Sousterrain — An Underground Pict Dwelling in Orkney

Wikipedia map of Scotland, Orkney (highlighted), and the Shetlands.

Once the Ice Age glaciers retreated, humans moved into northern Britain and the nearby islands. The Neolithic (late Stone Age) culture quickly advanced up the islands of the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. The Megalithic culture came with it.

Map of the development of megalithic architecture in Stone Age Europe, details at Wikipedia.

                
Skara Brae on the largest island in Orkney was occupied roughly 3100-2500 BC. The Orkney Islands have a lot of sandstone that easily splits into useful thin slabs. These were used to build dwellings, many of them underground or at least partially so.

The Pictish people lived in eastern and northern Scotland from times before history until the 900s AD. They're fairly mysterious, little known as they left little language and next to no written records.

Remember the Pink Floyd song, "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict", from the 1969 Ummagumma album.

Kirkwall as seen from the west side of its harbor.

Kirkwall is the capital of the Orkney Islands and its largest town. That's a relative thing, this being Orkney, as the population of Kirkwall is about 8,500. Its name comes from the Norse, as do so many names in Orkney, from Kirkjuvgr meaning Church Bay. Kirkjuvgr was corrupted to Kirkvoe, then Kirkwaa. English cartographers mistook the corrupted Norse waa for the Scots wa, meaning wall, hence the current name.

Edinburgh Hotel Search

  Enter a city

Check-in

Check-out

Rooms :

Child

Adult(s)

1234

1

1

The Ordnance Survey maps, at least the highly detailed 1:25,000 one, shows some ancient structural remains labled sousterrain. Sometimes discussion of Neolithic and Iron Age cultures spells it souterrain, but I'm going with the Ordnance Survey map and the original French spelling.

That's French for "under the ground". What's a French-named "underground" ruin doing on islands off the north coast of Scotland?

Time to investigate!

A little investigation discovers that it's mentioned, at least slightly, in the local tourism information. There, they call it the Grain Earth House.

You can find it on the 1:25,000 Explorer map #461, Orkney — East Mainland or the 1:50,000 Landranger map #6, Orkney (Mainland).

First, get to Kirkwall. It's the transport hub of Orkney. So, as Orcadian transport goes, this is relatively easy. Then walk toward the northwest edge of town, in the direction of Stromness.

You're looking for the Ortak Visitor Centre and Factory, which is really just a large jewelery showroom. Go in there and ask for the keys and lantern for the sousterrain. I know this sounds like an awfully strange protocol for underground exploration, but that's really what you do.

The lantern is a fairly big thing, with a large 6-volt battery block. The keys are attached to a key fob that takes the bulky form of a one-kilogram block of brass.

Yes, that makes it very difficult to forget that you have the keys in your pocket and forget to return them.

The road through the industrial estate.

They will give you directions when you pick up the keys and lantern, but it's a simple route.

Continue down the waterfront road, then take the first road inland to your left.

This road goes up a slight incline through a light industrial area called the Hatston Industrial Estate.

There's a veterinary clinic, a place renting tools and trailers, various vehicle parts supply and repair places, and at least one place doing boat repair.

The exterior of the sousterrain.

You find the sousterrain right in front of a boat repair place.

There it is, enclosed in a black iron fence.

Right in front of a small ferry that's been hauled up here for repair.

The sousterrain structure as visible above ground.

You can see the sousterrain's shape before you open the outer gate.

A large hump is obvious from a distance.

Look closer. You can see a much lower sinuous ridge ending in a small round hump.

The sousterrain entrance.

Let's go in!

First, open the outer gate and go inside the fence.

You will see that there's a modern locked wooden door installed in the large entrance hump.

Entering the sousterrain.

Unlock and open that door, and realize why you have the big lantern.

Descending the sousterrain entrance stairs.

Start down the stairs.

The sousterrain goes deeper than you may have thought after seeing its appearance above ground.

The tunnel at the base of the entrance.

A square tunnel leads off to the left from the bottom of the entrance stairs.

It seems that sousterrain construction started by the excavation of a trench and pit, what would become a tunnel and dwelling or storage chamber, respectively.

The side walls were constructed from local stone, cut in this case into rectangular blocks.

A ceiling was built from large slabs. The slabs can span the narrow tunnel on their own. For wider spans, as in the main chamber, support columns would have been constructed first.

The resulting structure is then buried. The tunnel and main chamber may be visible as mounds above grade level, but you can see from this picture that the sousterrain itself is a buried stone structure. It's not simply a tunnel dug through the ground.

The sousterrain tunnel.

Turn to your left, and get ready to crawl.

This tunnel is about 1.5 meters tall by 1 meter wide. It curves along its length of approximately 10 meters.

You can see it curve slightly to the right, and you can see the block walls and rock slab roof.

The sousterrain tunnel opens into the main chamber.

As you go round the last bend you can see the opening into the main chamber.

The main chamber of the sousterrain.

The main chamber of the sousterrain is oval, about two meters wide and four meters long. The ceiling is just over 1.5 meters high, just slightly higher than the tunnel.

It's enough to make you gather together several species of small furry animals and groove!

Scotland and Orkney

An ascent of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain, overlooking Glen Nevis just outside Fort William.	The Road to the Isles, over 22 miles (37 km) overland across the high Scottish moors of Lochaber from Corrour Station to Fort William.	A trek through Glen Nevis and the Water of Nevis.
The Brealach Walk out of Pitlochry though the southern Highlands and past some megaliths.	Skara Brae, a Neolithic village on Orkney.	Neolithic Orkney: Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, and the Knowe of Onston.
West Coast Walk along the sea cliffs of Orkney's Mainland Coast.	Scapa Flow and the Churchill Barriers.	The Sousterrain, an underground Pictish dwelling in Orkney.
The Isle of Iona, and Oban and Mull.	The Grit Boxes of Scotland.	Navigating with the UK National Grid system and Ordnance Survey maps.

England

Walking along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.	Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and Durrington Walls.	Avebury, with its stone circles, Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, the Avenue and numerous tumuli, a much better collection of megaliths and structures than Stonehenge!
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford.	Dover's tunnels in the White Cliffs from World War II through the Cold War.	The Swingate Chain Home radar station near Dover.
The World War II glider base near Harwell, south of Oxford.	Bletchley Park, the secret installation where the British broke the German codes during World War II.	The Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill's emergency World War II government center underground in central London.
You could go to Lee Ho Fook's and get a big dish of beef chow mein.		What's the plumbing like?

Travel in the U.K. — places to stay, how to get around

Home Linux/Unix Networking Cybersecurity Travel Technical Radio Site Map Contact