Why Orkney of all places? How did this scatter of islands off the northern tip of Scotland come to be such a technological, cultural, and spiritual powerhouse? “For starters, you have to stop thinking of Orkney as remote,” says Caroline Wickham-Jones, a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. “For most of history, from the Neolithic to the Second World War, Orkney was an important maritime hub, a place that was on the way to everywhere.”
It was also blessed with some of the richest farming soils in Britain and a surprisingly mild climate, thanks to the effects of the Gulf Stream. Pollen samples reveal that by about 3500 B.C.—around the time of the earliest settlement on Orkney—much of the hazel and birch woodland that originally covered the landscape was gone.