Ancient Orkney Islands

Day 11  Kirkwell, Orkney   Thursday, Sept 21, 2017

This is The Earl's Castle (1601) which we walked past in Kirkwell during a morning stroll, prior to departing on our scheduled excursion into this Scottish countryside. Kirkwell is the capital of Orkney, a group of 70 islands north of the Scotland mainland. The city is on the eastern side of the main island.

 The main reason we wanted to shuttle into town following our 11 am arrival was to see this St. Magnus Cathedral. Built 1137 to 1152, it was dedicated to Orkney's earl who was murdered by his cousin in 1117. There were stories of miraculous cures associated with his burial place, so he was proclaimed a saint. His nephew, Rognvald, came from Norway and overthrew the cousin, and the new earl began work on the cathedral. The remains of both Magnus and Rognvald are buried in the cathedral.

It certainly was an impressive church, and is still an active place of worship.

A painting of the saint himself!

This 17th century gravestone was in great condition.

This is the Rognvald Chapel at the far end of the cathedral.

This is their plaque to mark where Magnus is buried. They found a box with his bones in 1919 during a major restoration.

These 14 paintings depict the martyrdom of St Magnus, when his cousin ordered his cook to do the evil deed with an axe while Magnus was praying.

They also had a display to memorialize the 833 men from HMS Royal Oak who died in 1939 in nearby Scapa Flow. This is a large, sheltered bay where the naval fleet was anchored, and they thought they had protected it from enemy submarines by blocking the entrances with sunken ships. However, a German sub did find a way to enter, and torpedoed the Royal Oak, a battleship. It sunk in minutes, turning over and trapping most onboard, whose bodies never were recovered in this designated war grave (similar to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, where 1102 sailors have their final resting place). The cathedral memorial contained the ship's bell, recovered in the 1970s, and a book listing the names of the dead.

I took this photo of the cathedral's sandstone entry way, to show the erosion weathering effects of 870 years.

The two photos above are a cathedral side view and the cemetery behind it.

Directly across the street from the cathedral are the ruins of both The Earl's Palace and The Bishop's Palace. This is another photo of The Earl's Palace. It turned out this was built in 1606 by the Earl of Orkney, who was Patrick Stewart, the same guy who built the Scalloway Castle in Shetland (see posting for Day 5); he was arrested and found hiding in that castle's toilet, and was later executed for treason.

This is The Bishop's Palace, built about the same time as the cathedral. It was the grand residence for the medieval bishops or earls.

The tourist shop across the street had a sign welcoming the Norwegian Jade. In a way, it worked on us because Janet bought puffin wrapping, which she plans to use in decorating some items in our home.

There's Janet holding her puffin wrapping paper, in front of a frozen food centre -- an entire store just for frozen foods!

Cycling is prevalent in Europe, but apparently you can't cycle everywhere. This sign was only a few yards away from the bicycle shop I went in to ask the results of the World Championship road race held in Bergen four days earlier.

On our walk back to the shuttle to the ship (in the background), we saw this tiny boat. I would not want to venture out far from shore in that little thing.

After eating lunch back at the ship, we departed on our tour to see the Neolithic village of Skara Brae across on the western side of the island. This 5000-year-old stone village was discovered only 167 yrs ago (in 1850) when a huge storm washed away the sand that had covered it for millennia.

The village consists of 10 houses and a larger "workshop", set right on the shore of a little bay that they think used to be cut off from the ocean. It is the best preserved prehistoric village in Northern Europe. (Harrison Ford was lecturing about it in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) Although the non-stone roofs are long gone, everything else, including their stone furniture, is intact.

That opening to the sea was thought to have been "closed up" when Skara Brae was an active community. Some of the known village was washed away in a huge storm in 1924, and they figure much of it was washed away in previous storms once the sea opening widened.

This photo shows Skaill House in the background (which we later toured), where the owner lived who discovered Skara Brae in 1850. Well, it wasn't a difficult discovery since it was right there on his property in front of him! Our tour guide told how the fellow let his daughters play in the houses, and even modified their play site by opening a hole through the wall of House 1 so the girls could have a view of the ocean. The discovery was announced immediately, but was never seriously investigated until 1913.

This is House 1, where you can see the box beds on either side, the dresser on the far side, the fire pit in the center, and other pieces still in place. The box in front of the dresser is a kitchen piece to treat or preserve sea foods.

The structures were connected by narrow, low covered passageways to protect them from the elements. The house roofs were most likely skins over a bone or wood structure, covered by turf.

This is House 2, and still has the bed boxes, hearth, storage boxes, and side rooms.

This is House 5 and House 4, behind. Every house at Skara Brae is structured similarly and contain similar furnishings.

This picture of House 2 shows the short, narrow entrances they had. The inhabitants were not short, but they wanted less space to keep heated.

These are Houses 9 and 10, the oldest in the village. Their beds recessed into the walls rather than projecting into the living space. Just beyond is House 7, the best preserved and most complete. It is covered over and is not open to visitors to keep it preserved for study. They built a replica of House 7 for us to visit:

Here is the passageway to replica House 7, but it has been made much taller and wider for tourists. There was a cute Neolithic chiquita peeking at me.

