My Mother was Orcadian and I was born there over 70 years ago ,we would play at Skara Brae in the houses they were not like they are now you could run in and out of them , I have two photos of my Mother and her sisters Standing in the houses over 80 years ago , All of Orkney is the most wonderful place we go back most years still have a few lovely cousins there ,My husband and I love it.

One of my best friends used to live in Orkney so very fortunate to have visited Scara Brae on a few occasions. Makes you wonder what else lurks beneath our feet as this was only discovered when the top of the sand dunes blew off in a terrible storm.

The ocean would have been miles away when site was in use. Makes sense as people would not build a settlement like this on a coast easily seen by all passing boats. Also small doors help to keep their sheep etc from entering their abodes. Great video thanks!

loved the video up until the end when it went from factual explanation of historical artifacts to ramblings that connected as many ancient civilizations as possible to Britain! Europeans and the British sure love to connect things back to themselves! I can actually see why Indians don't even want to hear about the Indo-European hypothesis since they think its just another attempt for Europeans to link everything to themselves rather than it being a scientific hypothesis to explain the curious similarities between the cultures, languages, and religions of north and east Europe, India, Greece and various other cultures in between!!!

Excellent Piece! The natural layered stone in the area created a resource that, combined with their creativity and architectural needs, permitted the construction of a magnificent and durable site. Thank you!

Scotland is AWESOME. Highly recommend a visit.

Glad they were conscious enough to have fire exit signs back in the day.

I was here just over 10 yrs ago ....fantastic place and a lot to see and take in .

Outstanding video. Loved the music and the historical talk about the place. Well done! 😊

Great video. Can't believe i had never heard of this place until half an hour ago!!!

Another great video Hugh Newman, thank-you.

I have been shouting about Orkney as one of the first dots to connect for 15 years. Now in 6 months 2 serious looks at it. At last. Keep digging. I have no ego I just want truth for all who seek it. Way more to Orkney than this one village. Bottle neck chambers tuned to create standing waves of dust that shimmer like 7 ghost sentinels on the mid winter sunrises. Acoustic mastery.

Really interesting video. Thank you.

Really interesting vid. It is quite an astonishing place. Cheers.

Thanks Hugh; much appreciate your outstanding work : D

Nice video, Thank`s Hugh Newman. 👍

Ur awesome thank u so much for a real tour xxxxxxx been wanting to explore the archeology there for years

Thank you!

Wow, never seen this place! How freakin’ badass! I swear ancient times are magical to me...they just had so much incredible construction and living spaces done in such beautiful landscapes. I wonder why there is just one small place out there alone? Must have been off-gridders lol 😆

Another interesting sight in the UK. well done.

These look incredibly similar in construction to the stone chambers scattered all over the area of New England USA where I’m at. It’s wild

I'm learning about skara brae at school

I dream of places like this!

This is awesome! My wife and I checked out Orkney in October 2019 and actually filmed the entire experience, it's up on our channel (check it out if you like). We're actually very interested in finding more sites like these while we travel. After Orkney we actually travelled to Ireland and did Newgrange in County Meath too to explore more of the area's Neolithic past. Totally worth every second of our time!

Damn that's old. I sometimes wonder about Doggerland and how fast or slow it fell in the sea and what might be older than this.

Great place, been many times, gets very windy.

Hopefully, he will host another trip next year. I will be going to that one, if he hosts it.

Interesting fact to consider: The Orkneys were ice free before britain, due to the warming of the sea currents. Also , it was on a height ... about 13 km for the shore at about 10 000 BC Then its a slow sea rise and pretty stable conditions for 4000 years. Then another sharper sea rise happens and within 1000 years the rest of doggerland(except an island) and the english channel is formed. Yep, its that new and fresh. After 5000 BC, there is no more big changes to the earthly sea level or climate. From here we see the re-rise of most civilizations.

What is the style of music played throughout this video? It's mesmerizing. Could anyone point me in the right direction to find more music like this? In particular with the subtle humming in the background.

