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Heathering Days
“Blue waters cut through Highland hills, red braes and purple heather”
~ Paul Colvin, An Orkney Odyssey
Orkney is an archipelago lying just off the northern coast of mainland Scotland, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic. Made up of around 70 islands, only about 20 of them inhabited, Orkney has a landscape of low green hills, open moorland, dramatic coastlines and remarkably few trees—along with a history that reaches back thousands of years before the arrival of the Scots or the Vikings.
Heather is a familiar sight at this type of year across much of the Scottish landscape including Orkney’s moorland and hillsides, where Calluna vulgaris blooms in late summer, turning stretches of the landscape shades of purple and mauve, usually reaching its peak during August.
Heather has also been useful to Orcadians for a very long time. It was gathered for bedding, insulation, thatching and even rope-making. Archaeological evidence from Skara Brae shows its use stretching back thousands of years into Orkney’s Neolithic past!
Heather even finds its way into one of Orkney’s other famous products. Highland Park whisky traditionally uses locally cut peat containing heather and other island vegetation. When burned during the malting process, this contributes some of the distinctive floral character to the smoke—a rather different result from the more medicinal, seaweed-rich peat associated with some other Scottish islands.
This tartan was created to reflect the intrigue and charm of Orkney's landscape, specifically the standing stones found scattered throughout the islands against a purple backdrop of heather.
The Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar are the primary stone circles in Orkney. The Ring of Brodgar, located on a narrow isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray, is particularly noted for its spectacular setting where heather blooms in deep purple during late summer, providing a dramatic backdrop for the 36 surviving standing stones. 🖤 🤍 💜 🌸 🪨 🪨 🪨
No one can say with certainty why Orkney’s great standing stones were raised, but archaeologists generally believe that they formed part of an important ceremonial landscape.
The Standing Stones of Stenness, erected more than 5,000 years ago, originally formed a circle of twelve stones around a large central hearth. This suggests a gathering place where fires were lit and communities came together—perhaps for feasting, storytelling, rites of passage or ceremonies connected with the ancestors. It may be one of the oldest stone circles in the British Isles.
The nearby Ring of Brodgar was built somewhat later and was far larger, originally containing about sixty stones within a deep rock-cut ditch. Its enormous scale must have required the cooperation of many people, so its construction may itself have strengthened ties among families and settlements. The ring is generally interpreted as a place of ritual and ceremony, although the precise nature of those ceremonies has been lost.
The stones may also have helped mark the passing of the seasons. Certain monuments in the surrounding landscape—notably Maeshowe, whose entrance receives the light of the midwinter sunset—have clear astronomical alignments. This has encouraged theories that the stone circles were used to observe the sun or moon and to identify important points in the farming year. Such alignments may have had spiritual as well as practical meaning.Rather than standing alone, the circles were probably parts of a much larger sacred landscape that included Maeshowe, the Ness of Brodgar, settlements and other individual stones.
For more on the Standing Stones of Orkney, click the photo of heather near the Ring of Brodgar.