The grandest of these tombs had openings cut in the wall.
To create side chambers where the most important bodies .
Could be laid out in aristocratic spaciousness like family vaults in a country church.
Unlike medieval knights, though, these grandees were buried with eagles and dogs, or even treasure.
The kind of thing that the Vikings who broke into these tombs thousands of years later were quick to filch.
In return, though, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy.
These wonderful graffiti，these runes were carved by the most skilled rune carver in the western ocean.
I bedded thorny here. Ingegirth is one horny bitch.
As for the Orcadian hoi polloi, well, they ranked space in a common chamber.
On a floor carpeted with the bones of hundreds of their predecessors.
A crowded waiting room to their afterworld.
For centuries, life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way.
But around 2,500 BC, the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter.
The red bream disappeared, and so did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for countless generations.
Fields were abandoned, the farmers and fishers migrated, leaving their stone buildings and tombs.
To be covered by layers of peat, drifting sand and finally grass.