Jarlshof — 4,000 years in one place

A great storm in the 1890s tore open the dunes at the tip of the South Mainland and exposed the corner of a stone building. What lay underneath has become one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Britain: continuous human occupation from the late Neolithic about 2,500 BC, through Bronze Age, Iron Age broch, Pictish wheelhouses, Norse longhouses, a medieval farm, and finally the 16th-century laird's house of Earl Robert Stewart. Sir Walter Scott gave the site its name in his novel "The Pirate" — a Norse-sounding invention that stuck.