Orkney Islands

The Orkney Islands are Britain's greatest archaeological treasure — a Neolithic heartland where five-thousand-year-old monuments predate Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, and where the density of prehistoric sites per square mile exceeds anywhere else in Europe. This archipelago off Scotland's northern coast has been continuously inhabited for at least eight thousand years, and the evidence is everywhere.

Skara Brae, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a complete Neolithic village preserved by sand dunes for over four millennia — its stone houses, connected by covered passages, contain built-in furniture including beds, dressers, and storage boxes that make it the most intimate glimpse into prehistoric daily life available anywhere. The nearby Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle of originally sixty stones set on an isthmus between two lochs, achieves the atmospheric power of Stonehenge without the crowds or the fence — visitors can walk among the stones and touch surfaces that were worked by human hands five thousand years ago.

Orkney's Norse heritage layers seamlessly onto its prehistoric foundation. The Earl's Palace in Kirkwall, described as the finest example of French Renaissance architecture in Scotland, and St. Magnus Cathedral — founded by the Vikings in 1137 and built from alternating courses of red and yellow sandstone — demonstrate the cultural sophistication of the Norse earldom that governed Orkney for over six centuries before it was annexed by Scotland in 1468.

Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, Princess Cruises, and Quark Expeditions include the Orkney Islands on British Isles and Northern Isles itineraries. The islands' seabird colonies — particularly on Hoy's dramatic cliffs, where the Old Man of Hoy sea stack rises 449 feet from the waves — provide wildlife encounters that complement the archaeological richness.

May through August provides the best visiting conditions, with June and July offering the 'simmer dim' — the extended twilight of Orkney's midsummer, when the sky never fully darkens and the Neolithic monuments glow in an ethereal half-light that seems to dissolve the boundary between past and present.