Orkney and Shetland studies

This paper explores arts festivals in terms of their relationship to local economic development within the rural island region of Orkney in Scotland. Fourteen qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with arts festival organisers, tourism representatives and local volunteers during the summer festival season. The findings offer new insights into the factors affecting how arts festivals impact the local economy; the areas of the local economy that are affected by arts festivals; and the implications of funding from awarding bodies on the endogenous development of arts festivals. For instance, it is concluded that supporting the cultural values of locals is vital to the economic success of rural arts festivals through a strategic design in the combined integration of minimised paid staff and maximised volunteers. Furthermore, it is revealed how in certain cases the initial retention of funding may benefit start-up arts festivals in terms of strategic development of their...

In Orkney islands, a number of wind energy projects have been established due to its potential for wind energy development especially as cluster developments on hilltop and moorland. This Self-sufficient Orkney Wind Energy (SOWE) project is trying to follow this pattern of development and has designed as a simple linear development of medium-large scale wind turbines which avoids dominating the landscape, while providing diversification required for the energy security, along with strong economic benefits to the local community. The developer completed preliminary designs and landscape assessment, resulting in the detailed design and the development of 27 wind turbine project for the expectation to generated electricity of 549.2 GWh annually. The SOWE project has been designed and selected the use of the Enercon E44-900 kW and Norex N80-2.5 MW wind turbines. These machines represent the maximum scale, respectively, as; • the site layout and all modelling have used a 45m, and 60m turbine tower height; • a rotor diameter of 44 m, and 80 m; and • The blade length is 22 m and 40 m. It has been found that the SOWE project provides a promising contribution towards the Scottish Government renewable energy production and carbon reduction targets.

This paper discussed maps of the Arctic coast produced by the Orcadian explorer John Rae.  Rae’s maps of the Arctic coast of Canada are little known, but represent the completion of the search for the North West Passage.  The paper focuses on the maps contained in the only published narrative of Rae’s expeditions in 1846 and 1847, which resulted in the consolidation of knowledge about a previously unknown coastal area of one of the Arctic regions, the Gulf of Boothia.  Analysing the methods and approaches contained in the narrative, the paper explains the way in which both Rae’s map and published narrative (re)produce and categorize Artic space and nature.  Aspects of Inuit knowledge about the Arctic landscape (and Rae’s interpretation of Inuit knowledge) will also be explored, as they form a significant part of John Rae’s legacy.  The resulting topographies and published map relate to wider issues of interpreting maps as social constructs, and the resulting methodological challenges of using maps as historical sources.

Provides overview of textual evidence for the existence of organised Christianity in Orkney and the mainland north of the Oykel. Argues that we should see the region like the Hebrides not like Iceland, and that we have relatively strong evidence for the existence of at least one bishopric in the region in/around the 10th century, with bishops probably supplied from Scotland and England. Also suggests that the Celtic name of the see, at least in Latin form, survived into the late eleventh century as 'Blascona'.

Various 'Gunn Chiefs' are supposed to have lived before Coroner Gunn of Caithness (often wrongly called Crowner Gunn).  James De Gun  (James Gunn) Ingram Gunn and various knighted Gunns all fail the test of any historic  support for their existence.  And logic is also against the whole 'knighted Gunns' idea - Scottish knights in minor highland families did not exist at these times.

The first Gunn in history was Coroner Gunn, the Gunns before him are merely Victorian romantic fantasy. And there were never any historic Gunn Chiefs as Gunns are not a Clan based on descent from one individual - their name is a regional name by origin.

A range of leading international scholars provide the reader with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the extraordinary richness and diversity of Scotland’s poetry. Addressing Languages and Chronologies, Poetic Forms, and Topics and Themes, this International Companion covers the entire subject from from the early Middle Ages to the modern day, and explores the connections, influences and interrelations between English, Gaelic, Latin, Old Norse and Scots verse.

The Journals of Prince Henry Sinclair and his descendants (20 books and a lambskin map) were found by accident in 2005 in a dusty dirty basement in Greeneville, TN. They then lay in a trunk in the back of the closet for almost 9 years before the author realized what she had. Translating the journals from Latin, Old English, and modern English she soon learned the story of her own 17th great-grandfather, Prince Henry Sinclair of Orkney and Scotland. Join the author and her great-grandfathers on a voyage of discovery as you learn about the covenant made between the St. Clair/Sinclair and Wemyss family, the Templars, the Native Americans, and the Freemasons. Travel with us as we search for the artifacts mentioned in the journals and validate the story. Book 1 of 10, tells the story of Henry as a young boy from the age of 8 in 1353 until l395 when he plans a voyage with Captain Nicolo Zeno and his son Antonio Zeno to Greenland and beyond.

