Day 1 of our Orcadian Adventure For February break we decided to take a family trip to Orkney, it’s one place in Scotland we have never been to. We caught the ferry from Gills Bay to St Margaret’s Hope. A fun 1 hour trip. The departure was at 1.30 so it was a very early […]
A style of chair that goes back centuries. The iconic Orkney Hooded Chair was traditionally made from driftwood washed up from the sea. Timber in Orkney is scarce so islanders would use other materials to make furniture. The earliest version of the chair was more like a low round stool covered with straw. From this it […]
Gow’s Folly was once cursed by generations of wagoners and hauliers, an odd looking little building with the stone spire in the middle of a busy goods yard. Nobody knew or cared about its origins and it was threatened with demolition on several occasions. Thanks to the Kirkwell Community Council this odd looking building has […]
John Gow was a pirate thought to have been born around 1698 in the Caithness town of Wick on the northern coast of Scotland. Gow grew up in Stromness, an important and bustling international port at the time. Young lads would all grow up with a strong calling to the sea and Gow was no […]
A 5,000-year-old whalebone figurine, one of the oldest representations of a human form ever found in Britain, has been rediscovered after going missing for more than 150 years. The figurine has been dubbed the “Buddo” of Skara Brae a name taken from an Orcadian word meaning ‘friend’. It was carved from a single piece of […]
With the Forth Bridge having recently joined five other areas of Scotland as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, we thought this week we would take a look at what makes these sites so special and worth preserving for future generations. If you were not aware UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and […]
Scapa Flow is one of Britain’s most important historic stretches of water, located within the Orkney Islands, off the northeast coast of Scotland. It’s a natural harbour which has been used over many centuries, from the Viking fleet of King Haokon in the 13th Century, to the present day. It formed an important northern base […]
Intertwined and impenetrably linked to Scottish culture, poetry has a long and distinguished history in Scotland. And it’s a history that’s continuing to this day – Edinburgh was recently named the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, the publishing industry is thriving, the country has more literature festivals per capita than any other, and there’s […]
A dictionary of an extinct language spoken only in the remote Scottish Highlands has been uncovered in an English charity shop. The two-volume Norn Dictionary was anonymously donated to the Willow Burn bookshop in County Durham, and with a price tag of £120 is the most valuable item to date handed into the shop. Originally […]
What is claimed as a carving on a glacial boulder in the town of Westford, in Massachusetts, USA, is argued to be proof that an expedition, led by Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, landed on the North American continent almost 100 years before Christopher Columbus. The ‘carving’ is subject to much speculation over its authenticity, […]
