Orkney
The Shape of It
Seventy islands, twenty inhabited, one that feels like the edge of something important.
Orkney sits ten miles north of the Scottish mainland, across the Pentland Firth — which is not a firth in any peaceful sense of the word. The tides there run at twelve knots and the currents fight each other in a confusion that has been sending ships sideways since the Norse learnt to dread it. On a bad day it is the most dangerous stretch of water in Europe. On a fine day it is merely spectacular.
The name “Orkney” is a palimpsest. The Picts called the islands something that may have meant “young pig islands.” The Norse heard this as “orkn” — their word for seal — and added eyjar, “islands,” giving us Orkneyjar: Seal Islands. Meanwhile the Old Irish called them Insi Orc: Islands of the Young Pigs. The Romans called them the Orcades. Everyone agreed they were out there; nobody could quite agree on what lived on them.
The islands are mainly low and green, formed by glacial action on sandstone that splits conveniently into building slabs. This is why there are so many ancient structures still standing: the stone was ready to hand, flat and obedient, and the ground preserved rather than rotted what was left in it. Hoy is the exception — a dark, dramatic island of sandstone hills, with Ward Hill rising to 479 metres and the Old Man of Hoy, a 137-metre sea stack, standing off its western cliffs like a sentinel who has been there long enough to stop caring about visitors.
The climate is mild, the soils fertile, and the wind constant. The near-total absence of trees — which seems to confuse every visitor — is mostly the wind’s fault. It bends saplings before they can establish, and has been doing so for millennia. On Hoy, however, hidden in a ravine on the north coast, there is a small natural wood of hazel, rowan and birch. It is thought to be a relic of the post-glacial forest, ten thousand years old — Britain’s oldest natural woodland, surviving by the accident of shelter.
In midsummer the light never quite leaves. Long after midnight there is a grey luminosity on the northern horizon that the islanders call the simmer dim — the summer twilight. In winter the reverse applies with equal force: on the shortest day the sun rises at nine in the morning and sets by quarter past three. The Mirrie Dancers — the Northern Lights — fill the gap.
The Stones
Older than Egypt, decorated by Vikings, and still not entirely explained.
Skara Brae was buried in a sand dune for millennia and rediscovered only in 1850, when a storm stripped away the covering. What emerged was a Neolithic village, built around 3100 BC, with stone furniture intact — box beds, dressers, storage niches — because the builders had no timber, and stone does not rot. The pyramids of Giza are five centuries younger. Skara Brae predates Stonehenge. The people who lived there kept cattle, grew grain and, apparently, organised their homes in a way that would still look perfectly sensible today. Plumbing included.
On Papa Westray, the Knap of Howar is even older. Two small stone houses, occupied from 3700 BC to 3100 BC, their walls still standing to eaves height. The oldest standing stone house in northern Europe. Visitors can walk inside; there are no rope barriers. This is either pleasingly trusting or a sign that Orkney has so many extraordinary things that it can afford to be casual about any individual one of them.
Rousay, a small island off the north-west of the Mainland, is sometimes called the Egypt of the North. It contains over a hundred identified archaeological sites. The Midhowe Chambered Cairn, a hundred feet long and forty wide, contained twenty-five crouching corpses. The names of the other tombs — Blackhammar, Taversoe Tuick — suggest Orkney’s archaeological placenames were arrived at by people who were not trying to be picturesque and turned out more memorable for it.
The Ring of Brodgar is a henge and stone circle set between two lochs, and it is the third largest stone circle in Britain. The Standing Stones of Stenness are a few minutes’ walk away. Between them, excavations at the Ness of Brodgar have revealed what appears to be a large ceremonial complex: painted stonework, elaborate architecture, industrial quantities of animal bones from feasting. The site is still being dug each summer. Every season produces something that revises the previous season’s interpretation.
Then there is Maeshowe. Built around 2800 BC, it is a chambered cairn aligned so precisely with the winter solstice that for a few minutes on the shortest days of the year, the setting sun shines directly down the entrance passage into the chamber. The Neolithic builders achieved this without instruments, at least not any instruments we have found. For four thousand years Maeshowe was sealed. Then in the winter of 1153, a band of Norse warriors, caught in a blizzard, broke through the roof and sheltered inside. And did what people have always done when stuck somewhere unexpected: they wrote on the walls.
“Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Lif the earl’s cook carved these runes. To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure. Hakon alone bore treasure from this mound.” — signed Simon Sirith
“These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean — with this axe owned by Gauk Trandilsson in the South land.”
“Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women.” — carved next to a drawing of a slavering dog.
“Many a woman has come stooping in here, no matter how pompous a person she was.”
Maeshowe contains over thirty runic inscriptions — the largest single collection of Viking runes known from one location. Scholars have identified several different hands. One inscription refers to the mound by its Old Norse name, Orkahaugr, confirming it as the tomb mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga. The treasure, if there ever was one, has not been found.
Notable Folk
The well-travelled and the wrongly-forgotten.
The Mither Tongue
A thousand years of Norse, pressed into a dialect that sounds like nobody else.
For a thousand years — from the first Norse settlers in the ninth century until well into the seventeenth — the people of Orkney spoke Norn, a language descended from Old Norse and closely related to Faroese and Icelandic. It was replaced gradually by Lowland Scots as the islands became more thoroughly Scottish, and by the early nineteenth century it was gone as a living tongue. But it did not disappear entirely. It seeped into the dialect that replaced it, leaving behind a vocabulary of wind and sea and small domestic things for which Scots had no words. The modern Orkney dialect is classified as a variety of Insular Scots, but it is richly stocked with Norn — to an extent, as the scholar Hugh Marwick put it, that its speakers often do not realise.
Orkney speech has a characteristic rising intonation, often described as a lilt, that linguists compare to Welsh or Irish. Statements can sound like questions to southern ears. The singular pronoun thoo and thee survive among older speakers, a direct link across a millennium to Old Norse. “I’m finished my work” is standard Orkney English, where the mainland would say “I have finished.” North Ronaldsay has its own sub-dialect, with a further softening of consonants; on Stronsay and Sanday the vowels shift again. A single word pronounced in five islands may arrive in five forms.
The last known fragment of spoken Norn was recorded in the 1770s by George Low, who took down a garbled version of the Lord’s Prayer from an old man who had learnt it as a child. By 1750 James Mackenzie had written that Norn was “retained by old people” but little more. The Norn Lord’s Prayer begins: “Fy vor or er i Chimeri. Halaght vara nam dit…” — which is unmistakably Norse to anyone who knows Icelandic or Faroese, and unmistakably lost to everyone else.
Place Names
Almost entirely Norse. The Picts named nothing here that survived them.
The Norse settlers arrived in such numbers, and so completely, that they renamed everything. Essentially every place name in Orkney is Old Norse, and most are transparently readable to anyone who knows the language.
The Sea People
Orkney has more selkie legends per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
The selkies are seal-people, living in the sea as seals and walking on land in human form. The stories are almost always sad. A man finds a sealskin on the shore and hides it; without it, the selkie woman cannot return to the sea, and stays as his wife. She is a good wife. She loves her children. But she is always watching the waves. If she ever finds the hidden skin — behind the rafters, under the hearthstone — she goes. She does not hesitate. In Orkney, practically every island had its own version of the story. Walter Traill Dennison found them everywhere he looked.
The Finfolk are more dangerous. They are sorcerous beings who live in the underwater kingdom of Finfolkaheem, and they abduct humans for servants or spouses. They could, according to the stories, row from Orkney to Norway in seven strokes. Their summer home was an enchanted island called Hildaland, invisible to human eyes, which eventually became Eynhallow after a man claimed it using protective charms and salted the ground. The island has been uninhabited since 1851, when all its residents were simultaneously evicted for unpaid rent and removed to the mainland. The Finfolk, presumably, moved on.
Then there are the trows — small, mischievous creatures of Norse origin, similar to trolls. It was unwise to disturb their mounds, especially after dark. To feel trowie is to feel out of sorts, slightly not-yourself. The Nuckelavee is worse: a sea-demon, a horse and rider fused into one skinless creature with black blood and a single burning eye, whose breath blights crops and spreads disease among livestock. Its only weakness is fresh running water; crossing a stream will stop it. On Stronsay, where it was believed to live, this knowledge was presumably some comfort.
