After the storm …

I often pick up books at yard sales, etc. and my latest find is a Bill Bryson novel entitled, “At Home, a short history of private life”, published in 2010.

This is Bryson at his best in my opinion but it is definitely not a “short history” as the title states.  He invites us to join him as he goes back to the home and vicinity where he once lived in Scotland and, in true Bryson style, each page is fraught with historical facts.  Many of these were new to me (as was the area that he writes about) so, instead of writing a book review per se, I would like to relate this one instance that I found fascinating and is representative of the book as a whole.

On the west coast of Mainland, the largest island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland there was a large grassy knoll that the natives had named Skerrabra.  In 1850 a severe storm hit all of Scotland and when it abated everyone was shocked to find that the top soil had been stripped away from the knoll leaving what appeared to be a small village of stone houses without roofs.  An amateur excavation unearthed more but it wasn’t until 1927 that it was decided to preserve the area and the true excavation began.

Skara Brae, as it is now known, was determined to be a stone-age settlement consisting of eight clustered houses.  It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is thought to be older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids.  

 

 

This is just a snippet of the hundreds of amazing facts that Bryson writes about in his entertaining novel.  Isn’t it fascinating and doesn’t it make you wonder what else there is in this amazing world of ours just waiting to be unearthed …

after the storm.