Orkney's newest golf course officially opened on Saturday,with over 100 players taking advantage of the new facility.  The new nine-hole South Ronaldsay Golf Course, which took just under seven-years to complete, attracted adults and juniors alike. Jim Seatter, Club Captain, said: “It went fantastically well, I think there were 79 adults playing and there was quite a lot of juniors. The weather held out and, thankfully, it stayed dry which made the day a lot better. It is nice to see all the hard work from over the years come together.”

Tomb of the Eagles

Isbister is one of those few extraordinary archaeological sites that offer such a bolt of insight into the past . The remains of our Neolithic ancestors have been preserved in Orkney as nowhere else in Britain but, somehow, it needed Isbister to breathe life into this collection of ruins and give us an amazingly clear picture of the people of 5,000 years ago. For these people the building and use of the tomb was symbol and expression of their identity. It was here that the dead joined their ancestors but only after the flesh had been stripped from their bones. It was here, too, that offerings of food and goods were made according to the prescriptions and taboos of both group and society. Here that broken pots were piled; fish, eagles and joints of meat mouldered; and the hands of the living sorted the heaped bones of the dead. There are many facets to this comprehensive overview of neolithic life; just one, for example, is the way the 16,000 human bones recovered are made to throw light on the stature, illnesses and even life-expectancy of the living.

This is perhaps the essence of Tomb of the Eagles: not dry bones, but a glimpse of prehistory.