Orkney

• 1. Introduction

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  Orkney sits 10 miles north of the Scottish mainland, a scatter of about 70 islands where the Atlantic and the North Sea collide. Twenty of those islands are inhabited. The largest, called simply the Mainland, spans 523 square kilometres and holds the archipelago's only towns. What makes Orkney remarkable is not its remoteness but what humans have built and buried there across ten millennia. The oldest permanently settled place known on these islands dates to 3500 BC, predating Stonehenge by roughly a thousand years. A charred hazelnut shell found in 2007 pushes evidence of seasonal visitors back even further, to somewhere between 6820 and 6660 BC. The islands have been Norse, then Scottish, then British, and through all of it a distinctive culture survived, one so separate that locals still call the Scottish mainland simply "Scotland", as if it were a foreign country. How did these windswept islands become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an energy pioneer, and a place that residents twice named the best in all of Scotland to live? The answers reach back further than most European cities.

• 2. The Oldest Places in Europe

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  Skara Brae has been standing, in its buried way, since around 3100 BC. Europe has no better-preserved Neolithic settlement. Covered by sand for thousands of years and only uncovered by a storm in the 19th century, the village preserves stone furniture, drainage channels, and covered passageways that speak of a settled, organised community. Nearby, the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar form part of a ceremonial landscape that drew people from across what is now Scotland. The Maeshowe passage grave lines up with the midwinter sunset, suggesting sophisticated astronomical knowledge. Together, four of these Neolithic sites are grouped under the designation Heart of Neolithic Orkney, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. In September 2021, that landscape yielded something new: archaeologists excavating a 5,500-year-old burial tomb on the island of Sanday announced the discovery of two polished stone balls. The second, according to Dr Hugo Anderson, was the size of a cricket ball, perfectly spherical and beautifully finished. The Iron Age left its own signature. At Quanterness on the Mainland, excavations revealed an Atlantic roundhouse built around 700 BC. The most dramatic Iron Age structures are the brochs, round towers whose precise purpose and origins remain debated among archaeologists. The Broch of Gurness and the Broch of Burroughston are among the survivors. By the late Iron Age Orkney was firmly part of the Pictish kingdom, and it was the Picts whose tribal name, thought to mean young pig or young boar in their language, almost certainly gave the islands their name.

• 3. The Norse Centuries

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  Norwegian king Harald Fairhair annexed the Northern Isles in 875, according to the Orkneyinga Saga, though some scholars consider that founding story apocryphal and tied to later voyages. What is certain is that a significant influx of Norwegian settlers arrived during the late 8th and early 9th centuries, so thoroughly reshaping the islands that their place names became almost wholly West Norse. The earldom passed through violent hands from the start. Rognvald Eysteinsson received Orkney and Shetland as compensation for the death of his son in battle, then passed it to his brother Sigurd the Mighty, who went on to conquer Caithness and Sutherland. It was Torf-Einarr, Rognvald's son by a slave woman, who founded the dynasty that controlled the islands for centuries. The Norwegian king Eric Bloodaxe used Orkney as a raiding base before being killed in 954. Conversion to Christianity arrived in 995 under circumstances that left little room for refusal. King Olaf Tryggvason stopped at South Walls and summoned the jarl Sigurd the Stout. The Orkneyinga Saga records his words directly: "I order you and all your subjects to be baptised. If you refuse, I'll have you killed on the spot and I swear I will ravage every island with fire and steel." Sigurd agreed, and the islands received their own bishop in the early 11th century. The most lasting mark of the Norse era on Kirkwall came from a killing. Magnus Erlendsson was murdered in April 1116 by his cousin Haakon Paulsson. The martyrdom and subsequent veneration of Magnus led to the construction of St Magnus Cathedral, which still dominates Kirkwall today. In 1290, the death of the child princess Margaret, Maid of Norway, while passing through Orkney en route to mainland Scotland, created a succession crisis that sparked the Wars of Scottish Independence.

• 4. From Norway to Scotland

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  In 1468 Christian I, pledging Orkney in his capacity as King of Norway, offered the islands as security against the dowry promised when his daughter Margaret married James III of Scotland. The money was never paid. In 1472 the Parliament of Scotland formally absorbed the Earldom of Orkney into the Kingdom of Scotland, ending five centuries of Norwegian rule. The transition opened the islands to Scottish merchants and entrepreneurs whose arrival created what residents came to call themselves: comunitas Orcadie, a community distinct from both its Norse past and its new Scottish overlords. A herring fishery, initially dominated by boats from mainland Scotland and the Netherlands, grew dramatically by the 1840s, when 700 boats were operating and Stronsay and Stromness had become the leading centres of that industry. In the 17th century Orcadians came to form the overwhelming majority of employees of the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada. Their reputation for sobriety, boat-handling skills, and endurance in harsh weather made them prized recruits for the Canadian north. Kelp burning briefly became a major industry, with Shapinsay alone producing over 3,000 long tons of burned seaweed per year to manufacture soda ash, bringing £20,000 into that island's economy. The industry collapsed in 1830 when tariffs on imported alkali were removed. The Jacobite cause found sympathisers here too. In 1745, Jacobite lairds kept Orkney friendly to the Stuart cause and used it as a landing point for supplies from Spain. Orkney was the final place in the British Isles to hold out for the Jacobites, retaken by the British government only on the 24th of May 1746, more than a month after the defeat at Culloden.

