
and of cattle from across England and Scotland at Durrington Walls,
should have caused more of a stir. “Experts therefore believe people
must have travelled between the great sacred places of Britain, and
that this would hardly have been the experience of the average Stone
Age farmer, but the privilege of a new elite, people at the top of soci-
ety who would have voyaged the length and breadth of the country
on a kind of Neolithic Grand Tour…Archaeologists are increasingly
of the opinion that the great stone circle of Brodgar and Stonehenge,
and the passage graves of Newgrange and Maes Howe, are all memo-
rable phrases within one splendid conversation between the people,
the stone, the land and the sky. From the Orkney Islands of Scot-
land, to the Preseli Mountains in south Wales, to Stonehenge in the
south of England and to Brú na Bóinne [the Bend of the Boyne] in
the east of Ireland - it is all connected… [ 8 ].”
“…as Alexander Thom and Euan MacKie proposed,” are surely
the words that should follow. But in Neil Oliver's recent History of
Ancient Britain , from which these quotations come, neither Thom
nor MacKie rates an index entry or a listing in the Bibliography.
Instead there is an anonymous 'tip of the hat' to Glyn Daniel and
his imaginary forest clearings. But the topic, the TV series and the
subsequent TV 'special' all spell out that if anything, MacKie and
the Thoms were too conservative. In Orkney, an entire complex of
Neolithic temples has been unearthed (Fig. 4.30 ), on the Brodgar
peninsula, a neck of land between two lochs linking Stenness and
the Ring of Brodgar (Fig. 4.31 ) [ 8 ]. Clearly the domain of a resident
priesthood for a long period, the oldest level dates to 3300 b.c. but
has still to be fully excavated. Eleven pyramidal stone buildings
were surrounded by a wall 4-6 m thick and still surviving to a
height of 1.7 m.
Around 2600 b.c., the structures were demolished, the
remains were buried, and a new pyramid labeled 'Structure Ten'
was created, with a cross-shaped inner chamber that is a larger
version of the one at Maes Howe. After the erection of the Ring of
Brodgar around 2500 b.c., Structure Ten was also demolished, and
the nearby stone village of Skara Brae was abandoned [ 20 ].
This area is now one of the biggest sites in the British Isles for
Neolithic art, with incised decoration, pecked geometric shapes
and carved motifs, lozenges, ladders and chevrons. Parts of the