Heart of Neolithic Orkney

The Heart of Neolithic Orkney is a name given to a collection of the most significant cultural monuments in Orkney (Scotland, UK), which was granted World Heritage Site status by UNESCO at the end of 1999. This followed an application process lasting more than ten years.

The original application covered only the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe Cairn. Later, the menhirs scattered between the large objects were added to cover the overall ensemble of the Brodgar-Stenness Area.

Following a final site visit in the spring of 1999, the ICOMOS International Council on Monuments and Sites endorsed the concept, but expressed regret that the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae had not been considered in the previous process. As a result, Skara Brae and the surrounding conservation area were included in the final designation of The Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site under national law.

Originally called the Neolithic Heart of Orkney, the monument is categorised as a group of sites under Article 1 of the 1972 World Heritage Convention and, as a whole, meets dedication criteria I to IV of the Convention.

As a result of this assessment, The Heart of Neolithic Orkney was confirmed as a World Heritage Site, the second of four complexes in Scotland at the time.

The categorisation as a group of individual objects and the spatial link to the two conservation areas prompted Scottish Executive to issue a protocol note after the official confirmation, which had not existed before: Scottish Executive declared as a kind of self-commitment to treat all cultural monuments of the areas concerned as World Heritage Sites in the narrower sense and to protect them accordingly - regardless of whether they were already known at the time of the declaration or have yet to be discovered. The first practical consequence of this was the Neolithic settlement in the Barnhouse area, just north-west of the Stones of Stenness: when the application was first submitted, Barnhouse had been located but not yet excavated and researched. The settlement is only mentioned in passing in the justification for World Heritage listing, but is now generally considered to be a World Heritage Site.

In the meantime, Scottish Executive and Historic Scotland as the responsible management agency have gone one step further in the spirit of the World Heritage Convention: An application is currently underway for a very substantial extension of the spatial scope, specifically to include the Ring of Bookan henge monument and adjacent cairns, the 3rd millennium BC Unstan Cairn, and the 2nd millennium BC Knowes o' Trotty (mounds) some three kilometres away to the northwest of Maeshowe.

For scientific research, the designation has been worthwhile in every respect. Since the designation, archaeological field research alone has received about three times more funding than in the comparable years before. This has enabled a number of teams to conduct research using state-of-the-art technology, largely free of the previously omnipresent cost pressure. The geophysical investigations of 2004 and 2005 alone revealed results that will probably lead to a complete reassessment of the situation on the Brodgar Peninsula in the long term. Amongst other things, it is fairly certain that within a dyke running north-west of Bookan across the peninsula, which was previously interpreted as a much younger field dyke (i.e. field or common boundary), at least one further, hitherto completely unknown Neolithic settlement has been discovered (probably even two), as well as several cairns and a number of hitherto unknown objects lying in the ground, probably conspicuously large stones with an unknown purpose.

The World Heritage Site is also a great success in terms of tourism. Orkney has almost the highest growth rates in the whole of Scotland, with around 20 per cent growth per year. A major contributor is the volume of cruise visitors, which has almost doubled in the period in question - and they all have the World Heritage Site as an integral part of their shore programme.

At the same time, however, the first massive problems for the maintenance and future conservation of the facilities arose. The condensation problems at Maeshowe, for example, developed so dramatically that daily visitor numbers had to be limited from the 2006 summer season onwards. Very similar problems are apparent for the outdoor facilities at Skara Brae and even the newly built Visitor Centre at the site there, although the neighbouring Skaill House has been marketed on an equal footing since its opening to the general public in order to equalise the flow of visitors to Skara Brae.

Descriptions of the individual objects can be found in the articles listed below: