Maisehowe

Around 5,000 years ago (3,000 BC), a lot of people were living in Orkney. The water level was a bit higher than now, and the climate a bit warmer. They were farming and ranching. And they had enough time and energy left over that they build a LOT of things out of the local stone. The local rock is sandstone, which fractures into huge flat slabs, that can be used to build houses, tombs and circles of standing stones, IF you can move them. 

On Wednesday, we went to Maisehowe, the largest and most elaborate of the chambered tombs in the UK - and most of Europe. The only way to get inside is to take a tour, so we stooped over to climb into the tomb with 20 other people, to get to see the inside up close. 

We couldn't take pictures inside, so this images is from a postcards], showing how these folks layered one slab upon another to make an arch. The construction looks so simple, until you realize that each building block weighed several TONS and was perfectly shaped and positioned. 

Originally, this was a burial structure. Perhaps also a spiritual building of some sort. But it was raided and cleaned out a long time ago - before the Vikings. We know that they visited the tomb, because they left graffiti all over the place. Our guide translated a lot of it - and showed us these drawings they also made.

Experimental archeologists have tried to figure out how these people moved those huge stones. Their best guess? Seaweed! If you put the stone on a sledge, then keep putting seaweed under the sledge, it's possible to use the slippery nature of the plentiful seaweed to move even multi-ton stones. Pretty cool, eh?