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.

The Knowe of Yarsoe

The Knowe of Yarsoe is a stalled cairn on the island of Rousay in Orkney. Like the majority of the cairns in Orkney, it was built in the early Neolithic period and continued in use for over a thousand years. It stands on the edge of a steep slope which falls away sharply towards the sea, the focus for many Orkney tombs.

Unlike the chambered cairns such as Cuween on Mainland Orkney, the stalled cairns comprise a long, narrow chamber subdivided by stone slabs into sections, resembling cattle stalls, where the bones of the deceased were laid. It is believed the two cairn types represent two distinct but interconnected cultures living in Orkney during the Neolithic period.

This tomb contains four consecutive stalls, and perhaps represents a continuing ritual descent into the spirit world from the earthly world. The innermost stall is partly blocked by stone slabs.

The Knowe of Yarsoe contained the disarticulated remains of around 29 people, dating from 2900-1900BC. All were adults and many more skulls were found than other remains. Orkney tombs typically contained several hundred bodies, adults and children, and many were ritually sealed and/or emptied at the end of the Neolithic period, around 2500BC. The bodies in this tomb may be those associated with the closure rite after the rest of the community’s ancestors were removed elsewhere. 
The dates indicate that these weren’t the last people to die. They may have been especially powerful or revered people whose remains (or perhaps their skulls) had been curated in a tomb or in a house for several hundred years before being placed here, perhaps as guardians of the land or the tomb. Many tombs have legends of ghostly guardians who bring calamity on anyone who disturbs them. Some may have been added long after Orkney’s Neolithic culture had collapsed.

The entrance of the Knowe of Yarsoe faces southeast, along the line of the hillside, on the long axis of the tomb. This is typical of stalled cairns and a major difference to chambered tombs which generally face out to sea. The communities linked to these tombs may have had little affinity to the sea compared with the people who built the chambered cairns.

Red deer. Massimo Catarinella, Wikicommons

Many tombs are linked to specific animals or birds which were interred with the human bodies. These include sea eagles, dogs and otters. The Knowe of Yarsoe contained the remains of at least 34 red deer. Red deer remains are commonly found in stalled cairns but not in chambered cairns, another indication of a cultural divide. The deer was a revered animal, both for its gifts of meat, hide and antler and for its embodiment of the spirit of the wilds. The shedding and regrowth of antlers reflects the dying-and-rising spirit of the green and the deer remained a totem or spirit guide for shamans and ritual specialists throughout the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon periods. The horned God Cernunnos and the sage Merlin were both associated with deer.

Cernunnos on the Gundestrup Cauldron, 1^st Century BC. 

Rousay is rugged with steep hillsides and heather moorland, ideal habitat for red deer, which were probably introduced to the islands by people at a very early point in Orkney’s history. Rousay is poor quality land and unsuitable for cultivation, and this offers the idea that the stalled cairns were linked to the earliest hunter-gatherer communities of Orkney, who especially revered the deer, whereas the Neolithic farmers who settled in later times and have proven Middle Eastern ancestry lived on the better quality land more suited to agriculture, built the chambered cairns and the various ritual monuments including the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, and brought Orkney into the forefront of British culture.

The Tomb of the Otters

The Tomb of the Otters is one of the most recently discovered Neolithic cairns in Orkney. It was built on the south coast of the island of South Ronaldsay, a short distance from the Tomb of the Eagles.

Like many of Orkney’s tombs, the Tomb of the Otters is a relatively inconspicuous grassy mound which could easily be a natural feature, as it was supposed to be until chance digging revealed the truth. The tombs were typically blended into the landscape but at the same time offered wide views across the land. They were built for eyes within the tomb, not for the living outside it.

Excavation found it to be a chambered cairn, containing six small chambers leading off from the main chamber. Those at the western end were added after the main construction and another small chamber was inserted under the main entrance passage. The tomb contained over two thousand disarticulated human bones, which had been placed in the tomb over a period of several hundred years.

Some of the bones date to 3300BC, the date of first construction of many Orkney tombs, and genetic analysis shows the dead were settler-farmers whose recent ancestry lay in the Middle East, the birthplace of agriculture. The presence of so many bones is unusual: in many cases, the tombs were emptied at the end of the Neolithic period, around 2500BC, in an elaborate, Orkney-wide destruction and closure of ritual sites.

The coast near the tomb.

