The islands cluster close to the Scottish mainland, but tourists disembarking in Stromness harbour, or at the airport just outside the island capital of Kirkwall, sense they have arrived somewhere different to other parts of Scotland. Orkney – visitors are politely advised not to refer to ‘the Orkneys’ – has always been a world to itself. For centuries, inhabitants routinely called it ‘the country of Orkney’, and the largest of its 70-odd islands has always simply been known as ‘the Mainland’.
Evidence of the past here is inescapable. Over millennia, people farmed the same stretches of fertile coastal land, a lived environment defined by the ubiquity of the sea. The word usually used to describe Orkney is ‘remote’, but remoteness is relative, and ‘centres’ can relocate over time.
The earliest sites testify to a dynamic society that can hardly be seen as clinging to the outer edge. The remarkable Neolithic village of Skara Brae, revealed by a 19th-century sandstorm, was one of many such settlements, whose inhabitants enjoyed a sophisticated communal life. They buried their dead in elaborate cairns like the great mound of Maeshowe, and gathered for religious or political purposes at the Ness of Brodgar, where for the past 20 or so years archaeologists have been excavating a complex of ritual buildings. Nearby is the imposing Ring of Brodgar: many scholars now believe Orkney to have been the starting point of a stone-circle culture, whose influence radiated throughout Britain, and inspired the construction of Stonehenge.