Unstan Chambered Cairn

Unstan Chambered Cairn is a Neolithic tomb of about 5,000 years ago on a low promontory into the Loch of Stenness, a grass-covered mound now capped by a modern roof with skylights. It is unusual in combining Orkney's two tomb types: a stalled cairn, its chamber divided into five compartments by upright slabs and entered by a long low passage from the east, with a small side cell of the kind found in Maeshowe-type tombs. Excavators found human bones piled in all five stalls and two crouched skeletons in the side cell, probably the last burials, along with leaf-shaped arrowheads, a fine flint tool and fragments of more than twenty shallow pottery bowls of one distinctive design, named Unstan Ware after this site. Reviewers say the visit is free with a small car park at the end of what feels like a private farm drive, to mind your head in the low crawl and that a phone torch helps in the dark corners.