These sites look like ancient Anderson shelters! Like those issued to the public during WW2. Cover them over with soil and you have a very good shelter, perhaps against an ancient aerial war, of global proportions.

fantastic. I went there 30 years ago and you could walk around in all the "houses" . No barriers or tourist paths, i remember crouching down to almost crawling to get through the doors.

So beautiful. The carvings look more look they could be their writing to me maybe says certain things or spiritual meaning

Just 1 point: the shoreline would have been much further away then and they reckon a lot of it has been swept away over 1000s years and now the water is closer to what we see now. I wonder if the hole in the stone there is from a post hole support like used with thin the rooms to close the doors from within and jts been reused.

Maybe some of these locations were "schools" centres to learn local apprentices, techniques like stone-working and pottery etc.

The replica carvings do not look like the photo of the original, which look like a repeating geometric pattern. In the replica house they look like words written in rune script or something...

Had a weeks holiday on Orkney on my own, but was never on my own,it was one of the best holidays ever, skara( never seen any daleks) brodgar,stennes ,tomb of the eagles, Mae's Howe, a different world from mainland Scotland You brought back many happy memories with this video Hugh, P.s the DNA of the paracus long headed Skulls ( the ones with red) hair). The have sampled the DNA back to scythia, that is where the Scots are supposed to originate from Through Egypt, Spain, Ireland, then to Orkney? Reed heid s common in Ireland, here ,in the Chinese pyramids, new Zealand The neolithic people maybe red hair was common?

Interesting to hear about Stone balls in Bridlington (I live near by), do you have any further information on them?

I didnt know there was a real Skara Brae. I thought it only existed in the Ultima games. Lol this is awesome and beautiful

what is the music called??????!!!!!!!!! i like it

I toured skara Brae in 1994. Local tour guide mentioned that at time they built the climate (according to fossil record) was tropical due to gulf of Mexico

He talks about the lovely beach and coastline. I'm pretty sure the coast would have been a long way to travel in 3180 BC.

When I was in Germany alot of cities had "half timber" houses. I wonder if these were like that. Wood or thatch and Earth roofs. Even imagine if Stonehenge was more elaborate or had a roof. 5000 years of tomb raiders, grave robbers, pillagers and nature. I'm sure nothing expensive or organic would be left.

Speaks almost in a whisper, as if he is letting us in on a deep dark secret! I wonder if you have to constantly whisper on the tour bus when you travel with this guy. Also, it would be way cool if they have real live music on the bus too. After all, the flautist would only have to learn one phrase, which would be incessantly repeated to add atmosphere. I joke, but it looks like such an amazing place! I'd truly love to see it.

Can you tell us anything about the sea wall, Howard? It's highly likely the shoreline has changed, but the flat stones are laid out same as other ancient places but it may still just be making use of the stones in the area, possibly.

I do sometimes wonder if the carvings were them sharpening tools and these were the lines left

Its the period of history I wish I was around in.

I am assuming the stone walls facing the beach were built recently to prevent erosion? Or are they part of the site? The "carvings" look like Runes? Great show 😄

At 7:00 Are those runes?

I’m wondering why they haven’t enclosed the whole site under cover for protection from the elements ?

Id love the thought of neolithic scots traveling round the world like the polynesians my only question is though how did they do it? Like what sort of boats did they have? Could it have crossed the atlantic? Even though the evidence you have put forward which i will research myself would suggest something similar but do we have the proof they had the boat technology and the provissions and skills necessary to take on the atlantic?

If you are interested in this I can recommend a book called Uriels Machine

Have you come across any temple?

same building tech like in S. Africa

I wonder if those spheres they made were for a game that they would play together?

Wowwwwwww

What do you think of Tom Rowsell's pronouncement that Skara Brae is NOT a religious centre?

