History - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 402

History
It's hard to look at a landscape in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and not
have a sense of the stories from history swirling around, from the ancient Stone
Age settlers whose dwellings and stone circles are still so well preserved around
the Northern and Western Isles, to the empty villages and lonely glens depopu-
lated during the Clearances. Unusually for Europe, the history of the region is
dominated more by the wildness of the sea and harshness of the landscape
than the politics of London or Paris, and even Edinburgh has often felt distant,
another landscape, another language and another di cult journey away.

Prehistoric Scotland
Scotland's first inhabitants were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers , who arrived as the last
Ice Age retreated around 8000 BC. They lived initially in the area south of Oban,
where heaps of animal bones and shells have been excavated in the caves on the Mull of
Kintyre and on the plains north of Crinan. From here there is evidence of their moving
onto the islands of Arran, Jura, Rùm, Skye and Lewis, where the damp and relatively
warm coastal climate would have been preferable to the harsher inland hills and glens.
Around 4500 BC, Neolithic farming peoples from the European mainland began
moving into Scotland. To provide themselves with land for their cereal crops and
grazing for their livestock, they cleared large areas of upland forest, usually by fire,
and in the process created the characteristic moorland landscapes of much of modern
Scotland. These early farmers established permanent settlements, some of which, like
the well-preserved village of Skara Brae on Orkney, were near the sea, enabling them
to supplement their diet by fishing and to develop their skills as boatbuilders. The
Neolithic settlements were not as isolated as was once imagined: geological evidence
has, for instance, revealed that the stone used to make axe heads found in the Hebrides
was quarried in Northern Ireland.
Settlement spurred the development of more complex forms of religious belief. The
Neolithic peoples built large chambered burial mounds or cairns , such as Maes Howe
in Orkney (see p.337) and the Clava Cairns near Inverness. This reverence for human
remains suggests a belief in some form of afterlife, a concept that the next wave of
settlers, the Beaker people , certainly believed in. They built the mysterious stone
circles , thirty of which have been discovered in Scotland. Such monuments were a
massive commitment in terms of time and energy, with many of the stones carried
from miles away, just as they were at Stonehenge in England. The best-known Scottish
circle is that of Callanish (Calanais) on the Isle of Lewis (see p.307), where a dramatic
series of monoliths form avenues leading towards a circle made up of thirteen standing
stones. The exact function of the circles is still unknown, but many of the stones are
aligned with the position of the sun at certain points in its annual cycle, suggesting that
the monuments are related to the changing of the seasons.

4500 BC 3000 BC 2000 BC 100 BC-100 AD

Neolithic people
move into Scotland

Neolithic
township of
Skara Brae built

Callanish standing
stones erected
on Lewis in the
Western Isles

Fortified Iron Age brochs
built across Scotland