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Hagar's Lounge is the dive of all dives, a grotty, fag-stained basement pub in the Scottish Highland town that Robert Louis Stevenson described in 1868 as “one of the meanest of man's towns, on the baldest of God's bays.”

The Vikings wouldn't bear this insult to “Vik,” the North Sea port they founded in the 9th century, which is slowly becoming Scotland’s sustainable energy capital. And surely the Viking spirits are enraged at Britain's Idler Magazine nominating Wick as contender for title of "Britain's Crappest Town" of 2003.

Wick is in Caithness, the far northeastern region of the Scottish Highlands. “Caith” was one of the seven provinces of pre-Celtic Pictland, named for the tribe whose animal totem was the wildcat. The Viking invaders added “ness”- old Norse for headland.

It's not surprising to find a pub in Wick named Hagar's, given that the Vikings reigned over Caithness and the isles of Orkney and Shetland from 850 A.D. until the Treaty of Perth in 1266 A.D. Well into the 16th century a dialect of Old Norse –“Norn”- was spoken in these parts. But 500 years later I should not have wandered into this dimwit echo of that glorious Viking past expecting to meet their bold-hearted Nordic descendants.

There I was at Hagar’s - in the thick of these Gaelic-Norse flavored Caithnessian accents with their elongated ooooohs, eeeehs and ayeeees, (made even longer by the row of empty cider bottles on the bar) - hardly believing my ears: human bones turning up on building sites of new bungalows all over Caithness. Vertebrae. Jawbones. Skulls. Fingers. A Hitchcocktian nightmare.

"Who got bumped off?" I quivered.

"Ah noobody," said a tall sunken-eyed man. "The forensic police suppose the bones're over 1500 years auld, bein' all broown from the peaty earth. How they got into the building contractor’s cement is the stoory. Aye."

"Aye, sand poachers, they wair," another one continued. "In the middle of the night a digger gouges out lorryloads of sand from the beach dunes off the Hempriggs Estate, near that posh Ackergill Castle. Then the poachers flog the sand on to a building contractor. But they dug straight through a Pictish/early Norse burial site. We got Viking bones all over Caithness noow."

I imagined the horror of Viking graves bulldozed by greedy builders. This was worse than that runway at Ireland's Shannon Airport accidentally built on a fairy path. (The airstrip was relocated as soon as the seers had their soothsay. W'arnt no fairies going to bring down a Boeing 747!!!) But this! All these wealthy “Southerners” from London and Henley-on-Thames, building their Scottish holiday homes with Viking bones interred in the walls! Wouldn't vengeful Viking spirits haunt their houses looking for missing parts of their scattered skeletons?

“Shouldn’t you be angry about your ancestor's bones?” I frowned at the shaggy red-haired man. “How can this happen to a Scottish archaeological site?”

“Ah lassie, the site is on an estate belonging to a Scot way out in California. The site wasn't a Scheduled Ancient Monument, so it wasn’t protected, though it should've been, I suppose. Caithness is lousy with chambered cairns, hut circles and stone circles and hill forts, but most of ‘em aren’t protected. Noobody minds ‘em ‘cept the tourists and the archaeologists and planners who fight over ‘em with the developers.”

"Way up hare we do what we want," piped the other. "Under these big skies wa’re cowboys. Listen up, lassie. We've had a building spree on ever since the Atomics came in the 1950's to work at the Dounreay Nuclear Energy plant. Then it was the North Sea Oilers in the '70's. Now it’s the Decomms taking apart the darn dirty nuke plant. They all want sand for cement for new houses. But I wouldn’t want noo Viking fingers pokin’ oouta me bedroom walls. Noo, noo, noo !!!"

The Great Ackergill Sand Heist. That's what they'll call it in years to come. Over 1000 tonnes of prime North Sea beach sand - dune grass, Viking bones and all - hauled away from a site beside Ackergill Links to a contractor's yard at a quarry near Watten, then sold to cement-hungry housing boom builders.

Agent for the Hempriggs Estate Bruce de Wert insisted that the graveyard's location in the miles of dunes along Sinclair's Bay had not been clearly marked. Yet had the estate applied to the local Council for planning permission to extract the sand - as law requires - it would have been refused on archaeological grounds. Ackergill Cemetery has been recorded as an archaeological site for aspects which are extremely rare in Scotland.

