Isle of Lewis

The Calanais Standing Stones went up between 2900 and 2600 BC, before the main circle at Stonehenge, and nobody can explain why the megaliths were arranged in a cruciform pattern on a Hebridean headland above Loch Ròg. Lewis holds Scotland's deepest mysteries in its oldest rock — Lewisian gneiss, nearly three billion years old.

Lewis is the northern two-thirds of the Outer Hebrides' largest island, a landscape of blanket peat, exposed gneiss and scattered lochs with Calanais at its heart. The main circle and its outlying rows were raised between 2900 and 2600 BC and may have tracked the moon — the stones align with its extreme southerly rising — and when five feet of accumulated peat was stripped away in 1857, the megaliths stood revealed at their full height, taller than anyone living had known them. The Arnol Blackhouse preserves a traditional Lewis dwelling exactly as lived: central peat fire, no chimney, animals under the same roof. And the Lewis chessmen — twelfth-century gaming pieces carved from walrus ivory, found in a sandbank at Uig in 1831 — remain among Britain's most famous archaeological finds, a handful of them displayed back home on the island.