From the Smithsonian Magazine: Discover the Astounding Secrets of Scotland’s Stone Age Settlements.
As the plow worked the southern part of the field, it had caught on something heavy and dragged it from where it lay. That was why the tractor had stopped. Hoey watched as the plow rose from the earth. There was a slab lodged between its blades. “It wasn’t any old stone,” she recalls now. “It looked like it had been deliberately made.”
The rectangular object was a little over five feet long. Four semicircular notches along one side appeared very like handholds. The Orkney Islands are rich in prehistoric sites, and it was thought, at first, that the slab could be the capstone of a type of Bronze Age burial known as a cist. The possibility of human remains prompted investigation, and when, a week or so later, two archaeologists arrived from the Scottish mainland, Hoey was given a trowel and invited to help. What was revealed, as she scraped the earth, was the top of a wall. “It was so exciting and enthralling. I was the first person to see that in thousands of years.” [continue]