About
On the southern tip of Els Ness, a small peninsula on the Orkney island of Sanday, Quoyness is a Neolithic chambered tomb used from about 3000 to 2500 BC. You enter it as its builders did, crawling through a 9 m passage into a rectangular central chamber that still stands to its full height of 4 m, with six small cells opening off it. Its layout closely resembles the houses at Skara Brae, a tomb for the dead shaped like the homes of the living. Excavations in the 1800s found skulls and bones in four of the cells and, in a stone cist in the floor, the remains of at least ten adults and four or five children, with pottery, tools, rare scratched Neolithic art and a hammer-shaped stone object like those from Skara Brae. From the parking area north of Quoyayre it is about 1.1 km along the coast. Knee pads help, and the passage can be wet. Sanday is reached by car ferry from Kirkwall.
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- Quoyness Chambered CairnOpen all year; an unstaffed open site reached on foot, no hours published
Opening times may change at short notice.
Historic Scotland: 'Quoyness Chambered Cairn is free to visit and is open year-round.' No hours, closures or notices on 21 October 2026.
The tomb is entered by crawling through its 9 m entrance passage; inside, the central chamber stands about 4 m high and the side cells are reached by crawling too. Historic Scotland warns that the way into the chambers can be wet. Reviewers suggest knee pads and say larger adults may not fit through the entrance. No toilets or other facilities.
Photo: The drystone outer wall of Quoyness Chambered Cairn with its low entrance passage, approached by a gravel path between grassy banks on Sanday. Beep boop beep, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quoyness_cairn.jpg. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0. Resized and cropped for display; derivatives retain the source licence.
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