 In replica House 7, with its dresser, box bed, fireplace, and shelves. The roof structure is a guess.

 Replica House 7 had a kitchen box showing this fake lobster awaiting its demise.

Our tour guide was Welsh, not Scottish! This is Skaill House, home of the same-family lairds (name for the owner of a large, long-established Scottish estate) since 1620.  It was used as the families' home, through the many generations, up until 1997, when it was opened to the public.

Although the house was lavish, it still had the feel of a "real" lived-in home, which it was. Notice that picture on the table?

That's the Queen Mum, who would stay here often while traveling around her beloved Scotland.

 Eeeeuuuuu. Do "real" lived-in homes have rugs like this??

These plates were salvaged from Captain James Cook's ship after he died.

Our bus then took us to the center of the island to the Ring of Brodgar, also dating back 5000 years. It's part of the UNESCO World Heritage site called Heart of Neolithic Orkney (which also includes Skara Brae). This Ring lies between two lochs.

It's 104 meters in diameter, and originally had 60 stones. Only 27 stones remain.

The ring is surrounded by a ditch originally 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep.

The site still had some beauty! And yes, it rained most of the day. It was really muddy walking around it.

REALLY muddy! These are a couple of the stones that are virtually gone. Many of the stones were destroyed by land owners and vandals during the past couple of centuries.

 

Our final stop, less than a mile away, was at the Standing Stones of Stenness, the oldest henge in the British Isles. There are just four of the original 12 stones left standing. 

We were amazed to hear our tour guide tell how, in 1814, a recent immigrant to Orkney who owned farmland in the vicinity of the stones, decided to remove them because local people were trespassing and disturbing his land (by using the stones in rituals). He started by smashing the Odin Stone, which was believed to have magical power (it was pierced with a circular hole, and was used by local couples for pledging their love by holding hands through the gap). His destruction caused outrage and he was stopped after destroying one other stone and toppling another. 

After returning to the ship, we got to see a perfect, entire rainbow. This photo captures only one side of it. At both ends, it seemed like we could go get the pot of gold where it touched the ground.

We were treated to a musical send-off as the ship departed. We were lucky we heard them as we walked across the pool deck toward our room. We scurried over to the side and watched them from 12 levels up.

There were little ones performing too. This all was a nice added touch.

What a view as the ship pulled away from the dock! 

I don't want to leave this day in Orkney without relating a story about the Italian Chapel. The excursion we booked originally would have taken us to the south to see this, but we changed our excursion because the Neolithic sites seemed more interesting. Still, I bought a booklet about the Italian Chapel, and it's a touching story.

"The Miracle of Camp 60" is how this hand-painted chapel is described, made during the war by Italian POWs. They put two Nissen huts together and a handful of the prisoners, led by one who happened to be a painter/artist, eventually were able to construct and decorate this church. They had ample cement, barbed wire, and plaster to use, because their day job was to construct the massive "Churchill Barriers" to block the Skapa Flow entrances following the sinking of HMS Royal Oak. The camp commander was supportive of letting the prisoners work on the chapel and supplied them with "extras".

This is the altar and part of the ceiling. The painting of Madonna and Child over the altar is considered the artist's masterpiece. They covered the ugly corrugated iron of the huts with plaster board. The alter and many other pieces were formed from concrete. Gold curtains were purchased using the prisoners' welfare fund. They fashioned six candelabra, two of iron and four of brass. They salvaged wood from a wrecked ship to make the tabernacle. 

They completed the forward chancel first, and the contrast between it and the remaining back of the hut was so great that one of the prisoners made a screen and gate, to separate the two sections, out of wrought iron, which took four months and is considered one of the chapel's glories. They then decided the back section was too "uninviting", so they persuaded the commandant to purchase enough plasterboard to line the entire interior. They then painted it all to resemble brickwork and carved stone. This all was so fancy dancy that they even sent in another painter from another POW camp to help.

Once the interior was done and beautiful, it then made the outside look ugly, so they built a facade with archways, pillars, a belfry, Gothic pinnacles, and windows of decorated glass. They also covered the iron hut exterior with a thick layer of cement.

Funny how the prisoners left on Sept 9, 1944, but the main artist stayed behind to finish! Before the artist returned to Italy, they held a service in the finished chapel, complete with a record player to play the bells and choir from St. Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican.

After the war, locals kept restoring the chapel and it gained fame as thousands went to see it each year. Eventually, they held regular services there for all faiths. In 1960, the Orkney citizens paid to have the Italian artist return for a three-week visit of pomp and circumstance covered by the BBC. In 1964, the artist again returned, this time with his wife, and again there were lots of festivities and honors. By then, many gifts had been donated to adorn the chapel and make it even more beautiful. 

Finally, in 1992, eight former POWs who had been there 50 yrs earlier and worked on the chapel, returned to honor the story of the Miracle of Camp 60.  The main artist was too frail to attend, but his daughter and her husband did. The artist died in 1999, and a month later the locals held a Memorial Requiem Mass in the Italian Chapel to honor his life and work.