04/30/2026
These are the Standing Stones of Stenness, right at the heart of Neolithic Orkney. They're iconic, they're enormous and they're also the oldest stone circle anywhere in the British Isles.
Wait until you find out what happened them though...
There are four upright stones still standing at Stenness, the largest around 6 metres tall! Erected about 5400 years ago around a hearth with a surrounding ditch, we don't know what it was originally used for, but evidence suggests this was the very first one built anywhere.
From Orkney, whatever the idea was behind the Stones of Stenness spread, reaching right through Scotland, out to the Western Isles and all the way south past Stonehenge in England. This was a culture where Orkney was central rather than considered a far-flung archipelago!
Originally there would have been 12 standing stones here, plus an outlier with a hole in the middle that became known as the Odin Stone - a reminder of Orkney's Viking past. Even in the 19th century, locals would clasp hands through the hole to make oaths or confirm their engagements.
That all stopped in December 1814, when a Captain Mackay who had moved to Orkney and bought a farm claimed they got in the road of his plough and all the locals visiting were damaging his land. He began by smashing the Odin Stone into pieces before starting to topple the Stones of Stenness!
Luckily, he was stopped by the law before he got to all of them and it's safe to say his neighbours weren't pleased. There were more than a few attempts to burn his house down!
Walter Scott wasn't much better for the stones after declaring one of them as being part of an altar for human sacrifice. It was just his famous imagination running away with itself, but in 1907 somebody decided to reconstruct this altar from the smaller stones.
Nobody seemed to think it looked right and eventually, the altar slab was pushed over again, still lying where it fell. It doesn't need a strange mock-altar anyway, the Stones of Stenness are evocative enough as reminders of Scotland's most ancient civilization.