The town of Stromness in Orkney was home to poet George Mackay Brown, and in recent years has become the location of development in  Marine Renewable Energy (MRE).  Brown’s work, celebrating the rhythms and cycles of life and humanity’s struggle for survival, often rails against progress and the advance of technology, while arguing for the importance of the role of the poet in a community, and the power of word and story to articulate the relationship between humans and their environment. This paper, moves from Brown’s writing about Stromness and the sea, to consider contemporary narratives, both within and out with Orkney, about the role of MRE as part of humanity’s response to the challenge of meeting future energy demands while addressing the dangers of climate change. In looking at narratives and storytelling about MRE from a dialogical perspective, it will consider how the process of storytelling, and the contexts and relationships this involves,  influence meaning making and understanding at every level, from the local to the global. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin it will argue that the importance of storytelling, identified by Brown, lies in its ability to engage and affect individuals on a personal level, with the power of any narrative lying in the interaction between individually persuasive, and socially authoritative discourse. Just as Stromness and Orkney are evoked and interpreted for many through the words of George Mackay Brown, the future of MRE depends on which stories get told and who gets to tell them.

The topic of this paper is a whole complex of intertwined notions of soul, spirits, forerunners / premonitions and other types of long-distance influence from a person’s mind. I will try to lead you into this ‘jungle’ by looking at some terms from the Shetlandic dialect of English. The noun gander, inherited from Old Norse gandr, has some interesting meanings that have never before been discussed by scholars:
- ‘a high, roaring wind; strong gust of wind.’
- ‘a sudden feeling of powerlessness, nausea, sickness at heart’

Completely unknown until 1975, when it was revealed during the construction of a new road, Old Scatness is a multi-period site that has provided unequivocal evidence dating broch construction to the mid first millennium cal BC, alongside a firmly dated sequence that is crucial to understanding the long Iron Age in Atlantic Scot-land. Excavations were carried out at the site between 1995 and 2006 by local volunteers and staff and students from the University of Bradford in a collaborative project led by Bradford and Shetland Amenity Trust. The first volume, The Pictish village and Viking settlement , covering around 1000 years from 400 cal AD-1400 cal AD, appeared in 2010. It was followed by The broch and Iron Age village in 2015, which considered pre-broch occupation from the Neolithic, but focused on the construction of the broch village from the mid first millennium cal BC. The third and final volume, The post-medieval township, published in 2019, examines the settlement evidence from the late fifteenth century AD to the end of the twentieth century AD, placing it within the historic context of the documentary evidence for the period. Given the complexity of the excavations, the range of scientific methods employed and the comprehensive nature of the published volumes, this is an impressive turnaround. As a set, these three volumes represent the full publication of an extraordinary occupation sequence spanning over 2500 years, allowing a detailed reconstruction of the changing social and economic role of a location in Shetland from the development of an enclosed broch, through a period of Norse occupation to a final phase as a nineteenth-century AD croft.

In this paper I give an overview of my research interests, outlining my interest in dialogism as a theoretical approach and how it has shaped my thinking about communication and meaning making. I will try to explain how an obsession with Mikhail Bakhtin led me to see a connection between the work of George Mackay Brown and recent developments in Marine Renewables in Orkney. On the way I will explore the idea of community as a creative, participatory process and the role of humour and storytelling in Orcadian culture.

With a special focus on the accounts and depictions of the Raven Banner, an iconic symbol of Norse expansion towards the west in the 9th to 11th centuries, I will here attempt to reconcile sources from Iceland, Norway, England and Ireland, in order to trace a connection between the kings and earls of what is now Norway and the bearers of the Raven Banner in Medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. For this purpose, I will first follow their lineages back to Ragnvald 'Heidumhaere' and Ragnar 'Lodbrok'. I will then attempt to tie up these two strings by discussing how these two forefathers may have been related. This overview will also form the basis for a discussion of whether the Raven Banner could be seen as a family banner.

This is a written up version of a paper delivered at a conference in Lerwick in 2008. Publication in an edited volume was supposed to follow within a year or two but has stalled so I am posting this here now. This Versionwas completed in late 2009.

A mythical island the size of Ireland in the North Atlantic called Hyperborea by Greeks, Atland by Frisians and Frisland by Mercator, disappeared on October 24, 2194 BC, when it partially slid down the Judd Anticline toward the Icelandic Basin. A remnant remained, the Faroe Plateau, topped by the Faroe Islands. The resulting tsunami, about 185m high, terminated life on other islands, plus the Bell Beaker people in Britain and Ireland, plus most farmers in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany, Poland, Finland and Estonia. The maximum elevation of plowed farmland on silt from the tsunami decreases with distance from the epicenter. Oera Linda Boek provides a detailed account of the tragedy.