• 5. Scapa Flow and Two World Wars

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  The vast natural harbour of Scapa Flow, ringed by the South Isles, made Orkney the home of the Royal Navy's main base during both world wars. After the Armistice in 1918, the entire German High Seas Fleet was transferred to Scapa Flow to await its fate under the peace negotiations. The German sailors resolved the uncertainty themselves by opening the seacocks and scuttling every ship. Most were eventually salvaged, but the remaining wrecks became a destination for recreational divers and remain so today. One month into the Second World War, a German U-boat penetrated Scapa Flow's defences and sank a Royal Navy battleship. The response was the construction of the Churchill Barriers, a series of barriers closing the main access channels. An unexpected benefit of the barriers was that they created causeways connecting several islands by road, making it possible to drive between Mainland, Burray, and South Ronaldsay without a ferry. The labour came from Italian prisoners of war, who also built the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm, an ornate structure constructed from two Nissen huts that still stands. The naval base declined after 1945 and closed in 1957. The post-war decades brought a significant population problem as people left, with total numbers falling to fewer than 18,000 by the 1970s from a mid-19th-century peak of just over 32,000. Recovery came in the final decades of the 20th century, and the population grew by 11% in the decade ending in 2011, reaching 21,958 in the 2022 census.

• 6. Renewable Energy Pioneer

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  By 2015 Orkney was generating over 100% of its net electricity demand from renewable sources, almost entirely from wind turbines spread across the islands. The surplus created a practical problem: the existing cable to the mainland could not carry it all. One proposed solution was to build a new cable. The other, which gathered momentum quickly, was to convert excess renewable electricity into hydrogen and store it. By 2019 more than 2% of vehicles on Orkney's roads were electric, one of the highest uptakes in the United Kingdom. The European Marine Energy Centre, known as EMEC, operates a wave test site at Billia Croo off the west Mainland and a tidal power test site in the Fall of Warness off the island of Eday. At the official opening of the Eday tidal site, it was described as the first of its kind in the world to provide developers of wave and tidal energy devices with a purpose-built performance testing facility. By May 2020 the islands were using hydrogen to power vehicles, with plans to heat a local primary school using the same fuel. A hydrogen-diesel dual fuel vessel, developed through a consortium called HyDIME, was planned for testing to carry passengers and goods between islands. Kirkwall Airport was scheduled to begin decarbonising its heat and power through green hydrogen as part of a wider Scottish government ambition for the Highlands and Islands to become the world's first net zero aviation region by 2040. In July 2023 Orkney Council investigated even bolder options for the islands' political future, examining whether Orkney might become a British Crown Dependency or even a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Norway, partly to better control its own energy revenues.

• 7. Language, Wildlife, and Identity

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  Orkney's name itself is a palimpsest of languages. The Picts called their people something meaning young pig or young boar. Norse settlers heard that as orkn, their word for seal, and added the suffix jar for islands, making Orkneyjar: Seal Islands. The Norse language gradually shifted into a local tongue called Norn, which survived until the end of the 18th century before dying out and being replaced by the Orcadian dialect of Insular Scots. According to the 2022 Scottish Census, 38.7% of residents over three years old considered themselves able to speak or read Scots, while only 0.8% could speak or read Gaelic, reflecting the Norse rather than Gaelic cultural inheritance. The best-known literary figures to emerge from modern Orkney include the poet Edwin Muir, the poet and novelist George Mackay Brown, and the novelist Eric Linklater. Folklore centres on the trows, an Orcadian form of troll rooted in the Scandinavian past, and on rituals like the marriage ceremonies once held at the Odin Stone, part of the Stones of Stenness. Orkney's wildlife carries its own distinctiveness. The Orkney vole, introduced by Neolithic humans, is an endemic subspecies with five distinct varieties found only on the islands, absent entirely from the British mainland. The North Ronaldsay sheep survives largely on seaweed, confined to the foreshore for most of the year. The Scottish primrose grows only on Orkney and the nearby coasts of Caithness and Sutherland. Since 2010, the introduction of stoats, a species not native to the islands, threatened the vole and dozens of bird species including the hen harrier and short-eared owl. The Orkney Native Wildlife Project, backed by RSPB Scotland and Orkney Islands Council, deployed more than 5,000 traps and by 2024 had spent £7.9 million trapping over 6,300 stoats, though the project faced sabotage and political friction along the way.