In the 19th-century a ninth-century Ogham-inscribed symbol stone was discovered on the site. In 1925 and 1926 Arthur JH Edwards partially excavated Ackergill with support from the Gunning Fellowship. His illustrated findings with the exact location of the graves comprised a lengthy report in the February 8, 1926: Proceedings of the Society for Scottish Antiquaries.

Edwards found a series of corbelled, stone-lined and chambered cists with the remains of sixteen bodies from infants to elders, one with a 10th-century bronze chain around its neck. The main series of cists were buried under a mound which is still visible today. Edwards also found a post sticking out of a cairn, with a notice prohibiting the removal of sand from the site!

Little good it does that some bags of the haunted sand were mysteriously returned to the site weeks after the heist. Patrick Ashmore, Head of Archaeology of Historic Scotland, regrets that some of Ackergill’s archaeological interest has been lost forever. The Viking bones have been scattered, all because the site had not been designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

Curious to see it, I drove out to Ackergill at sunset and found the spot by the chaos of wrecked dunes. That evening the sky was a shocking mustard yellow, streaking the waves and watery sand with its eerie glow. I imagined the lean swooping Viking longboats on the horizon and the women of these high, narrow-faced people, as their unearthed skulls read, waiting upon the shore.

I pictured these first farmers patiently quarrying and cutting the stone slabs for these eternal coffins for their loved ones, then mining the beach for sparkling white quartzite pebbles to ritually lay on top. Even Scottish children know the magic contained in these lucky "chucky stones." Yet today, except for the few scattered by the bulldozers, they are nowhere to be found in the area.

I hope Ackergill becomes an international cause celebre to rouse the Scottish authorities to better protect the archaeological riches of Caithness, which may prove as amazing as the isle of Orkney's Skara Brae, a World Heritage Site. This raw place of big sky and dramatic light, moorlands, sea stacks and geos (cliff-edged rocky inlets) is a Celtic dreamscape for hikers and archaelogists. The wind still carries echos of the neolithic peoples, Celtic warlords, tribal Picts and Vikings who marked the landscape with their chambered cairns, stone circles, henges, standing stones and brochs.

Down south you have to fight crowds to experience anything megalithic. The A303 Motorway zips across the Salisbury Plain in a blink, and your eyes are so accustomed to reading stone structures as housing estates that you don’t notice you’ve just driven past the largest megalithic wonder on the planet.

Stonehenge is roped off to visitors now and its carpark is jammed with tour buses. The ropes prevent the abuses of the past—visitors with hammers chipping off souvenir bits. But we can count on car exhaust to eat away the rest of this 5,000 B.C. marvel.

Up in Caithness you still have the rare privilege of exploring the best preserved chambered tombs in all of Britain - the Grey Cairns of Camster - with nary a soul around.

From Lybster I drove the four miles out to the 6,000-year-old burial cairn which must have seen zillions of human bones since the year 3,800 B.C. These remarkable cairns are over 200-feet long. It’s not hard to imagine the Bronze Age scene because the landscape has not changed since then. Nothing but bog and stone, bog and stone.

I wandered the processional length to the beehive of stones weighing several thousand tons. I knelt down and creaked open the iron grate, peering into the forbidding blackness. Fighting the claustrophobia, I got down on my belly and forced myself through the two feet by two feet opening. Is the fear of being buried alive still in our bones? Yes, by Jove! In Ireland undertakers are reporting a trend of people being buried with their cell phones! Celts always were a people to bury themselves with their most prized possessions. But a Nokia N92 with 2 megapixel Zeiss optics, hi video res, FM radio, live digital TV with a large 2.8” screen and 16 million colors (did anybody count them?), digital zoom and integrated flash, 4 gigs and 3000 tunes? I realized I didn’t have one!!!!!!

I clawed my way along the dirty 21-foot passage, breathing yogically to stave off the panic. When I got inside the chamber I could sit up. But where was I? Was the world I knew still out there? Would I be able to crawl back out to the 21st century?

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