Orkney's Pictish Heritage: Stones, Symbols & Sites

Before the Norse, Orkney was Pictish. For roughly six hundred years between AD 300 and 900 the islands belonged to the painted people of the north — a confederation of tribes who carved cryptic symbols on standing stones, hammered out the most refined silver brooches in early-medieval Britain, and ran a high-status workshop on the Brough of Birsay that the later Viking earls were content to build directly on top of. Their language is lost. Their stones survive. Here is what they left, and where you can still see it.

The Orkney Picts — Six Centuries Before the Vikings

The Picts were a confederation of tribes who held Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line from roughly AD 300 to AD 900. The name Picti ("painted people") was a Roman label; what they called themselves is unknown. Recent genetic work suggests they were indigenous to Britain rather than a later immigrant population — descendants of the Iron Age peoples who had built the brochs.

In Orkney they were the dominant culture through the early medieval period, building their houses on top of (or alongside) the same broch sites their ancestors had used and presiding from major political centres at Birsay, on Sanday, and probably at the Mine Howe complex near Tankerness. By the time the first Norse longships arrived in the late 8th century, the Pictish kingdom was already fragmenting — but the islands' farms, workshops and chapels were still Pictish, and would remain so for another hundred years before being absorbed into the new Norse earldom.

Orkney's Pictish Symbol Stones — Five Story Stones and What They Show

Pictish symbol stones are the islands' most evocative pre-Norse relic — slabs of red and grey sandstone carved with an abstract vocabulary of crescents, V-rods, mirrors, eagles and one strange creature usually called the Pictish Beast. Their precise meaning is still debated; they probably encoded names, lineages or kindred-group identity, much as a heraldic coat-of-arms would in a later medieval context.

The five most important "story stones" found in Orkney, where to see them, and what each depicts:

Pictish Symbols and Their Meanings — A Visitor's Decoder

Nobody can read a Pictish stone the way you can read a Norse runic inscription — the language was non-literate and the carvings remain undeciphered. But after a century of cataloguing, archaeologists agree that the symbols come from a tight repertoire of about thirty motifs, used in repeating pairs, and probably functioning as personal or family identifiers. The vocabulary you'll meet on Orkney stones:

• Crescent & V-rod. The most common motif on Orkney. The crescent looks like a moon lying on its back, crossed by a Z-shaped or V-shaped rod. Possibly a sun-and-spear or a "broken arrow" — symbols of authority.
• Double disc & Z-rod. Two linked discs with a lightning-bolt rod across them. Often paired with the crescent on the same stone.
• The Pictish Beast. A creature with a long curling snout and a back-flowing crest, sometimes called the "swimming elephant." Found on the Brough of Birsay stone and the Newark cross-slab. Almost certainly a stylised dolphin or sea-beast — nothing else fits.
• Eagle. Strong, frontal, talons forward. The Burrian stone in the Orkney Museum carries one of the best-preserved Pictish eagle carvings in northern Britain.
• Mirror & comb. A round-handled mirror, sometimes with a long-toothed comb beside it. Widely interpreted as marking a female burial or female personage on the monument.
• Bull, boar, salmon. Animal symbols, less common than the geometric pairs but always with frontal, schematic posture.

Pictish Settlements in Orkney — Sites You Can Walk Today

The Picts didn't build a new architecture; they adapted what was already there. Their settlements are layered on top of (and inside the ruins of) Iron Age brochs, often using the same drystone construction technique. Five accessible sites:

Pictish Metalwork, Ogham and the Buckquoy Spindle Whorl

The symbol stones get all the photographs, but it's the small objects that show how connected Orkney's Picts actually were. The islands sat on a North Sea trading axis that linked Pictish power centres in Aberdeenshire to monastic Ireland and pre-Viking Norway — and the artefact assemblage reflects it.

• Penannular brooches and hand-pins. Distinctive Pictish silver jewellery — open-ring brooches with terminal knobs, long-shanked pins with intricately decorated heads. Examples in the Orkney Museum demonstrate craftsmanship as fine as any contemporary Anglo-Saxon or Irish metalwork.
• The Mine Howe assemblage. Crucibles, moulds, slag, ironworker's tongs and an anvil base — together described by archaeologists as among the best metalworking assemblages from Iron Age Britain, and continuing well into the Pictish period.
• The Buckquoy spindle whorl. A small disc-shaped weight for a hand-spindle, found by archaeologist Anna Ritchie at Buckquoy, Birsay, in 1970. Around 700 AD. Inscribed with Old Irish ogham reading BENDDACTANIM — "a blessing on the soul of L" — the ONLY known ogham-inscribed spindle whorl anywhere. Now on display in the Orkney Museum.
• Bone combs and pins. Decorated combs are a Pictish signature — long-toothed, double-sided, with the back-plate finely incised. The Mine Howe and Pool sites both produced fine examples.

