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Places to visit
in Orkney.

It’s 20:54 in Orkney.
Orkney

Stone circles, sea stacks and saints.

Orkney is a place where the past lies right on the surface. On the Mainland you can walk through a 5,000-year-old village by the Bay of Skaill, stand inside a great stone circle between two lochs and stoop into a tomb lit by the midwinter sun. Kirkwall has its red sandstone cathedral and a whisky distillery, and Stromness has a gallery out on a pier. In the south, wartime causeways run from island to island past a painted chapel. Over on Hoy there is a red sea stack and a remote sandy bay. Book the ferries early in summer, and check the tide before crossing to the island at Birsay.

BeachesDistilleriesMuseumsStanding stones
Place of the day20 hours ago

Churchill Barriers.

Four wartime causeways linking the Orkney Mainland to Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray and South Ronaldsay, with blockships beside them.

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From our archive20 hours agoOrkneyThe Old Man of HoyOrkneySkara BraeOrkneySt Magnus CathedralOrkneyChurchill BarriersOrkneyRing of BrodgarOrkneyBroch of Gurness

Orkney this autumn, in our photographs.

Six places in Orkney, each as we found it.

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Did you know19 hours ago

Orkney and Shetland belonged to Norway until 1468 and 1469, when they were pledged to Scotland for a royal wedding dowry that was never paid.

Christian I, king of Denmark and Norway, agreed a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish florins, a large sum at the time, when his daughter Margaret was to marry James III of Scots. He could raise only 2,000 florins of the first 10,000 in cash, so he pledged Orkney in 1468 and Shetland the next year as security. The money never came, and in 1472 Orkney was taken into the Kingdom of Scotland. The Norse past has never gone away: many place names in both island groups are Norse in origin, and Shetland's yearly Up Helly Aa festival celebrates its Viking history.

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Places to visit19 hours ago

Muckle Skerry.

Scattered off the northern coast of Scotland are the Pentland Skerries, four empty islands of varying sizes

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Just opened19 hours ago

Scapa Flow Museum on Hoy launches Voices from Scapa Flow, a collection of wartime stories from Orkney, on 14 October.

There are between 40 and 50 short audio stories, made from new interviews, old recordings and readings from diaries and letters. You can listen on the usual podcast apps or at four new listening stations in the museum.

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Did you know18 hours ago

Norsemen who broke into Maeshowe, a 5,000-year-old tomb in Orkney, covered its walls in graffiti, including 'Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women'.

Maeshowe was built around 5,000 years ago and then sealed, and some 3,000 years passed before anyone went in again. In the 12th century Norsemen broke into the mound, and accounts say they were sheltering from a snowstorm and looking for treasure. They left about thirty inscriptions in runes, the letters of the old Norse alphabet, in several different hands, along with a carved dragon. It is the largest collection of runic writing to survive outside Scandinavia, and most of it reads like light-hearted graffiti: one carver boasts that he is the man most skilled in runes west of the ocean.

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From our guide18 hours ago

Italian Chapel.

On the little island of Lamb Holm stands one of Orkney's most loved buildings, made from two Nissen huts by prisoners of war. Italian soldiers captured in North Africa were held here to build the Churchill Barriers, and they asked for a place to worship. The artist Domenico Chiocchetti led the work, giving the huts a painted interior and a concrete front of arches and pinnacles. His Madonna and Child above the altar was based on a prayer card from his mother. He came back in 1960 to help restore it.

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From Issue 8 of Hidden Scotland magazineIssue 818 hours ago

Back to Orkney

National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson on how a meeting with his editors first sent him to Orkney, and the forty years of return trips to the islands that followed.

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True or false17 hours ago

True or false: Kinghorn in Fife is named after a king's horn.

Did you know17 hours ago

Skara Brae, a stone village on the Bay of Skaill in Orkney, was a thriving community before Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids were built.

People lived in the village from roughly 3180 BC to about 2500 BC. That is earlier than the Great Pyramid, built around 2560 BC, and earlier than the main building at Stonehenge, begun around 3000 BC. Once its people had gone, the village was lost from sight until a storm uncovered it in 1850. The houses still have their stone dressers and box-beds, and Historic Environment Scotland calls it the best-preserved Neolithic, or New Stone Age, settlement in Western Europe. Today you can walk among ten of its buildings and four of its passageways, five thousand years after they were built.

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From our guide17 hours ago

The Aurora Borealis in Orkney.

Orcadians call the northern lights the Merry Dancers, and on a clear night in the dark months they can ripple across the northern sky. Orkney's dark skies help, with little light pollution to dull them. Look from autumn through winter, late on a cold, cloudless night, from somewhere with an open view to the north, such as the coast at Birsay. The show is often fainter to the eye than it looks in photographs, so a camera helps. Wrap up warm and be patient.

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From our guide16 hours ago

Ring of Brodgar.

The Ring of Brodgar stands on a narrow neck of land between the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Stenness, with water and hills on every side. It was raised around 2500 BC as a circle of 60 stones, and 36 of them survive, some more than four metres tall, inside a deep ditch cut from the rock. What went on here is still a mystery. A local legend says the stones were giants, caught dancing when the sun came up and turned to stone. You can walk round it at any hour, free of charge.

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