Maeshowe

From outside, Maes Howe is only a smooth green mound rising from the fields of Orkney's West Mainland, about 35 metres across and a little over seven metres high, with a ditch around its platform. Inside is one of the most accomplished buildings of Neolithic Europe. Raised around 2800 BC, roughly five thousand years ago, it is a chambered cairn: a low passage about 11 metres long leads into a tall square chamber built of Orkney flagstone, with smaller side cells opening off it. Some of the slabs weigh up to 30 tonnes, and the courses of stone are laid and fitted so precisely that the corbelled walls still stand. Estimates of the labour involved run to tens of thousands of hours, the work of a whole community.

The builders aligned the entrance passage on the setting sun at midwinter. For about three weeks either side of the winter solstice, when skies allow, the last light of the afternoon runs down the passage and falls on the back wall of the chamber, the same kind of alignment found at Newgrange in Ireland. Standing in the dark while a narrow bar of gold creeps across the stones is the moment many people come for.

The tomb's second life began in the twelfth century, when Norse visitors broke in through the roof and left more than thirty runic inscriptions on the chamber walls. They form the largest collection of runic inscriptions known from a single place, and they read less like sacred texts than graffiti: names, boasts, a line declaring one Ingigerth the most beautiful of women, and a claim that the carver was the most skilful rune-writer west of the ocean. The antiquarian James Farrer opened the chamber in 1861 and found the carvings. Maes Howe is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1999, with the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the village of Skara Brae all within a few kilometres.

Getting there

Maes Howe lies on Mainland Orkney, about 10 miles (16 km) west of Kirkwall on the road to Stromness. Visits are by timed guided tour, which starts at the visitor centre in the village of Stenness, a little over a mile from the cairn; a shuttle bus covers the last stretch. The X1 bus from Kirkwall reaches Stenness in about 25 minutes. The nearest airport is Kirkwall Airport (KOI), about 17 km away; the islands are also reached by ferry from the Scottish mainland into Stromness and other Orkney ports.