Standing Stones of Yoxie

Around 4,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, a house was built on the northeastern coast of Whalsay as part of a wider settlement at Pettigarths Field, which grew to include a megalithic tomb and a second house known as Benie Hoose nearby. What came to be called the Standing Stones of Yoxie took its name from the megaliths worked into its walls, many of which remained standing when the site was later examined; only later did investigators recognise that what looked like a stone grouping was in fact the partitioned remains of a substantial dwelling, originally around 18 by 11 metres, with an L-shaped block to the west and a smaller forecourt to the east.

In the centuries that followed, the site continued to see use: material recovered from Yoxie spans both the early and late Bronze Age, indicating that the building or its immediate surroundings remained occupied, or were returned to, long after its Neolithic construction. Activity at the site continued into the Iron Age, when further material was deposited alongside the earlier Neolithic and Bronze Age finds, pointing to a long and intermittent history of use rather than a single short-lived settlement phase.

The site was excavated by C.S.T. Calder, who interpreted Yoxie as the remains of a temple and Benie Hoose as a dwelling that may have housed the priests serving it. He noted that the layout of the two buildings echoed records of temples and priestly houses in Malta, and drew the same conclusion about a comparable structure at Stanydale on the Shetland Mainland; had the reading held, Yoxie and Stanydale would have counted among the earliest known temples anywhere in the British Isles.

That interpretation has since been set aside. Early and middle Neolithic society does not appear to have supported the kind of complex social structure, a distinct priestly caste, that a temple building would imply, and both Yoxie and Benie Hoose are now regarded as prehistoric houses rather than religious buildings.