The Ring of Brodgar is a Neolithic stone circle on Mainland, Orkney, built between 2500 and 2000 BCE, with 60 stones originally set in a true circle 104 meters in diameter. It is the third largest stone circle in the British Isles, yet no one knows exactly what ceremonies it hosted. The site survives as a ditch, a bank, and 27 standing stones, all of it exposed to the North Sea wind.
What Is the Ring of Brodgar?
The Ring of Brodgar is a Neolithic henge monument and stone circle on the island of Mainland, Orkney, in northern Scotland. It stands on a narrow strip of land between the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Stenness, part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site. The circle measures 104 meters across, making it the third largest in the British Isles after Avebury and Stanton Drew.
The site is not a ring in the sense of a continuous wall. It is a circle of standing stones, originally 60, surrounded by a rock-cut ditch up to 3 meters deep. The ditch was hewn from the sandstone bedrock, and the excavated material was piled into a bank on the outside. The stones themselves are local flagstone, some reaching 4.5 meters in height.
What makes Brodgar remarkable is what it lacks. There is no central monument, no burial deposit, no obvious altar. The circle is empty. Whatever happened here left no trace in the ground, which is precisely why it has fascinated archaeologists for over a century.
When Was It Built, and Who Built It?
The ditch at Brodgar was dug around 2500 BCE, give or take a few centuries. That date places it in the Late Neolithic, the same period that produced the great passage tomb of Maeshowe, two kilometers to the east, and the settlement of Skara Brae, eight kilometers to the northwest.
The builders were farmers. They raised cattle, barley, and pigs, and they lived in stone houses with built-in furniture, as Skara Brae shows. They had no metal tools. The ditch was cut with red deer antler picks, and the stones were dragged into place on wooden sledges. The effort was enormous: 60 stones, each weighing several tons, moved from quarries up to a kilometer away.
The population of Orkney at the time was small, perhaps a few thousand people. That means the circle was not built by a single village. It required coordinated labor across the entire island, a project that must have taken years. The human consequence is simple: the people who built Brodgar were organized, patient, and willing to invest generations of work in a place that had no practical function.
What Was the Ring Used For?
The short answer is that we do not know. The long answer is that the archaeology points to procession, assembly, and the management of the dead.
The ditch and bank form a boundary, not a fortification. The bank is on the outside, which means it was designed to contain something within, or to mark a threshold that people crossed deliberately. The original entrance, now lost, likely aligned with the nearby Stones of Stenness, another circle 800 meters to the southwest.
The surrounding landscape is dense with ritual sites. Maeshowe is a chambered tomb aligned so that the setting sun shines into its interior at the winter solstice. The Stones of Stenness, built around 3000 BCE, is an earlier and smaller circle. The Barnhouse Settlement, a village of stone houses, sits nearby. Brodgar is the centerpiece of this ritual landscape, the largest and latest expression of a tradition that spanned a thousand years.
Archaeologists have found no evidence of sacrifice, no human remains in the ditch, no offerings of pottery or bone. The absence is telling. The circle may have been a place where the living gathered to witness the dead, whose bodies were processed to the tombs and then to the sea. Orkney’s Neolithic people practiced exposure of the dead, letting the flesh rot before the bones were gathered and placed in chambered tombs. Brodgar may have been the stage on which that transformation was enacted.
What Does the Circle Symbolize?
The number 60 is the first clue. Sixty stones, a circle of 360 degrees, six stones per degree. The builders could not have measured angles in the modern sense, but they did not need to. They needed a count, and 60 is a number that recurs across Neolithic Britain. It is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. It is a number that allows division into equal parts, which is exactly what a society of competing kin groups would need.
The circle itself is the symbol. A circle has no beginning and no end. It is the shape of the sun’s path, the horizon, the year. For a people who lived by the seasons, the circle was the natural form of time. The ditch, cut deep into the rock, separated the inside from the outside. The bank, raised on the outer edge, reinforced that boundary. To enter the circle was to leave the ordinary world and enter a space where the rules of daily life did not apply.
The stones themselves are unworked. They were not shaped, carved, or dressed. They stand as raw slabs of local sandstone, some with natural cracks and fissures. This is a deliberate choice. The builders of Maeshowe carved intricate spirals into their stones. The builders of Brodgar did not. The power of the circle lies in its emptiness, its refusal to represent anything. It is a frame, not a picture.
How Does Brodgar Compare to Other Stone Circles?
Brodgar is often grouped with Avebury and Stonehenge, but the comparison is misleading. Stonehenge is a complex of dressed stones, lintels, and bluestones imported from Wales. It is a monument of engineering, built to impress. Avebury is a massive henge enclosing a village, with circles within circles. Brodgar is neither.
The closest parallel is the Ring of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, built around the same time. Callanish is smaller, with a central monolith and a cross-shaped arrangement of stones. Both circles are set in dramatic landscapes, both are built of local stone, and both are oriented to the sky. But Callanish has a clear astronomical alignment, while Brodgar’s alignments are debated.
What distinguishes Brodgar is its relationship to water. The circle sits on a peninsula between two lochs, and the Stones of Stenness stands on the shore of the same body of water. Water is a boundary in Neolithic cosmology, the threshold between the living and the dead. The placement of Brodgar between two lochs is not accidental. It is the same logic that placed tombs on islands and promontories across Neolithic Britain.
What Do People Get Wrong About Brodgar?
The most common error is calling Brodgar a “Druid” site. The Druids were Iron Age priests, described by Roman authors, and they lived two thousand years after Brodgar was built. There is no continuity between the Neolithic builders and the Iron Age Druids. The connection is a Romantic invention of the 18th century, when antiquarians projected their fantasies onto any ancient stone.
The second error is the claim that Brodgar is aligned to the solstices. The evidence is weak. Some stones may align with the midsummer sunset, but the circle is so large and the stones so irregular that almost any alignment can be found if you look hard enough. The builders may have been aware of the sun’s path, but they did not build the precise solar observatories that some popular writers claim.
The third error is the assumption that Brodgar was a place of continuous use. The ditch silted up within a few centuries, and the site was abandoned around 2000 BCE. The stones stood, but the rituals stopped. Brodgar was not a living tradition. It was a monument built, used, and left, and its silence is part of its power.
FAQ
Can you walk inside the Ring of Brodgar? Yes, the site is open to the public and free to visit, though access is managed by Historic Environment Scotland. The path around the circle is well maintained, and visitors can walk among the stones.
How many stones are left at Brodgar? There are 27 standing stones today, down from the original 60. Some fell and were never re-erected, and others were removed in the 19th century for agricultural use.
Is the Ring of Brodgar older than Stonehenge? The ditch at Brodgar was dug around 2500 BCE, roughly contemporary with the main phase of Stonehenge. The Stones of Stenness, nearby, is older, dating to around 3000 BCE.
What is the Heart of Neolithic Orkney? It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, Maeshowe, Skara Brae, and the surrounding landscape. It was inscribed in 1999.
The Ring as a Threshold
The Ring of Brodgar asks us to consider what a monument is for when it holds nothing. It is not a tomb, not a temple, not an observatory. It is a boundary, a place where the living stood at the edge of the world and looked inward. The stones are still there, and the wind still moves through them. If you stand at the center, you can see the lochs on both sides, the hills beyond, and the sky above. That is the whole monument. It was enough for the people who built it, and it is enough for us.
For more on the ritual year and the monuments that mark it, see the wheel of the year. The stones of Brodgar are one expression of a wider Neolithic cosmology, and you can trace its other forms in our glossary of sacred sites. To understand how the solstices shaped these monuments, read the guide to the winter solstice.