Dwarfie Stane

The Dwarfie Stane is a chambered tomb cut out of a single vast block of Devonian Old Red Sandstone, a glacial erratic left in a steep-sided valley between Quoys and Rackwick on the Orkney island of Hoy. It stands in open, desolate peatland. It is the only chambered tomb in Orkney carved from stone rather than built out of stones, and may be the only Neolithic rock-cut tomb anywhere in Britain. Its plan nonetheless matches the Orkney–Cromarty class of chambered tomb found across the islands, sometimes called Bookan-class after a cairn on Mainland.

The block measures 8.6 metres long by 4 wide and up to 2.5 high. The entrance is a metre square, cut into the west face, and inside is a passage 2.2 metres long with two side cells, each 1.7 metres by 1 and a metre high. The southern cell has a pillow of uncut rock left at its inner end. A stone slab originally closed the entrance on the west side. It now lies on the ground in front of the opening, which is how the tomb is almost always photographed and the first thing a visitor sees.

R. Castleden reads the monument as an imported idea — the rock-cut tomb, tried once here and found unsatisfactory. The stone itself may explain that. The folklorist Hugh Miller, a stonemason by trade, described the block as extremely compact Old Red Sandstone, which is a considerable thing to hollow out by hand. It is unique in northern Europe, and it resembles Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs found around the Mediterranean, though there is no direct evidence of any link between this tomb and the people who cut those.

The tomb was plundered at some point by breaking an opening straight through the roof of the chamber. Nobody knows when it happened — the hole had already been noted by the sixteenth century — and it was finally repaired with concrete in the 1950s or 1960s. The name comes from a local legend that a dwarf called Trollid lived inside it, though the tomb has also been claimed as the work of giants. Walter Scott popularised its existence in his novel The Pirate, published in 1821.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century graffiti covers the rock. The most remarkable is an inscription in Persian calligraphy reading that the writer has sat two nights and so learnt patience, cut by Captain William Mounsey, who camped here in 1850 and wrote his own name above it backwards in Latin.