The population of the North Sea archipelago of Shetland, UK possesses a distinct sense of ethnic identity, which connects the island’s present-day community to that of its Old Norse/Viking settlers from Scandinavia. This sense of Viking ethnicity, however, is relatively recent, first arising in the 19th Century. This paper argues that Shetland’s cultural identity must be understood in terms of the islands’ historical interconnectedness with trends in literature and scholarship in mainland Scotland, Britain, and Europe as a whole. Part II of this two-part paper looks at how the rise of nationalism and philological research into race and ethnicity in the 1800s both drew upon and contributed to Shetlanders’ understanding of their history and culture. In the 1890s, Edinburgh scholar David MacRitchie promoted a theory to explain European and Asian fairy folklore. This theory was grounded in the history of Orkney and Shetland and eventually made a significant impact in Shetland itself, being used by the author Jessie Saxby to promote a distinctive local identity concept. MacRitchie’s work also contributed to later research connected to the development of neopaganism and racist Nazi ideology. The conclusion concerns the role of isolated island communities within flows of cultural development and exchange.

The stone-built buildings of Orkney provide us with a rich dataset from which to study the architecture of the Early Neolithic house. However at the same time, dealing with them as if they all represent the same manifestation of ‘domestic life’ throughout the islands is flawed.

Evidence is emerging for a securely-dated Early Neolithic phase of occupation in Orkney, of considerable variety, in settlement morphology, house form and, of particular importance, in
construction material. The approach developed here is that this architecture needs to be viewed holistically, as part of the range of occupation practices carried out in the 4th millennium BC.

The central tenet of this dissertation is that this variability has key methodological and interpretative implications.

Methodologically, ephemeral timber remains pose a number of questions with regard to the prospection of all elements of structural evidence from the Early Neolithic. This study
demonstrates the difficulties of consistently detecting timber structural evidence from both fieldwalked data and geophysical survey, using a new survey at a possible timber settlement at
Deepdale as a starting point. Interpretatively, the challenge is to integrate this diverse dataset, centered on an understanding
of the complex material engagements apparent in the social investment of the house. This needs to, ultimately, be considered in a wider context in order to provide a fuller understanding
of Orcadian Early Neolithic domestic life.

The key conclusion is that in order to provide a fuller account of the Early Neolithic house in Orkney, we need to diversify both our methodological and interpretative approach.

With the densest concentration of well-preserved wartime sites in Orkney and perhaps one of the least disturbed WWII defence landscapes in the UK, the Island of Hoy is home to an incredibly significant, visually dominating but little known material legacy from recent world conflict. In October 2013, the Island of Hoy Development Trust (IoHDT) employed a Graduate Heritage Officer to undertake a dedicated 12 month placement focusing on the island’s rich World War Two (WWII) archaeological heritage.

This development document represents the principal output of the Legacies of Conflict Project and intends to present a summary of the activities and initiatives that have been implemented over the past year to address the three aims detailed above. Through the interpretation of the results from these activities, this document also offers a series of recommendations to support and guide future initiatives and funding applications for the long term sustainable preservation and interpretation of Hoy’s unmatched WWII heritage.

WA Coastal & Marine was commissioned by Historic Scotland to provide high-resolution multibeam bathymetry data targeted on a number of wreck sites in Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Scapa Flow is a large natural harbour in the southern part of the Orkney Islands in the North of Scotland, which served as Britain’s main naval base during WWI and WWII. Its waters hold Scotland’s highest concentrations of shipwrecks. WA Coastal & Marine manganed the acquisition of multibeam data over the wrecks by MMT Netsurvey and subsequently conducted an archaeological assessment of this multibeam data.

In addition to this WA Coastal & Marine conducted and a Desk-Based Assessment (DBA) of the wreck sites covered by the multibeam data in order to enhance the historic environment record with respect to these sites and to support Historic Scotland’s work on the Scottish Marine Protected Areas Project.

This paper takes the discussion on the concept of Hanseatic material culture from the Baltic and moves it west towards the North Atlantic islands and Norway, focusing on the contact zones between Hanse traders and societies at the fringes of northern Europe. The peoples of this area conducted considerable exchange with the Germans during the 14th through the 17th centuries, a process which could have led to signifi cant impacts on the native cultures. This study describes artifacts produced in northern Germany and imported to the north as a medium transporting culture, and points out the many complex problems in tracing artifact distribution in northern Europe that are caused by multilateral and illegal trade, piracy, and the involvement of third parties. With the help of archaeological methods, the second part of the paper attempts to address some of those issues by suggesting a classifi cation of Hanseatic artifacts.