Episode 1 Britain's Ancient Capital: Secrets of Orkney

Stonehenge,

on the plains of southern England.

Britain's most famous ancient monument.

But over 500 miles north,

new discoveries are being unearthed that challenge its supremacy.

How extraordinary.

And they're turning the Stone Age map of Britain on its head.

Could the centre of our ancient world

have been in the remote islands of Orkney?

A place cut off by the fastest flowing stretch of water in Europe.

I'm investigating how these far-flung islands may have forged

Britain's first common culture.

This isn't human sacrifice?

I'm joined by naturalist Chris Packham,

who'll discover how Orkney's environment played its part.

Look at that. Orkney vole.

This is more than an animal, it's a time traveller.

Engineer Shini Somara will uncover how the people of Orkney built the

extraordinary structures which might have shaped those far further south.

We tried to over engineer it!

And archaeological adventurer Andy Torbet

will climb its heights and plumb its depths

to understand how the landscape helped shape

the island's destiny.

It's remarkable to think that no one has looked down this view

for 3,500 years.

12 years ago,

a dig began that is challenging everything we know

about Stone Age Britain.

Now, we're joining the archaeologists

as the site yields up its secrets.

And together, we'll discover if far-flung Orkney

really dominated Britain for over a thousand years.

I'm heading to one of the most important archaeological excavations

in the world.

But this isn't Stonehenge, Machu Picchu or a pharaoh's tomb.

It's a small strip of land on the remote Orkney Islands.

When someone says, how important is Orkney archaeologically,

I struggle to find strong enough words.

But what was going on here was extraordinary.

There you go.

You can see the sea,

that is lochs Harray and Stenness, one either side.

And the narrow isthmus of land in between,

that's where the magic happens,

that is the Ness of Brodgar.

Every summer, hundreds of archaeologists and volunteers

vie for the chance to join this remarkable excavation

in the heart of Orkney.

And there's this season's archaeologists. Champing at the bit,

they are. God love them.

Nick Card. 'Nick is the dig director.'

-Pleased to see you again.

-Good to see you, too.

For ten months of the year,

the site is protected from the harsh Orkney elements.

It looks more like a scrapheap than one of the world's wonders.

As the covers come off, they reveal a prehistoric marvel.

Look at it.

As far as the eye can see, it's just structures and buildings.

All sorts of weirdness.

This is the 12th year of digging,

and they've already uncovered one of

the earliest stone building complexes in Western Europe.

Guarded at its east and west ends by stone circles,

the dig has so far revealed the remains

of at least 14 monumental stone buildings,

enclosed by a massive wall.

The Ness of Brodgar was a sophisticated feat of engineering,

at a time when most houses across Europe were built of wood.

4,000 years before the Battle of Hastings,

long before the invention of metalworking,

the ancient Orcadians built this remarkable complex

in a time known as the Neolithic, the new Stone Age,

when Britons first learned to farm.

It's currently dated at about 3000 BC,

but Nick suspects its origins go back even further.

You can look at the walls here,

the way they're kind of taking on this wave formation,

rising up and down.

And this is in fact because these structures

are collapsing and subsiding

into earlier structures underneath.

If we take a wander down here,

you can get a sense of the scale of this.

So we're walking down a slope, but you say this isn't natural,

this is all the work of people?

This is all man-made.

The scale of it's sometimes difficult to comprehend

because what you're looking at is a huge mound.

If that's the much later stuff, because it's on top,

how early is the first comprehensive building project?

Well, I think that's one of the crucial questions.

I think we know that the material we're dealing with up there

dates from about 3000 BC onwards.

But how much earlier it goes - that's one of the big questions,

to see when the Ness of Brodgar started.

What would be amazing is that definitive early date

from when they, as it were, first put a shovel in the ground

-and started work.

-I think that is one of the kind of key questions

for the Ness - when did it begin?

So a radiocarbon date would be fantastic.

If they started building at the Ness much earlier than 3000 BC,

it would support an exciting new theory.

That the people of these remote islands were the driving force

of a revolution.

A cult which swept Britain and culminated in Stonehenge.

To investigate this theory, the rest of the team are on their way.

Naturalist Chris Packham.

Engineer Shini Somara.

And archaeological adventurer Andy Torbet.

It's the first time any of them have visited the site.

This is incredible.

-It's huge.

-It's huge.

-Hello.

-Morning. Morning.

Chris. How do you do?

-What do you think?

-What a site!

-Hi.

-Astonishing.

And is this it, or does it... Is it larger?

It's much larger, it extends all the way from the farmhouse there right

away back to the bridge and basically from shore to shore.

Some of the preservation is just immaculate.

And it gives you this real sense of what these Neolithic people

experienced. You can walk into these buildings and get a true sense of

what they were like.