 The tombs are believed to each link to one community or village, and many are associated with specific animals or birds which may have been community totems. This tomb is uniquely associated with otters.

The tomb was, uniquely, carved out of the bedrock and is set partly into the ground. This makes it unusually wet inside and the bones were periodically covered with silt, perhaps caused when water levels rose. This was perhaps a deliberate attempt to emulate the otters’ natural habitat.

The skeletons and spraint of otters were found in large amounts inside the tomb, suggesting otters routinely entered it. The skeleton of a four-year-old child was found with a small stone which had been worked to resemble an otter’s head. Perhaps this was a favourite toy, or perhaps a spiritual emblem to help guide this child to the next world.

Many of the ‘totems’ have well-known links to the spiritual world and many are carrion-eaters. The otter almost exclusively eats fish, but has been known to eat carrion. It is possible the otters encouraged in this tomb devoured the flesh of the dead and were considered spirit guides for these people. Their habitat of both land and sea gives them a greater liminal status.

The chambers are roofed with slabs of stone from the beach which are heavily water-worn, creating another deliberate link to the sea.

The majority of Orkney tombs face out to sea, but the entrance passage of this tomb faces north, inland. It is possible this entrance is a later feature after the tomb was extended, perhaps to keep it damp and suitable for otters. The original entrance may have been to the west, where it would face a large lake, plausibly the freshwater home of the otters in question.

  

English Otter. Alexander Leisser, Wikicommons.

The Tomb of the Eagles

The Tomb of the Eagles is a Neolithic chambered cairn in Isbister in South Ronaldsay, the southern-most island of Orkney. Unlike most tombs in Orkney, which were either emptied prior to their closure in ancient times or have been destroyed thanks to time, treasure-hunters or clumsy antiquarians, the Tomb of the Eagles survived intact until its careful excavation in the late 20^th century, through which our knowledge of Neolithic Orkney has surged.

The tomb was built around 3150BC, and comprises a stone-built and grass-covered mound which covers a central chamber accessed by a low passage, three metres long, through which visitors have to crawl on their hands and knees. The main chamber contained bodies which were largely intact, perhaps after their excarnation (devouring by carrion-eaters) but before they were deposited with the rest of the ‘ancestors’. It seems the process of death was a long-drawn-out affair in Neolithic Orkney. Side chambers contained unarticulated bones, largely sorted into groups of skulls and other bones. The tomb contained at least 340 people, including men, women, children and babies.

Around 2500BC, the time when bronze started to filter into Britain, the social structure in Orkney collapsed. The tombs which had been used for nearly a thousand years, along with other ritual buildings such as at the Ness of Brodgar, were carefully dismantled or sealed and never used again. The passage of the Isbister cairn was blocked from the inside and the entire tomb was filled with rubble, soil and ancient human bones, perhaps those kept as relics in houses. It was never entered again, although many Bronze Age burial cists nearby indicate the remembered sanctity of the site.

Skulls and round-bottomed Unstan Ware pottery deposited in a side chamber.

Each of the dozens of tombs in Orkney was likely linked to an individual settlement or community, and each seems to have been close-knit and independent. Studies of the skeletons show a high incidence of genetic abnormalities which suggests a large degree of in-breeding. Other Orkney tombs show a different range of abnormalities.

Many are linked to specific and often unique animals or birds which may have totemic links. The Isbister cairn is uniquely associated with sea eagles, which were once common on the high cliffs of the area. Like many of the potential ‘totems’, sea eagles are carrion-eaters and were plausibly used to devour the bodies of the deceased before their interment in the tomb.

Like many Orkney tombs, Isbister opens out across the sea, but the unusual thirty-metre sheer drop is reminiscent of the soaring spirit of the sea eagle.

 A foundation deposit sealed under the flagstone floor comprised bones of humans and sea eagles, dating to 3150BC, and eagle talons were placed with many of the bodies. One had fifteen talons which perhaps formed a necklace. Perhaps eagle-catching was a test of status for the people of Isbister. Scaling the precipitous and sea-lashed cliffs to reach their nesting sites would certainly have tested the physical and mental strength of anybody.

Nearly a thousand years after the tomb was sealed, in 1500BC, a cist grave was inserted in the mound, and this also contained sea eagle bones along with the human remains. Orkney’s status and way of life had changed immensely since the beginning of the Bronze Age, but it seems the people of Isbister had not forgotten their ancient heritage.

White-tailed sea eagle. Jacob Spinks, Wikicommons.

