Pentland Firth
Pentland Firth
Is it possible that Neolithic people may have been able to walk over land, between Caithness and Orkney, that has since been scoured away by Ocean currents? The arrow on the map is the most likely location for such a passage of land.
This is a view of the Pentland Firth from a settlement called Skarfskerry, on the North Coast of Caithness in Scotland.
The low headland across the water is a neighbouring piece of Scottish coast and beyond that, at the horizon left of view, and almost invisible, is Orkney, an archipelago that sits beyond the northernmost coast of the Scotland.
Orkney is renowned as the home of a Unesco World Heritage site. The islands were occupied over 5000 years ago by Neolithic people who created a group of settlements and monuments of a complexity and quality not surviving anywhere else in Britain at such an early date.
The Pentland Firth here that separates Scotland from Orkney is a strait of water about 8 miles wide, and is famously dangerous.
The average speed of water running through the Firth can reach 4 nautical miles per hour, and also a peak speed, in places, of 12 nautical miles per hour.
Watching the waters of the Firth from the safety of a capable boat is disconcerting as there are treacherous whirlpools and glassy surfaces where it is hard to imagine what turbulence might be happening beneath the vessel.
Even today with modern craft, the unpredictable nature of the seaway can cause real problems for seafarers.
Skarfskerry, the village where the above photograph is taken from, is a straggling group of dwellings dotted along the North coast of Caithness.
Caithness, the northern most county in Mainland Scotland, is otherwise a bare, some would say barren, landscape.
Here there are very few people, towns are small, and “Civilisation” is miles away.
In prehistory there is no evidence of any greater density of Neolithic population in Caithness than elsewhere in Britain, yet people are thought to have looked across to Orkney in the early years of the spread of farming practices, and decided to make boats and cross the Pentland Firth to establish communities there.
When these people arrived in Orkney they built settlements where they are thought to have farmed domestic animals, including pigs, cattle, and sheep.
Some of these animals are thought to have been domesticated locally, but others, like sheep would have been brought in to Britain by migrants from Europe.
The date at which this journeying is calculated to have happened is from 3500BC, a period known as the Early Neolithic, in Britain.
In the absence of actual evidence it is difficult to see how the import of domestic animals across a substantial waterway, like the Pentland Firth or the English Channel, was accomplished, and practicalities are often not discussed.
One of the earliest boats found in Britain is a Neolithic log boat which can be seen sitting in the sand of Grey Abbey Bay in Strangford Lough, Ireland. It is made of oak heartwood, measures 9.1m long by at most 0.89m wide, and would probably carry up to 5 people. A sample of the wood was radiocarbon dated to after 3499BC. (Nationaltrust.org.uk)
Such vessels were clearly being developed in Neolithic times, at least for enclosed areas of water, or for riding, and crossing rivers.
The possibility that a boat like this could cross a piece of water as violent as the Pentland Firth seems unlikely, and the shipping of livestock in it is even more doubtful.
Even now, Orkney is on the edge. It takes a degree of raw determination (and heating) to survive here. High winds and horizontal rain are normal weather conditions for an Orkney winter.
In spite of this, people are thought to have come here, with livestock, on boats, and settled.
The earliest boats that would have been able to reach Orkney in current conditions are the Ferriby boats (above) that are dated to 2000BC, which probably started to arrive there at around 2500BC.
There are two main types of habitable structures from Neolithic Orkney. These are lightweight huts, as at Barnhouse, (above) which generally date to before 3000BC.
Complex structures, like those at Skara Brae and the Ness of Brodgar date to after 2800BC.
These are sites that suggests that there was a distinct change in conditions on Orkney during the Neolithic period of Britain.
I believe this change was between a period when peple were visiting the islands on footprint before 3000BC and a later period when a smaller population were castaway on Orkney, as a remote island.
The consequences of being separated from more sheltered regions of Britain and Europe were probably quite dramatic.
The date that I understood from my research on neolithic Orkney at which partition of Orkney from Caithness would have been, was 3000BC.
Extemsive research on Quaternary deposits on the Norwegian coast demonstrate that some fairly dramatic events happened over that side of the North Sea, but there is nothing obvious happening on this coast to indicate that land existed here before 3000BC.
The evidence that does exist, follows:-
The map above [*] shows the maximum spring currents around the Scottish coasts. The Pentland Firth is by far the strongest.
The section [*] southeast out of Pentland Firth/Muckle Skerries also appears to suggest that land may have once linked the two shallow shorelines, and thus Caithness with Orkney.
What do you think? Would the spring currents in the Pentland Firth sweep away Quaternary deposits in the North that had once allowed people to walk from Caithness to Orkney?
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