Okay, so I've got the days screwed up. Realize I have 2 day 8s and no day 9! And since we were at sea yesterday and I didn't do a blog, there is no Day 10. So, Day 11 it is!
We are very far north and it is quite chilly. But no rain so that is a good thing. We left on our tour about 11:45 and went out to what our guide called the Neolithic center of Orkney. The Ring of Brodgar is like Stonehenge. There were 60 stones placed in a perfect circle, each stone 6 degrees from its neighbors! They were put in place about 5000 years ago. They were dug down between 3 and 6 feet and stood 10 to 12 feet tall. Not all of them remain. There was one that had been struck by lightning in 1980, so you can imagine that may have happened a time or two in the last 5000 years. Around the stones was a ditch that had been dug down to bedrock with a narrow land bridge in (single file) and a wider land bridge out on the other side. No one is sure what these places were used for - there is nothing in the center - no relics, no bones.
Later we went to another area close by - just on the other side of a village that they are just beginning the excavate - called the Standing Stones of Stenness. Our guide said this area was obviously used as a gathering place with remains of fires in the center, etc. There were only 12 stones in this circle - actually only 11 with a dug out spot for a 12th. Only a few remain because in the 1800s the farmer got tired of people coming on his land to look at the stones and started knocking them down.
We also visited a burial mound. It is called Maeshowe. It was amazing. To get in you had to walk down this passage that was about 4 feet high and 2 1/2 feet wide and 39 feet long. It opened into a square room with 3 small chambers on the sides. It was an engineering marvel. Our guide said that the tradition going in the Neolithic age was to leave the bodies out in the elements until they were picked clean and then bring whatever bones remained to the mound. The entrance to this mound is positioned in such a way that on the Winter Solstice (and weeks on either side) the setting sun shines right down the passageway and illuminates the small chamber on the front wall! She said they broadcast it in the Internet and we could probably find it on YouTube!
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