Architecture of Scotland in the prehistoric era

The oldest house for which there is evidence in Britain is the oval structure of wooden posts found at South Queensferry near the Firth of Forth, dating from the Mesolithic period, about 8240 BCE.

[3] Neolithic habitation, burial and ritual sites are particularly common and well-preserved in the Northern and Western Isles, where a lack of trees led to most structures being built of local stone.

[4] The stone building at Knap of Howar at Papa Westray, Orkney is one of the oldest surviving houses in north-west Europe, making use of locally gathered rubble in a dry-stone construction, it was probably occupied for 900 years, between 3700 and 2800 BCE.

[8] In contrast to the Highlands and Islands where stone was extensively used, in the south and east the most visible architectural survivals of the Neolithic are mainly earthen barrows, the earliest probably dating from the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE.

[12][13] Mortuary enclosures are usually sub-rectangular banks with external ditches and raised platforms of stone or wood within them, thought by J. G. Scott to be used for the exposure of corpses prior to burial elsewhere, although this interpretation is disputed.

There is debate as to the role of these buildings, which have been seen variously as regular farming homesteads of Neolithic families and as related to a series of monumental constructions such as barrows.

[16] As bronze working developed from about 2000 BCE, there was a decline in the building of large new structures, which, with a reduction of the total area under cultivation, suggests a fall in population.

[18] At Jarlshof these are oval houses with thick stone walls, which may have been partly subterranean at the earliest period of inhabitation, a technique that provided both structural stability and insulation.

They take two distinct forms, either a circular rubble enclosure known as "ring cairns", or passage graves, with a long entrance, usually in complex astronomical alignments.

[22] As elsewhere in Europe, hill forts were first introduced in this period, including the occupation of Eildon hill near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, from around 1000 BCE, which accommodated several hundred houses on a fortified hilltop,[23] and Traprain Law in East Lothian, which had a 20-acre enclosure, sectioned in two places west of the summit, made up of a coursed, stone wall with a rubble core.

[24] In the early Iron Age, from the seventh century BCE, cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction.

[21] This period also saw the beginnings of wheelhouses, a roundhouse with a characteristic outer wall, within which was a circle of stone piers (bearing a resemblance to the spokes of a wheel), but these would flourish most in the era of Roman occupation.