The Ness of Brodgar is an astonishing complex of buildings and structures that seems to have begun some time around 3500 BCE (dating from charcoal recovered from a sondage under Structure 14's northwest wall), reached a peak of monumental activity between 3125-2850 BCE and declined over the succeeding centuries until its eventual abandonment around 2400 BCE.
What was so special about this narrow spit of land, at this high latitude, that was the driver for such an effort?
There's an obvious focus on the sky - the Ness itself runs roughly northwest-southeast making it an excellent spot from which to watch the Winter Solstice Sunrise and Summer Solstice Sunset - and other monuments on Orkney (eg Maes Howe) support the idea that these turning points were marked.
On an impulse, I fired up Stellarium and loaded a horizon profile created for the site by HeyWhatsThat to take a look at the sky around 3000 BCE.
The first thing I noticed was the one of the tracks from the Archaeolines plug-in wasn't shown - that for the Major Lunar Standstill at the negative declination for the Moon, for a very good reason.
The high latitude combined with the elevation of the horizon towards the south means that at its southernmost possible extreme, the Moon never rises as seen from the Ness. Even at its culmination due south, it remains below the horizon.
 |
| Major Lunar Standstill 3001 BCE, no moonrise at the southern extreme (horizon landform, shown by the brown line, made transparent to show the track) |
At the Ness we are, effectively, beyond the "arctic circle" for the Moon at the limit of its 18.61 year regression of the lunar nodes cycle.
I wonder what the Orcadians would have made of this? That's an investigation for another day.
Gneiss to see you...
Recent excavations in the summer of 2026 at the Ness have turned up another piece of polished Lewisian banded gneiss to go with the fragments found in previous digs (pestle macehead and an axe).
 |
| Lewisian gneiss from the Ness of Brodgar 2026 dig (photo: Sigurd Towrie) |
These artefacts confirm connections between Orkney and the Western Isles/NW coast of Scotland as the latter areas are the source of this highly distinctive rock. As the dig diary puts it:
This distinctive rock, sourced from the north‑west coast of Scotland and the Western Isles, has long testified to Neolithic links between those regions and Orkney. Several of our polished stone artefacts – especially maceheads – were crafted from it.
Hmm - there's another gneiss macehead to think about, and that one comes from an entirely different site: Stonehenge.
 |
| The Stonehenge gneiss macehead |
If the Lewisian gneiss finds at the Ness "testified to Neolithic links between those regions and Orkney" then surely the same case can be made for the one found at Stonehenge.
Col. William Hawley discovered this object in a shallow scrape near to the South Barrow in 1923.
 |
| Location of the gneiss macehead found by Hawley in 1923 |
He wrote, in his 5th Report on the 1923 excavation season given to the Society of Antiquaries in June 1924:
Only on one occasion has anything been found with them (ie cremations on the inner edge of the bank - SB), but this was one which went far to make up for the poverty of the others. It occurred this season and should rightly come into next season's report, but finds have been so infrequent that perhaps I may be excused for producing it this evening. It is a beautiful little polished mace-head of the 'cushion' type found amongst the bones of a cremation like the others, but with a shallow cist scraped 2 in. deep in the chalk rubble. It was 7 in . below the surface and 5 in. wide, but not deep enough in the more solid ground to cover all the bones and some protruded into the soil above the cist.
