Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on the west coast of Orkney’s Mainland, occupied roughly 3200 to 2500 BC and now recognised as the best-preserved prehistoric settlement in Western Europe — older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, and entirely unknown to anyone until a storm tore the sand cover off it in 1850. Today it’s managed by Historic Environment Scotland as part of the UNESCO-listed Heart of Neolithic Orkney, with a dedicated visitor centre, café and ticketed entry to the village and its replica house.

History of Skara Brae

The 1850 Storm and William Watt’s Discovery

William Watt, laird of the nearby Skaill estate and a keen amateur antiquarian, was the first to investigate after a severe winter storm in 1850 stripped the turf and sand from a grassy mound above the Bay of Skaill, exposing stone-built structures beneath. What the storm actually uncovered was what antiquarians of the time would have called a “kitchen midden” — a dense, artefact-filled mound of ancient domestic refuse — and it was Watt, living close enough at Skaill House to notice the change, who first investigated and found signs of substantial buildings beneath it.

The mound itself already had a name before anyone knew what lay inside it: locals called it “Skerrabrae” or “Skerrabra,” a name still in use into the 1950s and only later corrupted into “Skara Brae.” Its origin is debated, but the leading theory ties the first part to the Old Norse word “sker,” meaning reef or skerry — fitting, given a large rocky skerry sits at the southern end of the same bay — combined with the Scots word “brae,” commonly used in Orkney to describe a mound or hillock rather than its more familiar Scottish meaning of a hill slope. Long before anyone thought to excavate it, the mound already had a practical use of its own: Orcadian folklorist George Marwick recorded that local fishermen used it as a “meed,” a fixed landmark lined up visually against the nearby Row headland to help them navigate back to good fishing grounds — a small reminder that the site was a working part of the landscape for the local community centuries before it became an object of archaeological interest.

Watt excavated four houses — the structures now catalogued as Houses 1, 3, 4 and 5 — before his death in 1866; accounts differ slightly on exactly who worked alongside him, with some crediting the antiquarian George Petrie, who later presented the findings to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and others naming James Farrer, the English archaeologist who had separately discovered the nearby Neolithic chambered tomb of Maeshowe. Either way, at the time, the small team assumed they’d uncovered something far more recent than it actually was, since the true age of the site wasn’t established for decades; their notes on what exactly they found and where were, by most later accounts, frustratingly sparse. Watt kept many of the objects recovered during this period at Skaill House itself; a number were later donated to Stromness Museum, where several remain on display today, including a small carved item nicknamed the “Skara Brae Buddo,” which has become something of a visitor favourite, while further pieces are now held at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall on loan from Stromness. The site’s long burial under sand turned out to have an unexpected scientific benefit as well: Orkney’s naturally acidic soil normally destroys buried bone within a matter of generations, reducing it to a soft, cheese-like consistency if any survives at all, but the sand covering at Skara Brae created different conditions that preserved bone artefacts in unusually good condition, a detail that later excavators would come to rely on heavily.

The site was then left largely undisturbed for decades, though not entirely: records mention a further phase of excavation around 1913 by antiquarian W. Balfour Stewart, and it was in that same year that the site was plundered over the course of a single weekend by an unrecorded group who made off with an unknown number of artefacts. It has never been established whether the plunderers were connected to Stewart’s own work or were entirely separate opportunists — a loss that, frustratingly, was never properly documented at the time, leaving a permanent gap in what’s known about the site’s contents from that period. It took a second blow the following decade: in 1924, growing concern about the site’s exposure to the elements led the trustees of the Watt estate to place Skara Brae under the formal guardianship of His Majesty’s Commissioners of Works, the government body that would later become Historic Scotland, and within a year a fresh storm tore away part of one of the excavated houses, making the case for proper, funded intervention impossible to ignore. By the time that intervention finally arrived in the form of a professional excavation, the site had already survived a storm, an amateur dig, an unsolved theft, and a second storm — a rougher passage into the historical record than its serene, sand-preserved houses might suggest.

The Rediscovered Archaeologists

A set of black-and-white photographs from Childe’s 1929 excavation, showing him alongside four women at the dig site, had long been assumed to show local tourists or curious visitors watching the work — a caption in one published account of the dig had even labelled them “visitors” outright, and that description went largely unquestioned for decades. The first crack in that assumption came before anyone thought to formally investigate it: Mairi Davies, an archaeologist at Historic Environment Scotland, noticed that one of the women in the photographs was holding a trowel, hardly standard equipment for a passer-by. A closer look at the full set of images supported the same conclusion — the women are dressed neatly in the style of the period, in dresses, sweaters and hats, but their shoes are visibly caked in dirt, and several images show them down in the excavation pit itself rather than standing politely at its edge.

The identification effort accelerated in 2019, when Dan Hicks, a professor of archaeology at Oxford, shared the photographs online and asked for help working out who the women were. What followed was a genuine piece of crowdsourced detective work: other archaeologists and interested members of the public combed through the images, cross-referenced them against known photographs and records, and eventually connected them to a note scrawled on the back of one print, which identified the group simply as “Prof Childe” and “4 of his lady students.” From there, the women were tentatively identified as Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy and Margaret Cole — a piece of historical detective work that succeeded largely because enough people were willing to look again at an old assumption rather than simply repeat it.