Do we know what the Neolithic people were doing here?

Well, I think the site was in use for well over a thousand years and

during that thousand years, its meaning, its function,

would have changed.

But I think you're looking at something to do with ritual religion.

Because here we are in the midst of all these great stone circles,

chambered tombs, etc.

I think this was a site of maybe pilgrimage

where people were coming from right the way round the archipelago.

But also from much, much further afield.

Is there anything like this anywhere else?

There's nothing like it in Britain

and there's nothing really like it in northern Atlantic Europe.

It's a one-off.

This place is absolutely incredible.

When you think about, it's 5,000 years old,

the level of engineering is just immense.

I mean, the walls are beautifully made, they're flush, they're flat,

but it's the size, the scale of how it's been done.

So this wall here is, I don't know, maybe ten, 12 feet thick.

That's like a castle wall.

It's an extraordinary privilege being here.

It looks so fresh, it doesn't look like it's, you know,

thousands of years old.

I mean, look at this.

The most exciting thing I've seen so far is this.

It's just five little depressions

cut into this stone as a little rosette.

I mean, who made that?

What were they thinking?

I wish I knew, I so wish I knew.

What fascinates me is the possibility

that in these two months that we have, we might be able to show

that ideas here might have been influencing

and shaping the rest of Neolithic Britain.

While the archaeologists hunt for evidence at the dig,

we start looking for clues as to what might have made Orkney special.

Chris and wildlife cameraman Doug Allan set out to look for what was

unique about Orkney's environment.

Andy and Shini investigate the other stone monuments

that surround the Ness.

And to try to understand what came before this revolution in stone

building, I'm going to explore one of the oldest structures

on these islands.

I'm heading from the mainland of Orkney to the island of Rousay.

Rousay's just a few miles long and yet on there are 160 registered

archaeological sites.

There's a one-mile stretch of coastline in particular

that I'm heading for

that has numerous chambered cairns, tombs for the dead,

just scattered along it.

And they've got wonderful names. Blackhammer cairn, Midhowe,

Knowe of Yarso, and one in particular that I want to see,

which is the Knowe of Lairo, the tomb of Lairo.

I'm going there to meet a farmer called Bruce.

Like so many farmers on the Orkney islands,

his land is just littered with archaeology.

-Morning, Neil.

-How're you doing?

-I'm fine, how are you?

-Lead the way, lead the way.

This one we're going to, Lairo, have you been in it?

I've never been in it, no.

-In all the years, no?

-Never been in it, no.

Even though it's in your back garden!

No. You know, there's cairns all over the place.

We look out the window and see three or four of them.

Just part of the rest of the landscape?

Yeah.

-Is that it there?

-That's it there.

-That's Lairo.

-That's Lairo.

'The tomb of Lairo may not look much from the outside,

'but its interior might provide some clues to the skills and souls of

'the first builders on Orkney.'

There we are, there's the entrance.

Look at that! Wow.

God, it's good. You've got to get in there!

-In you go.

-Aye!

I might put different trousers on!

It might be a bit dirty in there!

There you go. OK.

Right, I'll see you on the other side.

-Good luck.

-Thank you.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's amazing, these enormous capstones

over the top of the passageway.

Oh, my.

Oh, it's huge.

Oh, how extraordinary.

Look at the height of it!

Those big lintels going across the thing,

presumably to support the height.

These were built by the first farmers.

From about 4000 BC onwards, there's a desire to make a mark on

the landscape like this.

I mean, this is relatively simple stuff, it's big and it's heavy.

It's not terribly sophisticated.

'This tomb's intriguing.

'But it's as nothing to what the ancient Orcadians at the Ness

'created in their stone building revolution.'

What makes Orkney special, really special, is around 3000 BC,

for some reason that we don't yet understand, the Orcadians

made a big change and they started building on a massive scale.

And the burial chambers they started constructing were far more

technologically sophisticated

and they were much, much bigger than this.

The biggest of them all can be found just half a mile away from the dig

at the Ness.

It's called Maeshowe.

There it is.

Here it is.

There's a lot of work has gone into that.

Wow.

Some of these stones are absolutely massive.

Look at this one! There's no break in this one, this one's just solid.

Oh, Andy, look at this!

This is so impressive.

Beautiful.

Gorgeous.

Just how difficult would it have been to build something like this?

What they did was this corbelling effect

where they're basically stacking

one on top of the other, on top of the other,

to create this arch that you can see.

Well, they didn't make their jobs easy,

cos these are huge pieces of stone.

This is probably about six tonnes.

This goes back, I don't know what, about ten, 15 feet?

I mean, it's huge.

I don't know how Neolithic communities would have moved a stone

this big up to these sort of heights.

You know, 25 feet off the ground.

It would have taken thousands and thousands of man-hours to build

-something like this.

