Among the many amazing sights to be seen in this place are the Neolithic monuments. Everyone’s heard of Stonehenge in southern England, but not everyone knows that the British Isles are positively littered with stone age ruins.
Orkney, as you can see if you go to the site linked above and click on the right square, has a high concentration of ancient sites. On Mainland there is one part of the island (“Heart of Neolithic Orkney” on UNESCO’s World Heritage list) where there are many apparently related sites. There are henges, standing stones, and cairns that seem to point to each other and which thousands of years ago may have served as an integrated religious center for the region.
Maes Howe, the Standing Stones of Stenness, and Skara Brae are the best known of the Orcadian sites and are on most tourist itineraries. Visiting these sites means sharing the space with busloads of visitors, but they are still worth it.
But it’s more fun to go to the lesser-known sites, where you can have the place to yourself to imagine what it might have been like here thousands of years ago.
Lorna of Arabia 