Maes Howe Passage Grave

Maes Howe in Orkney is one of the most elaborate and finely built passage graves known. It was built in the late Neolithic Period, around 2700BC, on a wide, grassy plain a short distance from and in view of the other famous monuments of Neolithic Orkney including the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the Ness of Brodgar. 

The mound is seven metres high and 35 metres wide – exceptionally large for an Orkney grave – and comprises a passage seven metres long which has to be followed at a crouch to reach a large inner chamber, built of corbelled stone with a phenomenal degree of craftsmanship. The five-metre high ceiling makes it the highest and most impressive Neolithic structure still standing. Three smaller chambers which can only be entered by crawling through their tiny entrances were built on each side. Provision was made to seal each chamber and also seal the main passage from the inside.

 Ward Hill on the island of Hoy 

Unlike other Orkney tombs, with the possible exception of the now-ruined Pierowall on the island of Westray, Maes Howe is aligned to the midwinter sunset which shines down the passage to illuminate the inner chamber. This may explain the unusual height of the passage. Most Orkney tombs have to be entered on one’s belly. The sun from Maes Howe at midwinter sets over Ward Hill on the island of Hoy, the highest point on Orkney, which no doubt explains its location. A standing stone a few hundred metres from Maes Howe also marks the same alignment. This is reminiscent of the much older Newgrange passage grave in Ireland, and there are known links between the two areas in the Neolithic period.

The Barnhouse standing stone and Maes Howe

When Maes Howe was opened by Norse warriors, and later by Victorian antiquaries, no human remains or other relics were recorded. Perhaps they were long destroyed, or perhaps it was never truly a tomb. Its elaborate design and its alignment mark it as separate from other tombs. Its enclosure by a wide and deep ditch, dug as the mound was built and with no causeway across it, is also unique for a passage grave but typical for henge monuments in Orkney and across Britain. It may have been designed as a ‘spirit house’ but in a different way, perhaps absorbing the spirit of the sun to fertilise the womb of the earth.

The interior of Maes Howe, showing the much older standing stones. Islandhopper, Wikicommons.

An earlier structure once stood on the site of the mound, also aligned to the midwinter sunset. This is suggested to have been a house but the importance of its location means it would have been far more than an ordinary dwelling. Four large standing stones were placed in the corners of the inner chamber, offering no structural purpose, and these were likely incorporated from an earlier monument or stone circle, perhaps around the ‘house’ itself, as a memorial or to seed its spiritual essence. Similar stones were used to form the entrance passage. Stone settings at the Stones of Stenness and an elaborate building at the nearby Barnhouse village are aligned to Maes Howe. These both predate the mound so were linking to this earlier structure.

Some of the runic inscriptions. Islandhopper, Wikicommons.

Maes Howe was entered by Norse warriors around 1100AD and it was named as ‘Orkahaugr’ in the 13^th century Orkneyinga Saga. Legend says warriors were forced to spend the night in the chamber during a storm and two of them went insane after their ordeal. The spirits of the mound were obviously still potent.

Another Norse legacy is the largest collection of runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia. These mainly comprise men carving their names and making lewd comments about women. Some make reference to a recent discovery of hidden treasure. Elaborate gold and bronze grave goods are associated with a much later time period, so presuming the inscription is not a treasure-hunter’s joke, it may refer to ancient relics such as carved stones, as were found at Newgrange and Pierowall, whose spiritual importance was still recognised. We will probably never know.

The decorated stones once found in the now-ruined Pierowall monument.

West Kennet Long Barrow

West Kennet Long Barrow is situated just south of Avebury in Wiltshire, today offering views of the great Avebury henge, the Sanctuary and Silbury Hill. None of these monuments were present when the barrow was built, although likely the locations already had special significance.

The barrow was built around 3650BC, and comprises five chambers around a central passage, all built of sarsen stone and drystone walling, covered in a vast mound of rubble and turf, 104 metres long.

Like many other long barrows such as Wayland’s Smithy, it is not especially prominent and doesn’t appear to have been designed to draw the attention, respect and admiration of human observers, as later Bronze Age barrows were. It seems more about commanding a view of the land, probably the land the entombed people lived on and farmed, and continued to offer their guidance and guardianship after death.

It seems the barrow was used for little more than a generation – perhaps the ‘founding fathers’ of this farming community – and then the entrance was sealed with the huge sarsen stones seen today. The remains of thirty six men, women and children were excavated. Bones and cremated remains were occasionally added over the next thousand years by removing the roof slabs.

