Transcript: VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic Orkney,
interview with Nick Card, Director of the Ness of
Brodgar excavations and Senior Project Manager at
ORCA
Question 3: Excavations and geophysics work at Brodgar has revealed a
Neolithic landscape bounded and enclosed by a series of walls. Can you
discuss this evidence and explain how it has been interpreted?
Well I think that in the past the landscape was seen as quite open and what the geophysics has shown is
that:
1. There are differences in the kind of density of monuments around the known upstanding
monuments. So, for instance, the Stones of Stenness is in close proximity to the Barnhouse
settlement and lots of other anomalies but then you go around the Ring of Brodgar and the area,
apart from some later burial mounds, Bronze Age barrows, is very quiet.
2. And this seems to be further defined by at least two major boundaries: north of the Ring of Brodgar
there’s a large sinuous earthwork that kind of stretches right the way across the Brodgar peninsula,
the so-called Dyke o’ Sean. Presently this is utilised as the parish boundary between Stenness and
Sandwick. I think for many years it was considered to be medieval in date but then a couple of
years ago some cows very kindly did a bit of intervention in the side of the large earthwork and it
revealed that underneath the earthwork there is in fact a stone wall, the scale of which makes me
think it is contemporary with some of the major Neolithic monuments. So you have the Ring of
Brodgar defined on its northern side by this Dyke o’ Sean, and on the southern side what we
considered initially was the Great Wall of Brodgar which defines the northern limit of the Ness of
Brodgar site. And these two boundaries we saw as defining the quiet area around the Ring and
perhaps supporting Mike Parker Pearson’s view that maybe, like Stone Henge, the Ring of Brodgar
represented the land of the dead; the realm of the ancestors and had to be separated from the
land of the living but with the discovery of the southern boundary wall we now seem to have a
least two elements which at present, although [not] supported by direct stratigraphical evidence, I
see these two boundaries as forming part of the same construct, forming a kind of walled precinct
around the main buildings at the Ness of Brodgar, something which is really unheard of in British
pre-history.
The whole landscape, as I said before, it’s the dating, the refinement which will give us a better idea of how
all these current separate elements actually relate to each other.
Suring the construction of the car park for the Ring of Brodgar, getting on for ten years ago, there was a
wall – it was only about a metre wide – a large curving wall that came to light during the watching brief and
we managed to trace that for about 30 metres and we think that it’s part of another enclosure that possibly
underlies the Dyke o’ Sean. Again, that is yet to be proven by excavation. Our remit was to look at the new
enclosure just within the confines of the footprint of the new car park. Another unknown element of the
World Heritage Site!
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