32 C O N T E X T 1 3 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 MONDAY–WEDNESDAY TOUR Tour of Orkney The wealth of places to be visited in the Orkney tour proved to be no problem due to the superb organisation and incredible generosity of Orkney Islands Council, which chartered a service bus and paid for some meals. The weather was relatively kind, and the guides superb and specialists in their fields.These, and the overall tutorship of Tom Hunter (whose knowledge gained in 18 months on the job would have taken the average conservation officer at least five years to get to the same point) all combined to make this a tour to remember. Specialists ranged from townscape heritage initiative managers, cathedral custodians, wartime historians, artists of renown and experts on the Nordic sagas. For Kirkwall, the tour base, the latter was fundamental.This settlement, being (with Stromness) one of the largest, appeared to have a typical medieval street pattern. It transpired that this was a development influenced by the Viking settlement, whereby one side of some of the streets had fronted the sea. In addition to this early medieval land reclamation, similar reclamation had taken place in the 18th and 19th centuries, leaving medieval sea walls visible behind later buildings. Conservation in this spectrum requires a close liaison with archaeologists, using a map reconstructed from information gleaned from the sagas showing Viking Kirkwall in 1050, to indicate sites for excavation in conjunction with new development or rehabilitation requiring ground disturbance.Would that we all had a Viking saga and an 11th-century map on which to base our understanding of settlement development. An enigmatic round-headed arch was all that remained of theViking St Olaf’s Cathedral in Kirkwall, and that was a 16th-century rebuild. The tale of the 1970s workman who discovered a skull on the site with a double row of bottom teeth which matched his own (a rare genetic imbalance with Nordic origins) reinforced continuity in population in a way that no amount of academic research could. Other Nordic attributes included the street names based on ‘wynd’ and ‘loan’, grain stores called girnals (16th and 17th centuries) closely associated with early sea merchants bringing grain into the adjacent port, and the open-air Scottish parliament site, based on a raised mound, where proclamations in 1500 were still read out as they were in Viking times. Connections with Norway and Canada (through the Hudson’s Bay Company) were discussed. Fine townhouses lay hidden in courtyards or behind shop fronts. Trees in a main street which had formerly stood in the garden of a townhouse, and had been Windswept delegates on the ferry to Stromness (Photo: Jane Roylance) The cathedral and war memorial at Kirkwall (Photo: Liz Blood)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=