From Picts to Norsemen — How the Vikings Replaced (or Joined) Them

The end of Pictish Orkney is the islands' single most-debated archaeological question, and the answers have softened considerably in the last twenty years. Three pieces of evidence point to assimilation rather than replacement:

• Stratigraphy at Birsay and Pool. Norse longhouses are built directly on Pictish layers — same site, same workshops, often reusing the same dressed stones. There is no widespread destruction horizon.
• Genetics. Modern Orcadian DNA shows substantial continuity of the local female line through the Norse-takeover period, alongside heavy Scandinavian male input — the population signature of intermarriage, not extermination.
• Pictish objects in Viking graves. Several Norse boat burials in Orkney include Pictish brooches, pins and combs as grave goods — heirlooms or trophies, but evidence of close cultural contact.

What did NOT survive was the Pictish language. Norse — and specifically the Orkney variant called Norn — replaced it almost completely by around AD 900, and the symbol-stone tradition stopped abruptly. The next great wave of monumental carving on the islands would be the runic graffiti of the Norse earls and their crusader fleet, three hundred years later. By then the Picts of Orkney existed only in dim folk memory — a few trow and finfolk legends may even preserve fragments of pre-Norse story.

Pictish Traces in Orkney Place Names

The Norse renamed most of Orkney. Place names ending in -by, -ness, -quoy, -bister and -skaill all come from Old Norse, and they cover more than 90% of the islands' farm names. But a handful of older names slipped through — and those are probably Pictish or pre-Pictish in origin:

• Birsay. Possibly a Pictish-origin name preserved through the Norse takeover — the high-status nature of the site meant the name stuck.
• The "Pict" element in farm names. Field names such as Picky Park or Pict's Knowe are usually 19th-century folklore — people pointing at unknown Iron Age or Pictish-era earthworks.
• Older topographical roots. The Orcadian dialect still carries a thin layer of words for hills, sea-states and weather that pre-date Norn — a topic explored in our guide to Orkney dialect.

How to See Pictish Orkney in Two Days

The Pictish sites cluster in two manageable groups:

• Day 1 — West Mainland. Drive to the Brough of Birsay (check tide times — the causeway is only walkable at low water), then 20 minutes east to the Broch of Gurness for the Pictish village and site-museum stone. If you've energy, swing south to the older monuments of the Neolithic UNESCO zone — see our guide to the Heart of Neolithic Orkney for context on the millennia that preceded the Picts.
• Day 2 — Kirkwall and the East Mainland. Orkney Museum in Kirkwall (free) — Burrian stone, Buckquoy ogham whorl, Newark cross-slab and Pool finds. Then drive out to Mine Howe near Tankerness for the metalworking site. A guided historic Kirkwall walking tour is the easiest way to have the dates and context handed to you.

For the outer-isles enthusiast, Papa Westray (a 15-minute Loganair flight from Kirkwall) adds St Boniface Kirk and the Pictish cross-slab fragments; Sanday adds the Pool site itself and a Class II cross-slab recovered there in 2021.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I see Pictish stones in Orkney?

The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall holds the best collection — the Burrian symbol stone, the Buckquoy ogham spindle whorl, the Newark cross-slab and finds from Pool on Sanday. The Brough of Birsay has a faithful replica of its famous slab on site (the original is in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh). The Broch of Gurness site museum displays its 6th-7th century symbol stone in situ.

What do the Pictish symbols mean?

Their precise meaning remains undeciphered, but most archaeologists now believe the symbols functioned as a system of personal or kindred identifiers — read in pairs, the way a heraldic shield names a family. The crescent and V-rod, double-disc and Z-rod, eagle, mirror, comb and the so-called Pictish Beast are the most common Orkney motifs.

Did the Vikings wipe out the Picts in Orkney?

The evidence today points to assimilation rather than replacement. Norse buildings are layered directly on Pictish foundations, modern Orcadian DNA shows strong female-line continuity through the takeover period, and several Norse graves contain Pictish jewellery. The Picts didn't vanish — they became Norse-speaking Orcadians.

Is Ogham a Pictish language?

Ogham is an Irish alphabet, not a Pictish one. Its appearance on objects like the Buckquoy spindle whorl (which reads BENDDACTANIM — "a blessing on the soul" — in Old Irish) shows that Pictish Orkney was in close contact with Christian Ireland in the 7th and 8th centuries. The underlying Pictish language itself remains largely unknown.

When did the Picts arrive in Orkney?

They didn't — the Picts are now understood to be the descendants of the indigenous Iron Age population, not later immigrants. The "Pictish period" in Orkney runs from roughly AD 300 (when the name first appears in Roman sources) to about AD 900 (when Norse settlement becomes dominant).

What is a Class I vs Class II Pictish stone?

Class I stones are unshaped slabs bearing only Pictish symbols, usually 6th-8th century. Class II stones add a Christian cross to the symbol vocabulary, mostly 8th-9th century, and mark the transition to Christian Pictish art. Orkney has many Class I stones but only two Class II — the Newark cross-slab from Deerness and one from Sanday recovered in 2011.

The Pictish sites cluster on the West Mainland and around Kirkwall — a comfortable two-day drive from a single base. Stay in Kirkwall, Stromness or the West Mainland and you can do every site in this guide without a flight.