The Finnmen are a different mystery. From the 1690s onward, reliable witnesses reported seeing solitary figures in small, enclosed boats, paddling at extraordinary speed in Orkney waters. A kayak captured in Orkney was sent to Edinburgh, where it was displayed in the Physicians’ Hall. Modern scholars believe these were Inuit hunters who had been blown across the North Atlantic by storm — or, possibly, deliberately brought over and then escaped. The locals, already familiar with the Finfolk legends, called them Finnmen. The two traditions wound together in the telling until they were inseparable.
An earthly nouris sits an’ sings,
An’ aye she sings, “Ba lily wean!
Little ken I my bairnis father,
Far less the land that he staps in.”
Then ane arose at her bed-fit,
An’ a grumly guest I’m sure was he,
Sayin’, “Here am I, thy bairnis father,
Although I be not comely.”
“I am a man upo the lan,
An’ I am a selkie in the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae lan,
My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.”
— Traditional Orcadian ballad, first written down in the nineteenth century; the tune is much older
At the Table
Where ancient grain meets the world’s most northerly distillery.
Bere is an ancient six-row barley, grown in Orkney continuously since at least the Bronze Age and possibly since the people of Skara Brae were grinding it in stone querns five thousand years ago. It matures in ninety days, which is why it survived so long in a northern climate where modern varieties would fail. In the nineteenth century, there were as many as twenty-five mills on Orkney grinding bere into beremeal. Now there is one: Barony Mill at Birsay, built in 1837, its original machinery still turning, powered by the water of a burn. It is the only mill in the world that still grinds bere commercially.
The product is beremeal — a flour with an earthy, nutty, slightly smoky flavour that comes from kiln-drying the grain over peat. The traditional use is the bere bannock: a thick flatbread, cooked on a griddle, eaten warm with Orkney butter. Generations of Orcadians grew up on it. It is not fancy. It does not need to be. In 2017, researchers planted bere alongside modern barley in manganese-deficient soil. The modern crops turned yellow, collapsed, barely reached knee height. The bere stood tall and full-headed. The ninety-day barley had been answering this kind of challenge for five thousand years and was not about to be embarrassed by a laboratory trial.
Highland Park distillery in Kirkwall has been making whisky since 1798, making it one of the oldest and most northerly distilleries in Scotland. It uses Orkney peat, which has a different character from mainland peat because it is composed largely of heather rather than bog. Scapa, the other Orkney distillery, operates on the edge of the great harbour of the same name.
North Ronaldsay, the most northerly of the inhabited islands, is enclosed by a dry-stone dyke that runs around its entire circumference. The sheep are kept outside this wall, on the foreshore, and eat seaweed for most of the year. They have been doing this long enough to have metabolised differently from mainland sheep; their digestive systems have adapted to the iodine and the salt. They are the only sheep in the world whose ordinary diet is the sea. The meat tastes of it, in the best possible way.
Scapa Flow
A harbour that has held the German fleet, lost a battleship in the night, and kept the secret of both for years.
Scapa Flow is a roughly circular natural harbour enclosed by the southern Orkney islands, covering about 120 square miles of sheltered water. The Norse called it Skalpaflói. It has been used as an anchorage since Viking times. In both world wars it was the main base of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet — the logical choice, positioned to intercept anything trying to come south through the North Sea.
On 21 June 1919, with seventy-four German warships interned in the Flow under armed guard, the British Battle Squadron left for torpedo practice. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, believing the armistice deadline had passed and that the British were about to seize his fleet, ran up the coded signal “Paragraph Eleven” — a student drinking phrase meaning “keep drinking.” The meaning to his own captains was different. Within five hours, fifty-two ships had been scuttled. It remains the greatest single-day loss of shipping in recorded history. Seven of the wrecks still lie on the bottom and are now among the finest dive sites in Europe.
Twenty years later, on the night of 13th October 1939, the German submarine U-47 slipped into the Flow through an incompletely defended channel and torpedoed HMS Royal Oak at anchor. She sank in thirteen minutes. Eight hundred and thirty-five men died. Winston Churchill ordered the construction of causeways blocking the southern approaches. The Churchill Barriers, as they are called, were built largely by Italian prisoners of war, who simultaneously constructed a chapel from corrugated iron and scrap concrete in Camp 60 on the island of Lamb Holm. The Italian Chapel, as elaborate and carefully finished inside as it is improbable outside, is still standing. The causeway that was meant to close a security gap became the road that now connects South Ronaldsay to the Mainland. The Barriers turned strategic necessity into infrastructure.