-And what I can't believe is that they

were able to achieve something like this just with stone tools.

-Yeah.

-That's what blows my mind about this.

Maeshowe is a truly sophisticated structure.

It shows just what the ancient Orcadians at the Ness were capable

of building.

And their ambition didn't stop there.

They also created monumental stone circles.

Just 500 metres away from the Ness are the Stones of Stenness.

Four of the original 12 stones survive.

The tallest is four metres high.

You know, we're 21st-century people and we're used to towering

skyscrapers, and yet

don't you think that just a single shard of stone erected in the grass

like this is every bit as impressive?

At the other end of the isthmus is the Ring of Brodgar.

Originally, there were 60 of these giant megaliths,

quarried and somehow brought here from different corners of Orkney.

Hundreds of stone circles were built across the British Isles from around

3000 BC, including the most famous of all, Stonehenge.

We've never come close to understanding their origin,

until now.

The latest evidence suggests the further north you go,

the older these mysterious stone circles become.

So could the stone circle revolution have begun here,

with the people of the Ness of Brodgar?

For this to be true, the origins of the Ness

must be older than 3000 BC,

the date of some of the circles further south.

Archaeologist Hugo Anderson-Whymark

is stripping back the soil to find the very first layer

people built on at the Ness.

We're in a small test pit -

it won't be that many days before we reach the layer we're really

interested in.

And we really hope that the charcoal with it is suitable

for dating so that we can actually get a date for that lowest deposit,

which should be the earliest occupation at the Ness of Brodgar.

I've been coming here for nearly a decade and I'm not alone -

taking part in this dig is a royal badge of honour for archaeologists

and students who come from all over the world.

Why did they have the need to have this here?

This is fantastic.

But I think what is interesting and what is eternal...

HUBBUB OF CHAT

A symmetrical series of five little cuts...

I can handle midges. They're just little, little bite.

Midges kill more people in Scotland than...

-than road traffic accidents!

-You just made that up!

You made that up! You had to think about that.

The pause gave it away.

So, is this your first year here?

-Yep.

-And what's the latest theory on what it is?

I think this is about impressing people.

And so this actual location is quite impressive,

so you've got both the lochs either side

and then it's pretty much you can see it from surrounding hills.

The day dawns fair.

In the finds hut, Chris is examining the animal bones found on the site

because he believes they hold vital clues to Orkney's central role.

This is only a tiny percentage of the overall assemblage,

but there's quite a number of different species represented here.

This is a cattle bone, isn't it?

You can tell from the sheer size of it, it's huge.

The team's discovered thousands of cow bones,

evidence the Neolithic people here were cattle farmers.

But it's one of the smallest specimens that Chris is drawn to.

Well, for me, this is the most exciting.

This is the skull of a vole,

and I can tell that because of the characteristic zigzag root of the

molars there. And its large size points to Orkney vole.

Yeah, so I've never handled an Orkney vole skull before.

Mr Buckley, my biology master, would be very envious,

we used to be ferociously competitive about who found the best skull.

And these are very interesting animals,

particularly from a Neolithic perspective.

I'd love to get to know more about them by meeting a living one rather

than just handling the skull.

They've discovered the bones of hundreds of these voles here.

But it's a mystery.

The Orkney vole has never been found anywhere else in Britain,

so how did it get here?

To investigate,

Chris is heading to the moors where the Orkney vole

survives to this day.

-Lead the way.

-OK, follow me.

Zoologist Xavier Lambin has been monitoring

the vole population by setting capture traps.

Wildlife cameraman Doug Allan has come along

to film this brief encounter.

That could be the wind, or a slug!

It's a vole, yeah. Yes!

Hold on, while I just...

Get ready.

-OK, go for it.

-Are you ready?

-Yes.

Look at that!

It's your first Orkney vole.

It's the first Orkney vole.

That's the one.

Microtus arvalis orcadensis.

Wow! And this is a sub adult, because they do grow to much larger?

Yes, 60, 80g.

So that would be an adult-sized field vole,

a common vole on mainland Europe.

-Yeah.

-I can hear him squeaking!

-That's a young female.

-It's a young female?

Yeah.

So she hasn't bred this year.

-Do I need a glove, do you think?

-This one is a little bit nippy.

If I was you I would put a glove on, unless you are a very tough man!

He needs the gloves.

Have you got any of these shark-proof gloves you wear underwater?!

Maybe even safer!

Ah, Doug, we've been friends for so many years,

it's all coming to a horrible end!

Look at that!

Orkney vole in the hand.

Mammal tick for Chris.

Oh, superb!

Bio archaeologist Keith Dobney has been researching the Orkney vole and

thinks he's discovered where they came from.

Hello, Keith.

Because they don't occur anywhere else in the UK or Ireland...

-And never has.

