Bay of Ireland, Stenness, looking out towards the island of Hoy

Fieldwork is taking place over the summer 2017 on an exciting project investigating the submerged landscape of Orkney; land now under water, covered by the tide but which would have been terrestrial land >5000 years ago during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods when Orkney would have had a much larger land mass than today.

The project team is an ensemble cast from the Universities of the Highlands & Islands, St Andrews, Dundee, Trinity St David’s, Hull, Coventry and University College Dublin, together with Mesolithic specialist Caroline Wickham-Jones.

The project, which is funded by the Carnegie Trust and Historic Environment Scotland, aims to reconstruct the landscape of Orkney from the Mesolithic period to the Early Bronze Age, a timeframe of some 6000 years. This will give us a glimpse into an Orkney much different to today where woodland was commonplace…