Ring of Brodgar

The Ring of Brodgar stands on the narrow strip of land between the lochs of Harray and Stenness: originally around sixty stones inside a rock-cut henge ditch, of which twenty-seven survive, set out in a circle about a hundred meters across and raised in the centuries around 2500 BCE, though its exact date is one of British archaeology's open questions. With Maeshowe, the Stones of Stenness, Skara Brae, and the Ness of Brodgar digging a few hundred meters south, it belongs to the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, the densest Neolithic ceremonial landscape in the British Isles.

It is kept free and open year-round, and the right visit is the walk: out along the Ness between the lochs, around the ring itself, with the ditch visible as a deep green trench and the horizon all water and sky. The stones carry runic graffiti from Norse visitors centuries later, which says something about the length of the site's afterlife. What the ring was for is unknown; the honest framing is that the ditch, the scale, and the company it kept make the ceremony certain without telling us what it was.

Visiting

Historic Environment Scotland's Brodgar page carries the access: free, open year-round, car park at the site.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ring_of_Brodgar), CC BY-SA 3.0.