-And never has, as far as we can tell from the record.

Only in this little northern island archipelago.

It means they've come from somewhere, and they don't swim,

which got archaeologists interested in using them as a proxy for

understanding when and where people brought them.

And carbon-14 dating has shown that the earliest voles we have in Orkney

have been from more or less the early middle Neolithic.

Which means the earliest farmers brought them here.

They were brought from somewhere in Europe to Orkney by people.

So where did these people, and their voles, come from?

OK, so here's a map of where they occur.

I mean, they occur all the way from Spain, up through France,

-into Eastern Europe.

-And you can see this nice blank area,

the whole of the UK and Ireland is absent.

So, where do they come from?

Well, we can look in more detail at the sequences

that are extracted from the nuclear DNA

and look for the subtle differences that we find in the DNA chains.

OK, so this is modern Orkney vole?

This is a part of the DNA sequence of an Orkney vole.

Let's look at the vole, the common voles from Denmark.

And yes, there's a lot of similarities.

The red, the As, the Cs.

But you can see here and there,

there are mutations which have occurred

which make them differentiate from the voles from Denmark.

So, let's look at some from the Spanish group.

Again, we can see mutations which showed quite a lot of difference.

Yes, a difference here and here.

Exactly. OK, so not from Spain. But if we look at Belgium...

We see that they are the closest match we have across the board.

And Belgium is the closest living population today

that matches almost the same, not quite identical,

as the Orkney populations of common voles.

Do you know, I've always said that my favourite British mammals have

been foxes. I live amongst those.

Or pine martens, because they're fantastically attractive and rare.

But they might have both been usurped by the Orkney vole!

Because this is more than an animal, it's a time traveller.

It's telling us about ourselves and how we moved across Europe

in the distant past. Fantastic.

The time travelling voles suggest that, for some reason,

people were drawn here from mainland Europe across hundreds of miles of

sea and one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world,

the Pentland Firth.

Whatever was happening here thousands of years ago

surely meant that Orkney was a magnet, a go-to destination,

for people from far away.

At our base above the Ness of Brodgar,

Chris reports back to us on his findings.

Doug and I can throw some light on the movement of people and culture

through the most unlikely source, Doug, the Orkney vole.

The Orkney vole, a great wee beastie, wasn't it?

It's fantastic.

So this animal somehow got from continental Europe to Orkney

about 5,500 years ago.

Without coming through...?

Without coming up through here.

So it somehow bypasses the whole of the island of Britain,

but makes its first landfall here?

It does. So they were brought,

they were transported at that time from somewhere in Europe.

Are the voles being brought deliberately,

or are they accidental tourists?

Well, here's some ideas.

They could be an accidental introduction,

because they could have been carried in animal fodder.

If people were bringing domestic stock here

they would clearly need to feed them en route.

And they might have got mixed up in the hay, some young animals,

there's that thought. They could have been brought as food.

The Romans ate small mammals, dormice, as we know.

Though I think if I were eating one as a snack, if I was carnivorous,

I'd probably only need about three.

Or maybe four.

And then the last reason, this sounds slightly absurd,

they could have been brought as pets.

What this potentially shows us,

the transport of this humble little rodent,

is that Orkney had connections to Europe which the rest of the UK

potentially didn't have.

How fascinating that a creature as humble as the vole

has so much to tell us about the movement of people

and the movement of the cultures that the people had.

There's no doubt that Orkney was a special place.

But why? You know, look at it, it's a little archipelago of islands

on the edge of Britain.

Why was this the pivot point for something so special?

Well, for me,

you've got to look at the resources they had at their disposal.

You know, the most impressive,

the most obvious thing today is the architecture,

the things they built out of the rock.

So I'm going to take a closer look at the rock.

And the size of the stones.

I mean, it's baffling how people alone could have moved

these mammoth objects.

I think I know the reason why we sometimes perceive as Orkney

being on the edge of the map.

Is that these days we perceive it as a place which is cold, wet, windy.

A place which is hard to live,

certainly hard to live in the Neolithic.

But was it? Was it cold, wet and windy then?

What was the climate like?

We head out to investigate.

These really do look like the Stones of Stenness.

-Gentlemen.

-Hiya.

Thank you for coming.

Doug's heading for one area of Orkney where the environment hasn't

changed for thousands of years.

The island of Hoy is home to

Orkney's only surviving ancient woodland.

HE LAUGHS

I used to like Hoy, now I'm not so sure!

This is more like it.

Into Orkney's only forest.

And you know something?

It's great.

It's so unlike any other part of Orkney.

I mean, just a profusion of growth here,

it's just absolutely remarkable.

You know, it's like a completely different landscape.

You get so accustomed to the big wide open vistas

and then you just come into this valley and boomph,

you're fighting your way through something

that's more akin to the jungle.