Inside the barrow                                                

The barrow was far more than a tomb. It was a place for the living as well as the dead, and some interesting research has been done into the acoustics of the chambers. Many long barrows of the Cotswold-Severn area were built to similar proportions, incorporating a 4:3 ratio into the chambers, which produces a particular musical resonance when singing or chanting. Infrasound – sound too low for human ears to hear – is also produced by the resonance inside the chambers, and this produces unsettling effects such as the feeling of an unseen presence, a sense of panic and danger, and glimpses of movement. This would all contribute to the feeling of the presence of the ancestor spirits around the living.  

Around 2200BC, the chambers were filled with chalk rubble and the monument abandoned. This time period reflects the arrival of bronze in Britain and a cultural upheaval which saw the abandonment of the old monuments and a surge in the building of new monuments such as stone circles.

But the old ways were never forgotten. Coins dating to the Roman period have been found inserted into the mound, perhaps offerings to millennia-old spirits whose presence was still uneasily felt.

Cuween Chambered Tomb

This is a tomb near Kirkwall on the north coast of Mainland Orkney, built by Neolithic farmers around 3000BC.

Dozens of tombs were built around Orkney and each was probably linked to a small community who farmed the immediate area. There was a small Neolithic settlement at the foot of Cuween Hill. Unlike the chambered tombs of southern Britain such as Belas Knap and Wayland's Smithy, Orkney’s tombs were often in use for a thousand or more years and may contain several hundred bodies.

Cuween comprises five dark, damp chambers leading out from a central chamber. This is reached by a long, low passage entered at a crawl. Some of the chambers are level with the central chamber; others are raised; others have a flagstone divider. The arrangement seems entirely organic with no overall grand design. This is the case with many of the tombs, which each have a unique layout. Perhaps the builders worked entirely through intuition or with the help of spirit guides who, while in a trance state, ‘drew’ the tomb into this world.

Cuween was excavated a century ago and was found to contain the bones of eight people and 24 dog skulls. The small number of human bones suggests the tomb was periodically cleared of bones, or perhaps emptied at the end of its use-life. The presence of dogs is unique, although other tombs contained animal bones such as red deer, otters or sea eagles, and may indicate a community totem or spirit guide. Dogs are commonly seen as guardians of the underworld or as guides for the dead. The dogs were collie-sized and resembled a grey wolf.

The view from the cairn across the farmland and the sea

Cuween probably derives from ‘kewing’, meaning cattle pasture. Due to the short growing season at this northern latitude, cattle have always formed the basis of Orkney’s agriculture. In more recent folklore it was known as the Fairy Knowe.

The tomb was cut out of the bedrock and roofed with flagstones then covered with earth. From a distance it blends into the hillside in this respect resembles the southern tombs. Its purpose was to form a bond with the land, and its influence spread over the farmland below it.

Most of the Orkney tombs face out to sea. The sea was a provider and nurturer as much as the land, and it makes sense for the guardian influence of the ancestors to extend across the water. It may also reflect the journey of the souls of the deceased.

Like many of the tombs, Cuween had been carefully sealed up. This generally seems to have happened around 2500BC, when Orkney’s Neolithic culture dramatically ended. The tombs gradually became the haunt of fairies and ghosts, left undisturbed for fear of violent repercussions from angry ghosts.

Belas Knap long barrow

Belas Knap is a long barrow near Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. It was built in the early Neolithic period and is of similar style to dozens of other barrows found across the Cotswolds and the Severn valley.

The barrow is situated on a wide, rolling hillside, with a wide view in three directions and a steep, wooded scarp dropping sharply on the eastern side. This was probably wooded in the Neolithic period and so would have obscured the only prominent view of the barrow. From all other directions, the barrow quickly blends into the ground. Like Wayland's Smithy long barrow, Belas Knap was not intended to be a visible statement, but conversely the barrow itself has a sweeping view of the landscape. They seem to be about blending with the earth, returning the ancestors and their skills to the earth, as well as legitimising their continuing presence on this tract of land. They reflect heritage and belonging.

            Belas Knap from the east.

                View south from the barrow.