Scapa Flow has two other significant deaths on its account. On 5th June 1916, HMS Hampshire struck a mine while crossing the Pentland Firth during a storm, and sank within fifteen minutes. On board was Lord Kitchener, en route to Russia. Six hundred and forty-three men died; there were twelve survivors. And on 9th July 1917, HMS Vanguard exploded at anchor off the island of Flotta — not enemy action, but unstable cordite overheating spontaneously below decks. Eight hundred and forty-five men were aboard. Two survived.
Did You Know?
A gathering of facts that do not sit quietly in any larger argument.
- That Orkney was literally pledged against an unpaid dowry? In 1468, Christian I of Denmark promised 60,000 florins on the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James III of Scotland. Unable to raise the money, he pledged Orkney as security. He never paid. The islands were formally annexed to Scotland in 1472 and have been Scottish ever since. In 2002, a Norwegian group called We Move Borders suggested Norway could simply repay the original sum and reclaim them. Orkney’s response was largely amused rather than interested.
- That the world’s shortest scheduled air service runs between Westray and Papa Westray? The flight lasts one minute and thirty seconds under normal conditions. In a tailwind, it has been known to land in under a minute. The plane is a Britten-Norman Islander with eight seats.
- That by the late eighteenth century, three out of every four workers recruited in Britain for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada were Orcadian? The Company had agents in Stromness, where the fleet stopped to take on water, and Orcadians had a reputation as hardy, dependable, accustomed to cold and to boats. John Rae’s father was the Company’s agent in the islands. At least twenty-eight Orkneymen became governors, chief factors, or chief traders between the early 1700s and the mid-1800s.
- That Scotland’s first free lending library opened in Orkney in 1683?
- That Orkney generates more electricity from renewable sources than it consumes? The wind and tidal resources of the islands are exceptional. Surplus power is exported to the mainland by undersea cable.
- That the Knap of Howar on Papa Westray — two small stone houses, walls intact — dates from 3700 BC? It is the oldest standing house in northern Europe. It predates Stonehenge by over a thousand years.
- That Orkney has a subspecies of the common vole found nowhere else on earth? It arrived, apparently, with Neolithic farmers around 5,000 years ago, was cut off when the islands were separated from the mainland, and has been evolving separately ever since. It is larger than its mainland relatives, with shorter, paler fur.
- That the last Franklin Expedition ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, stopped in Stromness before their final voyage? They drew water from Login’s Well on Stromness’s main street, which still stands. Franklin himself spent his last night on British soil in Stromness, as a guest in the house of John Rae’s sister. No one on the expedition survived to return to Britain; the wreck of the Erebus was found in Canadian waters in 2014, confirming the account that John Rae brought home from the Inuit sixty years earlier.
- That Orkney is thought to be the place the Greek explorer Pytheas was describing when he wrote about the “edge of the world” around 325 BC? He called the northernmost land he had heard of “Ultima Thule.” Most scholars think he was describing Shetland or Norway, but Orkney has been staking a claim to the title ever since.
- That the Viking runic inscription “Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women” was carved into the wall of a five-thousand-year-old Neolithic tomb, next to a drawing of a dog?
- That Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer, lived on the island of Hoy for many years and wrote The Yellow Cake Revue — a song cycle opposing Margaret Thatcher’s plans for uranium mining between Stromness and Yesnaby — which contributed to stopping the project in 1980?
- That Orkney has an average of three archaeological sites per square mile — and the islands have been inhabited for at least eight thousand five hundred years?
- That HMS Hampshire, the ship on which Kitchener drowned in 1916, was leaving Scapa Flow in a storm when it hit a German mine? The storm was not expected to be dangerous. The route had been inadequately swept. Kitchener, en route to Russia for talks, was one of six hundred and forty-three dead.
This page draws on a range of sources, including: Hugh Marwick, The Orkney Norn (1929); Walter Traill Dennison, Orkney Folklore and Sea Legends (ed. Tom Muir, 1995); William Mackintosh, Around the Orkney Peat Fires (c.1898); the published works of Ernest Marwick; the John Rae Society’s records; the Slow Food Foundation on Orkney bere; Wikipedia as a source of leads and verification; and general web research conducted in 2026. The selection, arrangement and editorial prejudices are entirely ours. Any errors of emphasis belong to this page; any genuine curiosities belong to Orkney.