I wonder why nobody mentions looking for connections between Denmark and the Orkney Islands. Didn't Orkney belong to Denmark at one time? The water levels were so much lower when these ruins were occupied. There could easily be archaeological remains on the surrounding beaches and below the current water level. The geography and the boundaries between countries were very different in ancient times. Because roads were so difficult to build and maintain, water was the quickest means of transport. People were very connected throughout the world thousands of years ago via the seas and rivers. It is certain that even 1000 years ago, beads made in the middle east and Egypt were found in Sweden. The same waterways and trade routes existed thousands of years ago that existed in the past 1000 years. Why would anyone think people could not navigate the seas all over the planet until modern man decided it could be so?! It looks like the walls would have been plastered over to prevent insects, wind and water from entering the buildings. To survive such extreme weather conditions, people would have had to have been very intelligent and skilled to survive and trade. I do not believe these ruins would have looked as primitive back when people lived in them. The buildings we live in today would not survive thousands of years like these buildings have. There could even be buildings below these buildings that we see in this video. It is very common to find more buildings below ruins. The Ness of Brodgar is a good example of this occurring in the Orkney Islands.

When it was built it was not on the coast . it was at least half a mile inland ... Over the last 6000 years the sea has changed the coastline...

It was not built next to the beach. It was built inland & the sea has eroded the coast.

5:20 hopi sipapu! they didnt need beds to be comfy they just clicked on it and then suddenly it was morning, or retrofitted as tomb later and the 'letters' are the name of the dead? 14:30 couldn't be St Brandanus' era?

It would be interesting to see if people that have lived there for generations have related DNA to those two female skeletons

This fascination we see with spheres and bowls and other mathematical forms may mean our ancient us had an enhanced mathematical capacity? Also evident in ancient Irish passage tombs as written about by J Swaggert.

The beach was not as close to the place 5000 years ago man , it was at least 5 miles away ...

1850 ... interesting year.

How tall were those women’s skeletons? Anything interesting about them?

I'll go for ancient tellytubbies

Hearth pronounced “harth” not “herth” please.

Did J.R.R.Tolkien visit skara brae.

The roof was probably made from conicle stones in some chambers and the other roof could have been made from Earth .. ??

Herth or harth?

How am I just finding out about this now? 😡

Would they have paid council tax

your telling me that there really were dwarfs/gnomes/hobbits. really they were just unusual humans

why should they shit in holes in their houses and have to dig and carry it to outside when they had pottery?

Ancient Serbs (Sarbs,sorabs,ras,tirasians,rusi,rasceni,)

I like your vids because I get to see the structures... But honestly you’re stretching your theories too far on this one. You do know that perhaps these days Egypt isn’t that far away but back then it was like another freaking planet in our solar system. Also not every stone age site has to have some ‘cosmological’ meaning.

An amazing place built in 1832 by welsh settlers who stayed here while they mined bronze ore from the caves near to the site. The name "Skara" comes from the sea food soup they would eat every morning.

Is it a thing to name children after places like this? my name is Brae, I also know that Brae means hillside or riverbank

I came in at 666 likes and 111 comments.... sorry to ruin this balance of power... 😄

Lots of guess work on this video ...

Ummm, I heard him say that he "imagined" that the roof was wood but it is well known that there was no wood on Orkney Island. Trees can't grow there because of the severe weather. Sounds like he could use a little more studying before he offers tours. I'll pass.

Australian Aborigines sometimes have reddish hair. So, unless there is more to suggest race, they should be careful. Everyone wants their ancestors to be the first colonizers everywhere, so they don't look like a tyrannical race dominant and exploitive of weaker peoples. Doesn't matter, all peoples initiate some violence in the name of conquest. No need to purify behaviors of the past. What's done is done.

There’s no peer-reviewed evidence whatsoever to suggest that Neolithic Orkney had any contact or cultural exchange with Egypt or the Americas. I respect your fascination with this site and your inquisitiveness but you are misrepresenting the actual history here in a way that is antithetical to true scholarship.

Seriously why talk about anything but skara Brae...it's enough why bring up every other culture?

Giant skeletons and out of place artifacts not supported by consensus expert opinion. You're the kind of person who has ruined the History Channel. Have a 👎

It's really sad how Europeans are so obsessed with these stacks of stones when real civilizations were already building pyramids and cities with running water and advanced medical technology that still hasn't been matched today.