The barrow is aligned to the north. This is unusual: most long barrows face roughly east. Four burial chambers were set into its length and the main forecourt with its stone façade was actually a false entrance. It’s believed the chambers were built separately as individual burial mounds, then later incorporated into a huge barrow. Many barrows including Wayland’s Smithy were originally smaller structures which were extended into huge mounds a century or two later. Even earlier than the chambers was a circular arrangement of stones lying near the centre of the current mound.

The barrow was crudely excavated in the 19^th century and restored to its current condition in the 1920s. It was originally 60m long and 25m wide but its edges have now been trimmed due to erosion, agriculture and excavation. Thirty eight bodies were found, dating from 3700BC-3600BC.

Behind the slabs of the false entrance were the bones of one man and five children, along with flints and horse and pig bones. The western side chamber, lined with sarsens and drystone walling, contained fourteen bodies including a woman with fatal head injuries. The southern chamber, now almost entirely destroyed, contained one body. The south-eastern chamber, which is much lower and has to be entered on one’s belly, contained four bodies. The north-eastern chamber which is lined with sarsens contained twelve bodies.

The chambers were repeatedly visited and opened and sealed, probably used for rites such as marriage, blessing the land and blessing births as well as for burial. Then, like many long barrows, the chambers were eventually sealed for good. This often seems to coincide with the arrival of bronze in Britain around 2500BC.

                  The north-east chamber.

Barrows were often respected for millennia after their closure, although their stones crumbled and collapsed and trees and shrubs obscured them. Belas Knap means ‘beautiful hilltop’. As this seems to refer to the barrow itself rather than the hillside, it is perhaps a name of uneasy respect given by later, more superstitious people to a haunted and feared place. Many ancient sites were avoided as haunts of fairies or dwarfs, later still the work of the devil. This may derive from people unwittingly uncovering the bones of long-dead people, or perhaps it is a long-remembered folk memory of the fearful rites once conducted here.

Wayland’s Smithy

                               

This intriguingly named long barrow in Berkshire was built by some of the earliest Neolithic farmers. The many long barrows in this part of Britain were one of many new concepts introduced by the people who brought agriculture to this land.

It is one of the Cotswold-Severn class of barrows, commonly found in southwest Britain, and is sited on the ancient trackway called The Ridgeway, close to the Uffington White Horse. Its present appearance is a result of restoration in the 1960s. Before then, it was an overgrown ruin.

A timber-chambered barrow was built around 3550BC, and the remains of fifteen individuals were placed inside, fourteen of them male. Around a hundred years later, the mound was incorporated into a larger structure. A stone-chambered tomb, consisting three burial chambers and an entrance chamber in a cruciform layout, was built. The remains of eight people were found inside. Six huge sarsen stones were erected in front of it, four of which survive, and an earthen barrow, 56m in length and 13m wide at its entrance, was built over it. The stone revets used to support the mound are visible; they were originally covered with earth.

The interior chambers.

No long-lasting constructions have been found in Britain prior to the appearance of these tombs, and it is a long time before the same amount of effort was made to house the living.

Agriculture bound people to an area. It was a long-term investment, requiring the clearance of rocks and mature trees to give cultivatable soil, and needed a close understanding of how best to cultivate and manage that specific tract of land, which could take a lifetime to learn. It was perhaps now important to have the ancestors close at hand.

The long barrows are not overly prominent; they are not intended to be a statement to the living as later Bronze Age barrows, standing clear on the skyline, appear to be. To me they seem to be about blending with the land, incorporating the gifts and knowledge of people’s forebears so they could aid the coming generations, as well as reinforcing the fact that, for these people, this land was home.

The folklore of the site is no less intriguing. Wayland, also known as Völundr, is an important figure in Germanic culture, and the name was probably applied by Anglo-Saxon settlers. The first recorded use of the name dates to 955AD. Wayland was a fabled smith of unmatched skill, and like many smiths, such as the Greek Hephaestus, he was lame. In an Icelandic saga, he was captured by a king who cut his hamstrings and forced him to work for him. He eventually killed the king’s sons, forged himself wings, and made his escape.

Local tradition stated that if a traveller’s horse lost a shoe, he could leave it at the Smithy with some coins, and when he returned the money would be gone and the horse newly-shod. Wayland was also said to shoe the nearby Uffington White Horse.

A local shepherd’s rhyme recorded in 1859 states that:

They say in this cave did dwell,

A smith who was invisible.

At last he was found out, they say,

He blew up the place and flew away.

An intriguing similarity to the Icelandic story recorded 600 years earlier.