Unearth Orkney's unique history, wildlife, islands, activities and culture by taking time to browse our Orkney blogs.
The Churchill Barriers are a series of four causeways linking the Orkney Mainland to the islands of Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray and South Ronaldsay with a total length of 1.5 miles. They were built in 1940 as naval defences following the sinking of The Royal Oak, but now serve as road links, carrying the…
In 1942, during World War 2, more than 1300 Italian prisoners of war were captured in North Africa and taken to Orkney. 550 were taken to Camp 60 on the previously uninhabited island of Lamb Holm, where they were put to work building The Churchill Barriers, four causeways created, using a series of massive concerete…
Maeshowe Chambered Cairn is arguably the most impressive of the Neolithic chambered tombs in not only theOrkney Islands but in all of north-west Europe. Maeshowe is approximately 5,000 years old and the largest of the burial tombs on Orkney’s Mainland, standing at a height of 7.5 metres tall. In modern times, Maeshowe appears as a…
During the Devonian Period (416 – 359 million years ago) Scotland lay to the south of the equator in a semi-arid environment. Scotland was all above sea level and was very mountainous. The mountains were probably as high as the Swiss Alps are today and it is due to 400 million years of erosion that…
St Nicholas’ Round Church, also known as the Round Kirk of Orphir, was built by Earl Hakon Paulson on his return from Jerusalem in about 1122 AD, next to his drinking hall at the Bu in Orphir. The apse is all that now remains of the only surviving round church from this time in Scotland….
The Ring of Brodgar is located on a small isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray and is a circle of 27 standing stones (which originally comprised of 60 stones). These stones are not as tall as the nearby Standing Stones of Stenness (varying in height from 2.1 metres to a maximum of 4.7 metres)…
HMS Royal Oak was a Revenge-class battleship of the British Royal Navy built in 1914 and a veteran of the First World War. The Royal Oak had extra armour and guns, which made her one ofthe best equipped of the Revenge class, but the additional weight caused her to sit lower in the water, lowering…
Scapa Flow, which in Old Norse means ‘bay of the long isthmus’ is a large – 312 square kilometres (120 sq mi) – natural harbour sheltered by the Orkney Mainland, and the islands of Graemsay, Burray, South Ronaldsay and Hoy.Most of it is shallow, about 30 metres (98 ft) deep, and it is large enough…
In the winter of 1850, a severe windstorm hit Britain, causing widespread damage and over 200 deaths. On the west coast of Orkney, at the Bay of Skaill, the waves and wind stripped the earth from a large irregular knoll, known in Scottish as a ‘howe’, revealing an intact village, albeit without roofs. The howe…
