In the winter of 1850, a storm violent enough to kill more than 200 people across Scotland tore through Orkney and stripped the turf and sand from a large knoll on the west coast of the Mainland, at a spot called the Bay of Skaill. When the wind died down, villagers found the outline of small stone houses standing in the raw earth, roofless and empty, with no record anywhere of who had built them or when. Nobody in Orkney had known a village was buried there.
The knoll belonged to the estate of Skaill House, and its exposure fell to William Graham Watt, the local laird’s son and a self-taught geologist, to investigate. Watt dug on his own initiative rather than as part of any formal excavation, and by 1868 he had uncovered four houses before abandoning the effort — a pause that left the site alone, and largely unprotected, for more than half a century.
William Watt’s Amateur Dig Uncovers Four Houses, Then Stops
Watt’s excavation was never published as a scientific record, and the site sat exposed to the weather and to opportunists afterward; in 1913 a group arrived over a single weekend with shovels and made off with an unknown quantity of artifacts before anyone stopped them. It took another storm, in 1924, tearing away part of one house, to convince Orkney’s authorities that the site needed both protection and a professional excavation rather than another round of casual digging.
That job went to the University of Edinburgh’s V. Gordon Childe, who arrived at the Bay of Skaill for the first time in 1927. Photographs later re-examined in 2019 showed four women working alongside Childe at the trenches, long assumed to be visiting tourists; a note on the back of the prints identified them as his own students, among them Margaret Simpson, who Childe credited by name in his published monographs.
V. Gordon Childe’s Three-Year Dig Fixes the Village at 3180 BC
Childe excavated at Skara Brae from 1927 to 1930 and published his findings the following year, initially dating the settlement to around 500 BC based on the styles of pottery and stonework he recognized. That estimate held for four decades, until further excavation in 1972 and 1973 recovered organic material suitable for radiocarbon testing. The results pushed the founding of the village back by nearly 2,700 years, to approximately 3180 BC, with continuous occupation lasting roughly six hundred years before the settlement went quiet around 2500 BC.
The revised date made Skara Brae older than Stonehenge and roughly contemporary with the earliest stone architecture in Egypt, a comparison Historic Environment Scotland, the public body that now manages the site and its surrounding monuments, draws explicitly in its own statement on the village’s significance.
Seven of Ten Houses Share an Identical Stone Floor Plan
Ten stone structures and four connecting passageways are visible at Skara Brae today, and seven of the houses share a layout precise enough that archaeologists can predict where the furniture will be before they dig: a central hearth, a stone dresser facing the low entrance, and two box beds built into the walls on either side, the one on the right consistently larger than the one on the left. Stone boxes sealed with clay sat beside the beds, likely used to keep bait limpets fresh, and doors made of thin stone slabs could be barred shut from the inside with a length of bone that slid into cut sockets in the jambs.
One structure breaks the pattern entirely. House 8 has no dresser and no storage boxes, sits apart from the household refuse that insulated the other buildings, and contained fragments of worked bone, antler and heat-scarred stone that point toward tool-making rather than daily living — evidence, based on the excavation record compiled since Childe’s dig, that the settlement set aside a separate structure for craft work rather than mixing it into the houses people slept in.
Anna Ritchie Rejects the Storm-Burial Story Behind the Abandonment
Why the village emptied out is still an open question, and not for lack of a tempting answer. One popular account, developed by writer Evan Hadingham from artifacts left behind in the houses, imagines residents fleeing a sudden storm in haste, a woman’s beaded necklace breaking and scattering across the passage as she squeezed through her doorway for the last time, cooked meat still sitting in a bed nearby.
Archaeologist Anna Ritchie has pushed back directly on that scene. “A popular myth would have the village abandoned during a massive storm that threatened to bury it in sand instantly, but the truth is that its burial was gradual and that it had already been abandoned — for what reason, no one can tell,” she wrote, a conclusion that leaves the actual cause of the exodus, sometime after Orkney’s climate turned colder and wetter around 2500 BC, unresolved a century and a half after the sand first blew away.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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