Skara Brae was discovered almost by accident in the winter of 1850 when a severe storm hit Orkney, Scotland. The storm's strong winds and high tides stripped away the earth, sand, and grass from a large mound called Skerrabra (later corrupted to Skara Brae), exposing the outlines of several stone houses. This revealed a Neolithic village that had been buried for thousands of years. William Graham Watt, the local laird and an amateur geologist, began excavating the site and uncovered four houses by 1868, but work was abandoned at that time. The site was later further excavated after another storm in the 1920s damaged some of the structures, leading to a more systematic study by archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh under Professor Vere Childe in 1927.