Kirkwall has an excellent free museum that focuses on the cultures of Orkney from the neolithic to the modern times. We could have spent all day in the museum, but there is an inner battle with myself about being in a museum reading about a place, or being out in that place experiencing it. I did focus on the Viking part of Orkney's history as I have recently, through DNA matching, come to know that a measurable portion of my ancestry is of Norse blood. (I had always thought we were of primarily Welsh background.) Turns out I've got none of that, but having a little Viking in me, well that is pretty cool.
The Norse started coming to Orkney and the Shetland Islands in the 700s (eighth century) they ruled the islands for 600 years. That is why the Orcadians seem more Norse than Scots. Slowly the islands came more and more under the influence of the Scots and then in 1471 the islands were officially transferred to Scotland in some kingly deal-making. Of course, a document signed by a couple of kings didn't change the fact the people of Orkney and Shetland were genetically and culturally norsemen. The islands reflect this.
An Orkney chair at the museum; a drawer on the right hand side is for the Bible
A drawer on the left for the whisky
Norse runic carvings on stone. Found in churches and on stones all over the island
Taking a break from antiquity, I did a tasting at the Scapa Distillery, one of two distilleries on the island. I tasted four whiskies, my favorites being a 18 year old blended barrel and a 13 year old whisky aged in used sherry casks. Scapa ages their whiskies in used bourbon barrels and used sherry barrels.
Whisky aging in the barrels
My wine tasting guide. Loved his whisky.
This was a center of pre-bronze age western civilization. At the time, population of the Orkneys was trebled what they are today. This was an active culture that required lots of manpower and organizational skills. Amongst the skills they were perfecting was building with stones. From these skills, through collective learning, came the building skills that resulted several centuries later in construction of Stonehenge in southern England.
Maeshowe Burial Chamber, largest north of the Alps, built around 3500 b.c.
1000 years older than Stonehenge in England
We went in the chamber but were not allowed to take pictures
Earlier visitors, the Vikings, broke into the chamber and left lots of runic graffiti.
This runic graffiti was at the museum
We visited two standing stone sites. The first was the great Ring of Brodgar. 27 (of what was once 60) stones set in a perfect circle. The circle is huge and so are the stones. We cannot say definitively why these stones were set in the ground the way they were, but considering the effort involved in getting this done over several generations there must have been a driving need to do this. All the Ring of Brodgar visitors must stay outside the circle. A little further down the road are the Stones of Stenness where I could walk amongst these neolithic monsters. Some things just make your heart beat faster.
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