I’m trudging along the coast of Hoy, a southern island in Orkney just off the northern tip of Scotland. We’re making the ninety-minute trek toward the Old Man of Hoy, an impressive sandstone sea stack that juts higher than the island’s sea-facing cliffs. The Old Man’s rock is undeniably ancient, but its current formation is not: it formed by erosion after 1750, and it too may soon fall into the sea.
The geological marvel is still far off while I’m gazing across the water at the outline of mainland Scotland. At this distance, I understand why mesolithic and neolithic peoples braved the sometimes-raucous Pentland Firth to settle in Orkney: you can sense the possibility, the potential of these shapes on the horizon. You see the land and think, yeah, I could get there.
But getting people to stay calm in a boat across a narrow channel seems much simpler than moving livestock. This question has been plaguing me since we visited Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement on the eastern edge of Orkney’s Mainland. According to midden analysis, the residents of that village raised cattle and sheep five thousand years ago.
The settlement at Skara Brae, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most complete neolithic village in all of Europe, feels oddly pristine. We can’t walk among the ancient houses, as we can at other Orkadian settlements,¹ but along paths above them. The dwellings are sunk into the ground, some connected by passageways that are completely obscured underfoot. I have never seen anything like it. These are homes: rooms with sleeping areas, shelves, hearths.² Before we reach the actual site, we tour a reconstruction of one of the houses, the furniture original but the details fleshed out. It imagines the pots and bowls and skins and roof as they might have looked 5,000 years ago. In one corner, it imagines a boat.
No mesolithic or neolithic boats survive, so that boat is conjecture: what do we know from other periods and regions, and what’s most likely to have been used here? I’m thinking of that boat as I ponder the Pentland Firth from Hoy. The boat on display at Skara Brae is tiny, barely longer than I am tall. Its skin hull looks fragile enough that a careless movement—the anxious shuffling of a calf, for example—could sink the vessel. I don’t think it could fit an adult cow at all, and certainly not a lucid one. I wonder if all the livestock of ancient Orkney arrived as young.
Back home, I realise that two factors make my titular question less mystifying: the cows may have been smaller than our modern breeds, and the boats may have been larger than the approximation at Skara Brae.³ How do you get a cow across a firth? Wait for a day with calm seas, load your creatures on your skin or leather or log boat, then hoist your sails or row from one island to the next.
Perhaps the animals were skittish or seasick. Perhaps only the most docile were chosen for the journey.⁴ Perhaps the creatures found calm and comfort from the people who knew them best accompanying them over the soft waves. Back on Hoy, I imagine the distant shores where shepherds watch the sea, preparing their animals for a new life on the horizon.
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¹ After visiting Skara Brae, we go to the Iron Age Broch of Gurness, where we ramble over and among the walls of a slightly less ancient village: it’s only around 2,000 years old.
² Other Orkadian sites, like the Knap of Howar, also feature still-intact stone furniture.
³ Vicki Cummings & James Morris (2022) Neolithic Explanations Revisited: Modelling the Arrival and Spread of Domesticated Cattle into Neolithic Britain, Environmental Archaeology, 27:1, 20-30, DOI: 10.1080/14614103.2018.1536498
⁴ That’s how we sent animals to space, after all.

How do you get a cow across a firth?
Possible answer: Much of the North Sea was dry until after 4000 BC because of Ice Age. Both humans and original auroch type cattle could have walked across?
Subsequent rises in sea levels post 3000 BC may have caused the Stone Age inhabitants of Orkney to move away from settlements like Scara Brae, especially when they had depleted all wood stocks (apparently burning peat came much later).