Prehistory: 3000BC - 100AD

Inside Caithness’s 5,000-year-old chambered cairns, the dead were not buried once and forgotten. Their bones were selected, moved, rearranged and sometimes removed as generations returned to the chambers. What kept drawing the living back?

Only a fraction of Camster’s Neolithic community entered its stone chambers. Were they powerful ancestors, ritual specialists or people whose unusual bodies made them appear touched by forces nobody could explain? The bones cannot answer, but they allow us to ask a very different question about the people buried inside.

The road past Camster Cairns appears to lead nowhere of consequence. But what if it follows one of the most important journeys in prehistoric Britain, carrying travellers from continental Europe towards the powerful monuments of Orkney? Look beyond the modern tarmac and an ancient route begins to emerge.