O'er moorland and brae: And then there was stone

We took a one hour car ferry ride north of John O'Groat's to the Orkney Islands: a low slung group of green islands covered in a patchwork of pasture painted every shade of lush and fertile green.

There are no trees: the salt and the wind put paid to them.

And the wind is merciless. Relentless. And when we remember the Orkneys we will remember the wind.

We lived for a time, in Lethbridge, in Canada, where the wind blew bitterly, and the suicide, depression and divorce rates increased with its severity. This feels, and sounds, exactly like that wind.

But, if there was ever a day when the Orkeys were wind free, these islands would be idyllic: a place where you might find rich fat milk and cheeses dripping like butter. Even the bulls in the fields are enormous, and look placid, and utterly content.

We came to the islands via the waters of Scapa Flow: a sheltered harbour created by Italians during the war. They were prisoners of war, located in the Orkneys after they'd lost battles in North Africa at Benghazi. The British used the waters of Scapa Flow for their fleet to retreat after combat in the Atlantic, but, in 1939, a German U-boat breached the bomb wrecks previously sunk to protect the waters, bombing a British ship and killing over 800 men.

Churchill immediately determined that there needed to be better protection, so the Italian prisoners of war were talked into contributing their time and effort, laying giant concrete causeways between the Orkney islands, joining a string of them together like a long green tail of land, stretching down towards the mainland: a physical barrier to enemy intruders.

Everywhere there are Nissan huts used as barns or out buildings. They nestle into the rolling land gently, and suit the place. They are likely remnants recycled from the war, which seems possible, as the Italians who were building the Churchill Barrier, as the concrete causeway came to be called, were given two Nissan Huts to build themselves a church, which they did, joining the huts end to end.

They did not stop there. They created a thing of beauty from scrap, which is standing still: a lovely monument to their efforts, ingenuity, and faith.

They spent their free time salvaging usable materials from the old buried hulks to decorate their church inside and out, and they hand-painted the tiles, the frescoes, and hand built the wrought iron rood screen. So attached to the Orkneys did these Italians become, that their descendants still visit the island regularly.

One of the Orcadians told us that if you but scratch the surface of the Orkneys you will find archaeology, and this is so true. The Orkneys hold one of the finest collections of archeological sites in the world, telling the tale of prehistoric man: all World Heritage listed and carefully protected.

There are so many visible, and still so many to be uncovered. There is Maes Howe, one of the finest passaged chamber tombs in existence. And there are circles of large angular standing stones, the Rings of Brodgar along with the massive collection of Standing Stones of Stenness. We visited them all.

Then there is Skara Brae, the unique prehistoric village that was buried under a dune, and only uncovered when a high tide washed away ancient layers of sand and turf, revealing an entire stone age village, that had been inhabited for over 500 years.

Started around 3,100 BC. Before the pyramids were built. Before Stonehenge was started.

Skara Brae has revealed a wealth of finds the like of which have never before been discovered, including homes filled with stone age furniture: stone wall dressers to display household objects, rectangular stone box beds likely covered in skins over soft bracken mattresses, and stone fish-bait boxes for preparing and soaking bait, along with beautifully fashioned and polished stone tools: all encircling a central open hearth fire. Their homes look cosy, close and comfortable.

These finds had only been speculated about before. Now archeologists found similar pieces, in similar homes, all over the village.

Skara Brae village is set into a huge mound of decomposed midden over the top of an earlier site that was reused. The midden compost was moved to the site, load by load, to offer support and insulation for the stone-built homes. All was then covered with an earth and turf roof, and the homes made secure underground, each reached via a low interconnecting passage, with a lockable stone or wood door for privacy, many still in situ.

Mind you, if the wind blew across the Orkneys then, as it does now, underground homes makes perfect sense.

Though, finding wood was rare, even then. Fallen trees, floating on the tide, used by the Skara Brae folk, have been found to have come from as far afield as North America. Amazing.

Another extraordinary site we were lucky to experience on the Orkneys was the Ness of Brodgar. We arrived at the Ness site to find it filled with a vast team of working archeologists, on their 6 week annual dig from their universities, uncovering what they currently think might be a vast temple complex which, already, is challenging existing beliefs and theories about how primitive man lived and worshipped.

With our usual dose of good luck we arrived just as one of the Professors offered an amazing talk about the site, the theories, and the finds of the Ness of Brodgar. He said that many of the academics are beginning to think that these Orkney sites might be interlinked, interrelated: hypothesising that there are sites specifically devoted to the living, and others apparently devoted to the dead, with what are possibly long processional routes between each for important rituals and ceremonies.

It is vast. It is unusual. It is fascinating.

But one thing is apparent, even lightly scratching the surface of the Orkneys, there appears to be decades of research remaining for archeologists in the Orkneys: doctorates to be written, theories to be promulgated, spectacular finds to be made.

Our time, there, with stone age man offered us a break from the tragic tales of the Clearances on the mainland.

To which we now return.

And leave the Orcadian wind to blow.