Not just with the plants, but also these biting midges!

I'd forgotten what they were like!

Places like this, obviously there were more of them,

but it must have been an attraction to live near them,

to have all these resources close at hand.

And maybe even to have somewhere that you could get out of the wind.

You know, the wind is really wearing day after day.

You come into one of these little copses

and you're much more comfortable, you're much warmer.

Doug's fled the midges and returned to the hills above the Ness to

discover what the landscape was like around here

when the Ness was at its peak.

Caroline, good to see you.

Caroline Wickham Jones is an expert on the evolution of this landscape.

You see the Peninsula down there, that's where it's all happening.

We know that it's a slightly warmer climate, less wind,

you'll be pleased to hear!

So it's actually a more benign climate in those days?

Absolutely, yes, yes.

Now, if I was standing here 5,000 years ago,

it would have looked a lot different from today, wouldn't it?

Yes, it would have been very different.

To start with, the loch levels are slightly lower.

So the neck of land on which the archaeological sites sit

is maybe twice as wide. There is much more wetland.

It's not this sort of big open expanse of water with clean edges.

Would there have been more woods around here at that time?

Yes, definitely.

I mean, Orkney at one point was covered by woodland.

The woodland gradually goes.

We know that's a mixture of natural causes, climate change,

a bit more difficult for trees to grow, and the farmers opening it up.

So when the farmers come, there's more woodland,

by the end of the Neolithic, the woodland's more or less gone.

So 5,000 years ago, the warmer, less windy, climate

was an ideal environment for the people of the Ness to farm in.

Once the woodland was cleared, this became rich pasture,

perfect for cattle.

But without wood, the ancient Orcadians had to find an alternative

building material.

What they turned to matched their wealth and ambition.

And triggered their building revolution.

Stone.

Building in stone without metal tools is a remarkable feat.

The geology of the island may explain how they did it.

And give Andy a chance to test his climbing skills.

He's heading to the island's west coast with a team of experts

to investigate.

I think that's about it, Andy.

It starts to get a bit too soft there.

-OK.

-So I think this is where we grab the bags and...

-Start walking.

-Go on foot, I think.

-OK.

Well, we just see the top of it.

I can just see, that's it.

So that, that's the mission.

What I want to do is I want you guys to get me to the top of that.

Orkney's famous for sea stacks.

Including the Old Man of Hoy.

But as far as Andy's concerned, that's for wimps!

Only a handful have ever climbed this.

North Gaulton Castle.

55 metres of sheer rock, carved from the cliff face,

laying bare the bones of Orkney.

That's a core sample of the geology on this island.

It looks a lot different up close than it does in pictures,

to be fair!

Less than ten people have ever been on that.

And the main reason, or the main reasons are, its location.

I mean, it's surrounded by that foaming sea.

So the options to get onto a stack, either you get in the sea,

-swim across...

-That's what I was thinking, but look at it now.

There's not a chance we'd go in there in that.

The only other option is, potentially,

is to string a rope across.

But it's absolutely enormous.

It's the only way to reach the stack.

A technique known as a Tyrolean traverse.

If you imagine the bay is basically the shape of a horseshoe

with the sea stack right in the middle,

the plan is to lay a rope across almost the tips of that horseshoe

and that'll give us access to the sea stack.

We need to get these ropes into space.

-OK.

-So, from that point to that point.

When you're on it, it is so exposed.

I mean, you're totally in space across a yawning sea, you know.

So it's very dramatic.

There's a beautiful flat ledge,

it's about the size of a dining table, just down there.

And that's what we're aiming for,

that'll be our start point to then climb up the top of the sea stack.

After three hours,

a rope over 300 metres long has been stretched across the bay.

But there's a problem.

That rope is being pushed up against the cliff by the wind coming in off

the sea. There's just no way on earth

we'll be able to reach the sea stack.

Mark, what do you reckon to the wind conditions?

I reckon it's blowing about 30, 35 mile an hour now.

So we want it to drop to maybe half that.

We can't actually get onto the ledge at the minute,

so it's too windy right now. So it really needs to drop.

An attempt on the stack today is impossible.

So the team make camp on the clifftop,

hoping tomorrow may bring a break in the weather.

So we'll have to see what the morning brings.

Early morning, and I've come back to see how Hugo's getting on with

excavating down to where the first people built at the Ness.

Oh! Look at that.

That's a wonderful find!

That is a beautiful flint scraper.

-My goodness.

-It's a fantastic little find.

Every once in a while, something leaps out.

"Oh, no, that's man-made!"

From this particular layer, I've had one other flint.

But we've not had too many.

And this is quite interesting, I think, this flint.

That's more characteristic of early Neolithic scrapers.

So, yeah, I think that's quite an important find, actually.

Hugo is now only inches away from the earliest layer of occupation.

