Skara Brae, the famous prehistoric stone village in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, was preserved in part thanks to a giant sand dune. The Neolithic village rested peacefully under a giant dune for millennia until wild storms ripped away its protection in the winter of 1850.
Locals were surprised to find a midden heap and sunken stone homes that had been peacefully sitting under the dune their whole lives. The discovery turned out to be the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in northern Europe thanks to the dune. It even had some prehistoric furniture!
The dune, by the way, was named Skara Brae.