Margaret Simpson’s own story, the best documented of the four, gives some sense of what the “visitors” label had obscured. She began studying at the University of Edinburgh in 1925, took Childe’s introductory archaeology class in 1928–29, and went on to take part in his excavations at both Skara Brae and the chambered cairn at Kindrochat in Perthshire — work for which Childe later credited her by name in his own monograph on Skara Brae, one of the few contemporary acknowledgements any of the women received. She’s since been recognised as the first of Childe’s students to secure permanent employment in archaeology, sometimes described as the first professional female archaeologist in Scotland; in 1930 she was appointed Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments and elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, following, by coincidence of family, in the footsteps of her great-great-uncle, the pioneering Edinburgh physician Sir James Young Simpson. Margaret Mitchell went on to appear in the photographic record of several more Childe-led digs across Scotland through the early 1930s, while Margaret Cole’s path diverged from archaeology altogether into a career in political writing — together, their varied trajectories are a reminder that “not enough evidence to name them” and “not considered worth naming” were, for decades, treated as the same thing, at a time when women’s contributions to archaeology were routinely left uncredited.

Skara Brae Visitor Centre

Verified against the official Historic Environment Scotland website (historicenvironment.scot), checked September 2026. Prices last checked: September 2026. Opening hours last checked: September 2026.

Skara Brae’s visitor centre is the starting point for every visit, and includes a short explanatory film, touch-screen presentations, a fact-finding quiz aimed at children and adults, and a display of artefacts recovered during the 1970s excavations. Because visitors can’t enter the original houses themselves — a rule that protects genuinely irreplaceable 5,000-year-old structures — a full-scale replica house sits just outside the centre, built to let people walk into a Skara Brae interior and see how the stone furniture, box-beds and hearth would actually have worked as a lived-in space. The centre also has a café (with reduced hours in winter) and a gift shop, and the path down to the actual village doubles as a timeline, marking out key moments in human history against how long ago the village was occupied.

Current opening hours are 9.30am to last entry at 4.30pm (site closes 5.30pm) from 1 April to 30 September, and 10am to last entry at 3pm (site closes 4pm) from 1 October to 31 March, with the site closed only on 25–26 December and 1–2 January. Skara Brae is genuinely popular, particularly from May to September and on days when cruise ships are in port at nearby Kirkwall or Stromness, and the car park has limited capacity — Historic Environment Scotland’s own advice is to book online in advance, both to guarantee entry on busy days and to secure a parking space, since walk-up visitors aren’t guaranteed either.

Skara Brae Tickets

From 1 April to 31 October, tickets booked online cost £14 for adults, £11 concession, and £8.50 for children aged 7 to 15; children under 7 go free but still need a ticket added to the booking. Walk-up prices are higher across the board — £16 adult, £13 concession, £9.50 child — which is the main financial incentive to book ahead, on top of the guaranteed entry. This ticket also includes entry to Skaill House, a 17th-century mansion a short walk from the visitor centre, though Skaill House is run separately and closes for the season after October, so tickets bought from 1 November to 31 March cover Skara Brae only, at a lower winter rate. Concession pricing applies to visitors aged 65 and over or those who are unemployed, on production of proof; it doesn’t extend to students. Historic Scotland members get free entry with a valid membership shown on arrival, and English Heritage, Manx National Heritage and Cadw members receive half-price entry in their first year of membership. If the village itself is closed for any reason, a reduced ticket is available on arrival covering the exhibition and visitor centre only.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Skara Brae important?

Skara Brae is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe, and it was already a thriving village before Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids were built — Historic Environment Scotland dates it to roughly 3200–2500 BC, centuries ahead of both. Because its stone houses, furniture and drainage survived almost intact under sand for thousands of years, it gives archaeologists an unusually direct, physical picture of ordinary Neolithic domestic life that most prehistoric sites can’t offer.

How old is Skara Brae?

The village was occupied roughly 3200 to 2500 BC, making it around 5,000 years old. Its original excavator, V. Gordon Childe, mistakenly dated it to the Iron Age in the 1920s; radiocarbon dating in the early 1970s corrected this and confirmed its true Neolithic age.

How was Skara Brae discovered?

A severe storm in the winter of 1850 stripped the sand and turf from a grassy mound above the Bay of Skaill, exposing the tops of stone structures beneath. William Watt, the local laird, began excavating shortly afterwards and uncovered four houses.

Did Skara Brae really have indoor toilets?

Several houses have small stone cells connected to a drainage system that runs out beneath the village, and Historic Environment Scotland’s own interpretation is that these “may have been” early indoor toilets. It’s a genuinely popular claim and a plausible one, but archaeologists treat it as an informed interpretation of the drainage evidence rather than a certainty, since no contemporary written record can confirm exactly how the cells were used.

How much are Skara Brae tickets?

From April to October, online tickets cost £14 adult, £11 concession and £8.50 child (7–15), with walk-up prices around £2 higher across the board. Winter tickets (November to March) are cheaper and cover Skara Brae only, since Skaill House closes for the season.

Can you go inside the actual houses at Skara Brae?

No — the original 5,000-year-old houses are viewed from a path that runs above and around the village, not entered. A full-scale replica house next to the visitor centre lets visitors walk inside and see how the interior, furniture and hearth would have worked.

Do you need to book Skara Brae tickets in advance?

It’s strongly recommended, and Historic Environment Scotland advises it directly. The site is popular in summer and on cruise-ship days, the car park has limited space, and booking online also guarantees entry and secures a cheaper price than paying on arrival.

For more of Scotland’s prehistoric and UNESCO-listed sites, browse the UNESCO World Heritage Sites collection or visit the Scotland hub. If you’re planning a wider trip to the Highlands and Islands, our guide to the Old Man of Storr on Skye covers another of Scotland’s most distinctive natural landmarks.