It won't be long now before we can, if we're lucky,

get a date for when this whole remarkable place began.

After a night on the clifftop,

Andy hopes he'll finally be able to examine up close

the natural resource used by the builders of the Ness of Brodgar.

It is perfect, there's only like one or two mph wind.

It's not even touching the rope, the rope is perfectly still,

and it's lying right on the line we want.

There's always that feel of anticipation, excitement.

This is proper, natural, roller-coaster ride.

Yeah, we're sorted.

Yeah?

OK, Andy, you just call the shots.

OK, here we go.

-Fantastic stuff!

-Just haul yourself across, mate.

-Yeah.

-Stunning view!

-Pretty exhilarating, huh?

Here we are. Just...

All right?

Yes. Two seconds.

If anything,

you know, it would be quite nice to stop just halfway across and just

enjoy the view! Beautiful.

It's quite an impressive place to be, isn't it?

Oh, yes, it's unique.

So, picture the scene.

It's 390 million years ago,

and we're actually stood at the bottom of this massive lake

that covers this entire area.

And actually, where Scotland at that point was almost at the equator.

And all the rock here is sediment that was laid down at the bottom of

that lake. And that builds up and builds up over millennia.

And that's why you can see on the sea stack these different coloured

bands, sort of grey bands, of that sort of slow, fine-grained,

almost mud sediment.

And then the reddy brown ones are the sand sediment.

Climbing!

Here we go!

The stack is a core through one million years

of accumulated layers of sand and silt.

Compressed over hundreds of millions of years,

different types of sediment form into distinct slabs of rock.

We've hit a layer that is quite brittle, actually.

Which is a bit less pleasant to climb on.

Oh!

OK, that's...

Just goes to show how fragile the rock is in places.

Got to be a little bit careful.

It's mostly solid, but clearly this band here is...

..not quite as solid!

It's the way these sedimentary bands are laid down that made them such

an extraordinary resource for the ancient Orcadians.

Now, look at this. This is a perfect example of the sort of building

material they would have used.

You've got this sort of obvious big thick band here.

But there's vertical sort of fractures as well.

They'd have kind of exploited these natural cracks to chip away

and quarry this stuff out.

I mean, that is a Neolithic building block right there,

just waiting to be plucked out and used in something.

Oh, beautiful!

That was awesome.

-Nice one.

-Thank you very much.

Cheers, fellas, that was awesome.

Orkney's unique geology created an amazing raw material

for this building revolution.

But it was before metal tools,

so how did they extract these natural slabs?

Shini's at a modern Orkney quarry

with owner Roy Brown and archaeologist Hugo.

Here, the sandstone pavement has been exposed.

It's amazing. You can see the straight lines.

Yeah, that's all naturally occurring.

There'll be just a little bit of clay or silt in the lines.

What I really want to know is how did they get the stone

out of the ground?

We can give it a shot, see how we get on?

-We're going to have a go?

-We're going to have a go, yes.

Let's do it!

They're starting to go in.

It's starting to split already, I can see it breaking apart.

I think it is starting to move slightly.

They wouldn't have used a metal hammer, though?

-Oh, not at all, no.

-No, no, in the Neolithic,

you'd have had a piece of deer antler.

That would have been your hammer. Or a stone pebble -

to drive the wedges in.

-Can I use that?

-Yeah.

Give each one a...

Yeah, go to the next one now.

Maybe that one. It's starting to lift there.

-See the difference there, it's starting to rise up.

-Yes!

I'm amazed at how easily this is lifting off the ground.

It looks like a standing stone is just rising.

It's a very prehistoric experience!

Yeah, especially using this!

I think we're going to get an incredibly big

slab of stone.

It'll be as big as any standing stone on Orkney.

Yeah.

We've got quite a kind of pressure line here.

Oh, yeah. It's cracked along there, indeed.

-Yeah.

-We're not going to get our standing stone out today.

-No.

-Let's try something else here,

maybe what they would have done in the past.

Let's try this, see if we can...

Ah, a bit of levering!

A bit of leverage, yeah.

There we go, that's it out.

-It's free.

-Gosh!

Can I stand on that?

Oh, yes, go on.

Gosh, that really gives you a sense of just how heavy it really is.

Right, now I want to know exactly how they would have actually

transported something like this. I mean, this is a small piece,

imagine transporting a gigantic standing stone!

Geological analysis of Orkney's stone circles suggests that some of

the vast monoliths were moved seven miles.

The only way to understand how ancient Orcadians achieved such

a mammoth task is to try it.

Shini's assembled a team of archaeologists and locals to attempt

to move this stone a few hundred metres.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you so much for coming.

So, there's wood over there, there's rope.

I'm pretty confident we can do it.

