[00:00.693]So Skara Brae was not just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers.
[00:06.000]Its people must have belonged to some larger society.
[00:09.363]One sophisticated enough to mobilise the army of toilers and craftsmen needed.
[00:15.069]Not just to make these monuments, but to stand them on end.
[00:20.052]And they were just as concerned about housing for dead as the living.
[00:26.291]The mausoleum at Maes Howe, a couple of miles from Skara Brae, seems no more than a swelling on the grassy landscape.
[00:34.356]But this is, as it were, a British pyramid and in keeping with our taste for understatement.
[00:41.041]It reserves all its impact for the interior.
[00:47.551]Imagine them open once more.
[00:49.598]A detail from a village given the job of pulling back the stone seals, lugging the body through the low opening in the earth.
[00:58.051]Up 36 feet of narrow, tight-fitting passageway, lit only once a year by the rays of the winter solstice.
[01:07.631]A death canal, constriction, smelling of the underworld.
[01:28.131]Finally the passageway opens up to this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber.
[01:35.443]Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvings in the form of circles or spirals, like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds.
[01:45.090]Others would have had neat little stone stores or cubicles where the bodies would be laid out on shelves.