Taversoe Tuick Burial Cairn

Taversoe Tuick cairn was built on the island of Rousay in Orkney. Like the dozens of other contemporary monuments found all across the islands, it was built in the Neolithic Period, around 3300BC, at which time Orkney was home to the most advanced culture in Britain and perhaps Western Europe.

Orkney’s tombs typically have traits in common. They are built overlooking the sea, have a wide view over the surrounding land, but are built into the hillsides so as to be barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape. They were not built to impress the living who looked up at them, as later Bronze Age tombs were designed. They were built for the eyes of the ancestors to gaze across the land where they once walked and now guarded and reinforced their descendants’ right to live and farm there.

The upper storey of the tomb

Each tomb is also unique, built to a design chosen perhaps intuitively by the community it was to serve. Taversoe Tuick was built on two levels, something found in only one other Orkney tomb. One crawls through the long and low entrance passage to a chamber containing four partitioned areas arranged in an arc, where the disarticulated bones of the deceased were laid. The upper storey is reached by a separate entrance at the back of the tomb and contained two chambers. 

The tomb, discovered and opened in the 19^th century, was found to contain cremated human bones, the complete skeleton of an adult, and flint and pottery artefacts. These were perhaps added during the Bronze Age, after the Neolithic Orkney culture had collapsed and its monuments ritually emptied, closed or destroyed.

The rear entrance to the upper storey.

Like many tombs, Taversoe Tuick was built with a view of the sea and its entrance passage aligns to the highest point on the small island of Gairsay to the south, which is marked with a tumulus of possibly Bronze Age date. The Orkney people were sailors, fisher-people and long-distance travellers and the sea was as important to their way of life as the land. It is logical that the ancestor-spirits contained in the tombs guarded the sea-ways as well as the land, and it is easy to imagine a web of guardianship linking between tombs and islands and landmarks the sailors used to guide them home, nourished by the generations of knowledge the people had laboriously acquired. And that web still survives today.