So this piece of stone, being three metres,

probably weighs about 1.5 tonnes, maybe more than that.

So it's a gigantic piece,

we're really going to need a lot of, you know, manpower to move it.

Anyone got any suggestions of how we start?

Could we create a sledge and then pull it?

You've got to elevate it from there to get the thing,

to put a sledge underneath it in the first place.

You need to slide it off onto the grass with a lever onto rollers,

-on the flat grass.

-On the flat grass.

Back end levered up, one underneath, put the others in, roll it.

Turn it round the corner and then go in sideways.

-No fingers underneath!

-They're not.

-No hands underneath!

-They're not!

After having broken a piece of stone off myself, and, you know,

thinking that that was impossible, and managing it,

I'm really confident that we're going to be able to move this.

So now we're just securing the braking system,

because we need to have control over this.

Cos once it starts sliding over the timbers,

we don't know how fast it's going to travel.

Is everybody ready?

One, two, three!

Stop!

The system of rollers works...

One, two, three!

..when gravity is on your side.

-Stop!

-Stop!

But it's all a bit stop start.

One, two, three!

Ancient Orcadians needed to drag their stones

over much rougher terrain, and far longer distances.

One, two, three!

-Stop!

-They wouldn't have been doing this on a green field, would they?

-No, absolutely.

-So what was the surface going to be?

A pasture! A bit rocky, a bit dodgy.

A bit rocky, a bit heathery.

Yeah, yeah.

But modern Orcadian ingenuity comes up with an unlikely solution.

My great uncle back in the day used to tell stories of when they used to

move all these things, they used to use seaweed as a lubricant.

-Seaweed?

-Yes.

It's greasy, made of fat, so less friction.

So hopefully make pulling a bit easier.

Yeah, we'll try it.

So what was your uncle trying to move with this?

-Flagstones.

-Flagstones?

Yeah. Not so thick, but same size, much thinner.

It actually seems like a really obvious solution because seaweed has

alginates in it which makes it very gelatinous and slippery.

But at the same time, it's strong.

Andy, do you want to call us in on this?

Give us a count down?

Everybody ready?

All right. On three.

One, two, three!

Ultimately it boiled down to just dragging a stone along seaweed.

That's all it was. We tried to over engineer it!

Ready, jump! Jump! Jump!

Well, we tried many methods and, amazingly,

it was this stuff that actually proved to be the most effective.

-No way!

-And, you know, just kelp.

Do you mean because it's like a naturally slippy,

slimy lubricant material?

-Yes.

-It's designed so that when it's being, you know,

thrown around in the currents,

these leaves effectively don't abrade one another.

And if you've got the people,

if you can inspire the people to come together,

you've got the manpower,

you know, here at that time.

You have to allow for the possibility that what mattered more

than completing the task was the act of bringing people together

in large numbers to do something.

Because while the people are together,

you can achieve other things.

You know, you can find wives for your sons,

you can find husbands for your daughters, you can trade tools.

That can all happen because all the people have been gathered together

-in one place.

-And that was the most endearing part of the day.

Because we started out trying to move a stone.

You know, 1.7 tonnes, we'll all get together and do that.

By the end of the day, it became our stone.

At the Ness, Hugo is back in his test pit.

And close to the earliest layer.

It's a crucial moment.

If the team can prove people were building at the Ness much earlier

than 3000 BC,

it's strong evidence that the stone circle revolution that swept Britain

and produced Stonehenge started here in Orkney.

But to get a date, Hugo needs organic material.

We're finally just about two centimetres from the very bottom.

And yeah, we've got an incredibly rich deposit of,

very dark sort of deposit here, full of charcoal.

Occasional bits of very degraded bone in it as well.

And a few flints coming up as well.

It certainly seems we're in some quite early archaeology down here.

Yeah, this certainly is the one we want to sample.

You can see all the black flecks in the surface there.

It's going to be a very good material for dating, potentially,

if we can get a big enough piece.

The black flecks of charcoal are what Hugo has been looking for.

They contain carbon -

the archaeologist's golden ticket to nailing down a definitive date for

the origin of the Ness.

This will go back to Kirkwall, to our environmental team, who will

put it through a flotation machine which basically is full of water and

all the soil will drop to the bottom,

all the charcoal will float to the top.

And then they'll skim that off and dry it out.

And that should give us the material that we want to date.

Another recent discovery suggests Orkney may have been not just the

originator of this culture, but the centre of its whole way of life.

I'm heading to one of Orkney's most remarkable settlements.

Skara Brae is a Neolithic village, and it is rightly world famous.

And when you see it, it's breathtaking.

I'll be honest, don't tell anyone,

but there's always been a sort of 1% of me that thinks it's so good that

somebody actually did it as a stunt!

I've always felt it looks so perfect that somebody had to have made it

almost like a film set.

