In this extract from his new book on the ghost towns of Britain, Matthew Green delves into the mystery of Skara Brae

There was blood in the ocean. In late November 1850, the British Isles were rocked by one of the worst storms in decades, a furious tempest that howled across the land and made dark mountains of the sea as it crashed upon the shore.

On the Cornish coast, a vessel from Cardiff was wrecked with the loss of all ten hands; a brig bound from Sydney to London vanished somewhere off the coast of Ramsgate, the first sign of it, the next morning, a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald floating across the waves; and off the Irish coast at Kilkee, a ship containing five hundred people off to start a new life in New York foundered in the darkness, the grinding and cracking of the hull against the Black Rock a terrible accompaniment to the shrieks and groans of the 96 who drowned, the blood from their battered heads and limbs swirling into the icy sea, corpses found floating the next day in only their nightclothes.

Across the land, roofs were ripped from houses, spires from churches, and in the cities, the horse-bus networks were brought to a sorry halt. The inhabitants of coastal villages lay in their beds at night in terror, listening to the sea’s shrill hiss, a fire that blazed black.

The storm that would claim 200 lives reached its zenith of destruction on the night of Tuesday 20 November. It ravaged one of the remotest parts of the British Isles: a barren, virtually treeless, gently undulating landscape kissed by the midnight sun in midsummer, yet which at that time of year had some of the longest nights in the whole country.

The archipelago was a relatively new addition to the United Kingdom, having been annexed from Norway in the late 16th century; Orcadian Scots still had a Norwegian lilt. Most strikingly, it was peppered with extraordinary prehistoric remains, a veritable Neolithic nirvana.

On the island of Mainland, the largest in Orkney, the storm blasted without cease for two full days, aided by the near-absence of trees. In a reversal of the usual order of things, the wind’s destructive force also proved an impetus of discovery – or rediscovery. For when it was finally safe to go out, some of the villagers who lived on the western coast of the island discovered at the Bay of Skaill that the beach had been conspicuously reconfigured. There, the wind had scoured away the grassy veil of a high dune known as Skerrabrae, revealing a considerable chunk of what no one had been expecting to see: a 5,000-year-old settlement miraculously preserved in the sand – just as Pompeii had been in ash and pumice – sunk in primeval muck.

The earth had been forced to give up her secrets, and what had lain concealed for millennia turned out to be among the oldest-built structures anywhere on the planet – older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the temples of Mycenae, and older, certainly, than Stonehenge.

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As Professor Vere Gordon Childe stepped on to the night ferry at Aberdeen, his suitcase bulging with books, his mind flitted over the challenge that lay ahead, and, as so often, the cold beauty of the Marxist programme. It was the summer of 1928 and he had only recently been appointed Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, so he was impatient to explore some ancient structures, structures of mysterious provenance.

But by the time he got to Kirkwall, the chief and indeed only city on Orkney, a note of apprehension had crept into his thoughts. What was he doing here? He hated fieldwork. He liked books and was an accomplished archaeologist, writing for both academic and popular audiences. He didn’t like going outside but he would have to spend the next couple of years shovelling sand on a beach – not a gorgeous Australian bay of fine white sand beneath a hot sun, but an abysmal Scottish one, assisted by men with cold, gloomy accents and of meagre cheer who wouldn’t appreciate his spontaneous quotation of the Classics, nor his Roman arithmetic, and buttressed at all times by a glacial wind that would chill him to the bone.

The Australian professor was just the kind of eccentric, visionary, perhaps slightly ill-adjusted kind of creature that seems drawn to lost places. Childe, as his closest colleagues testified, was not the best-looking of men. He spoke 17 languages and was hoping to learn an 18th before the year was out. He could do long division in Roman numerals (as anyone who went to one of his dinners discovered to their cost). He was astringent and hurtful, with an abrupt and alarming manner that almost everyone, including his closest colleagues, found objectionable.

His moustache was a force unto itself, concealing his smirks, and he was thin as a rake with no chin to speak of. Once, in a single evening, he addressed his assembled company in six different languages, pontificated upon Bronze Age datings, and roamed over the entire gamut of European literature, quoting liberally. Examination was his whole life; suspecting he had cancer, aged 65, he took his own life in Australia’s Blue Mountains, realising his long-held ambition not to get old and become a burden on society.

He grated the mind and sapped the energy from the room. His habits may have been peculiar (he liked to drink half-pints of rum and milk), but no one could deny his colossal intellect. The trouble was, he was worried no one was going to appreciate it on Orkney. How could he have known that, during the course of the two seasons he spent there, he would have an idea that would make his name and trigger an intellectual earthquake in the world of archaeology? On a bleak Scottish beach lay the key to unlocking the mystery of what kind of society our prehistoric ancestors lived in and of how civilisation began to take root in these isles.

From Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain by Matthew Green (Faber & Faber). Buy this book here.

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