It's like the Shire, it's like Tolkien's Hobbiton.

It's an extraordinary place.

-You first.

-You go.

'Mike Parker Pearson oversaw recent excavations that revolutionised our

'understanding of ancient Britain's most famous monument,

'over 500 miles south.

'Stonehenge.

'His findings there have led him here.

That's right, it's this way, isn't it? That's a good start!

Oh, I do love ignoring a no admittance sign!

-That's it.

-Makes my heart beat faster!

Yeah.

It's just the cosiest place on earth, isn't it?

It's amazing.

It's certainly not the easiest place to get in and out of.

No, but they were a little slighter of build!

It's quite extraordinary, isn't it?

It never fails to impress, does it?

Look at this, these stone beds, these box beds.

There's an element of the bizarre about it.

-Yeah.

-The very idea of a stone bed!

I know. I know, cos you would have to pack it with something nice

-and soft and springy.

-That massive hearth, huge fire.

Yes, they must have been fairly toasty in here, even in the winter.

And then this huge display case!

I mean, we call these dressers.

-Yeah.

-Until recently we thought this was the only place where you would

find such things.

Have you ever seen anything like it?

Well, we've seen something very similar, but in different materials,

near Stonehenge. You can see in this plan.

Oh, yeah.

So we have the central hearth and then the slot for each of

the beds on either side.

-Yeah.

-And here,

three holes within this slot for a dresser made out of timber,

we reckon.

So it's the same, except the building material in your house

is timber, and other organics, and here, it's stone.

Yeah. And they've even gone for the rounded corners

in what's an otherwise square building.

We're fairly sure that this idea has been transplanted from here,

not just to Stonehenge, but the whole of Britain.

That's amazing. So that's, how many hundreds of miles is that from here?

Exactly. Yes,

it's over 500 miles away

and what's really interesting is that this is

the place that this particular style of architecture started.

And this is the first time that we see in Britain, in prehistory,

that there is a shared common culture.

So it's a really important moment.

What Mike's saying is that everyone's getting their furniture

from IKEA, but 5,000 years ago.

There's an awareness of what you're supposed to have,

how you're supposed to live,

what shape your house should be and what the furniture in your house

should look like.

And that that idea presumably seems to have started here

on Orkney, is breathtaking.

These islands were the origin of the first united culture of Britain,

thousands of years before the United Kingdom came into being.

Well, I've just been with Mike Parker Pearson visiting Skara Brae.

It's so clear that there is a communication of ideas between

north and south. The stone circles that are scattered across

the length of Britain, the earliest of them seem to be up here.

That idea began in Orkney and spread.

This time I've spent with Mike today

suggests that the house plans from places

like Skara Brae also began here and then travelled south.

You know, Orkney is radiating ideas.

So, Orkney is the cultural centre of Britain?

It's beyond speculation that in the Neolithic,

Orkney was the centre of something.

An idea or a series of ideas, a way of living,

evolved here and its influence

spread the length of the long island of Britain.

If Orkney was the source of that civilisation,

was the Ness of Brodgar its epicentre?

Currently, the 3000 BC date for the Ness

is not early enough to prove

this remarkable complex could have been the driving force behind

the stone circle revolution.

But that was before Hugo's radiocarbon sample

was delivered to the lab.

I've had an e-mail of the results of the radiocarbon sample that we took

from the sondage, the deep trench.

I think they're interesting,

I'm just going to go and see what Nick and Dave think.

Nick, Dave.

This may be of interest to you.

It's the radiocarbon dates from there.

-The dates?

-Yeah.

-And?

-So, there we go,

the earliest possible date for Neolithic activity here at the Ness

is 3512 years BC.

Very early, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Wow.

-So those dates are almost exactly what we were looking for.

-And that's early.

-That is early.

We've always said that the buildings up there on the Ness dated from

around 3000 years BC, that's 5,000 years old.

That's fantastically old.

But now, because of the radiocarbon dates that have come up this summer,

we know absolutely that there was serious business going on here,

serious building, 500 years before that.

Now, archaeologists bandy time periods like 500 years

as though they don't count for much.

But think what that means.

That means we've gone back from the present-day

to the time of the Tudors.

That's the significance of going back a further 500 years.

It pushes back the foundation of the Ness of Brodgar

to way before Stonehenge.

It gives weight to the idea that the Ness was the beating heart,

the beginning, the capital,

the wellspring of Britain's very first common culture.

-Next time...

-We've got to try and build and design a Neolithic boat.

The team investigate how the ancient Orcadians navigated across

the dangerous Pentland Firth.

A huge volume of water is being squeezed into a tiny space.

How they used the surrounding resources.

This whole beach is a great big natural larder.

And we uncover human remains.

It's great, isn't it? That they're sending us, you know,

a message from their present to our present.