If you ever wanted to know what the front cover of our #Viking Age in Scotland book looked like!

The only surviving remains of a round church in Scotland: modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, & built by the villainous Earl Haakon, who had ordered the murder of his cousin, (St) Magnus, & wanted to make amends. It was hailed in the Orkneyinga Saga as ‘magnificent’…

And, thanks to Dr. Colleen Batey, the cover of the The Viking Age in Scotland book I co-edited!

Absolutely adorable figurine from Skara Brae, c. 2700 BC.

Found in the 1850s, donated in the 1930s to Stromness Museum, lost, & then rediscovered in 2016.

Late 9th century Viking comb from Sanday

Square pillar where in 1919 a hidden cavity was found, containing a reliquary with bones including an axe-damaged skull: almost certainly the relics of St Magnus.

One of the great mornings of my life. The eeriness of the landscape, the ever-changing light, the early morning emptiness, the bird calls: I felt as profoundly as I ever done like a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.

Here are the Stones of Stenness

The Ness of Brodgar, and beyond

The Ring of Brodgar

As though the top of Hobbiton had been sliced off with a knife

Much admiration from Sadie for the oldest furniture found intact in its original setting anywhere in Europe

Margaret Simpson, “who went on to become the first female professional archaeologist in Scotland,” working at Gordon Childe’s excavation of Skara Brae in 1928

One thing I was not expecting to find at Skara Brae: Captain Cook’s dinner service, given as a gift of condolence to the wife of the local laird, who had just died. Stromness was the 1st British port of call for the Resolution & Discovery on their return from Cook’s 3rd voyage.

Church in Birsay, dedicated to St Magnus & built - almost certainly - on the site of Christchurch, founded by Thorfinn on his return from pilgrimage to Rome. This is where St Magnus’ body was originally brought for burial, before it was translated to the cathedral in Kirkwall.

This monument doth heir present a subject to your eye,
For patrick prince has now gone hence and so above did flye
He left behind 5 children kynde withall a mother deare
To him and them it well became a mother and a pheare

Bell from HMS Royal Oak, sunk by a U-boat in Scapa Flow in 1939

The Light in the North: St Magnus Cathedral, founded in 1137, & hallowed to this day by the relics of the martyred & miracle-working eponymous saint. He was an earl of Orkney so pious that he once refused to take part in a raid on the Welsh, but instead sat in his cabin singing psalms

Very Captain Aubrey behaviour from Stromness

A definite Dark-Ages-holy-man vibe to the Brough of Deerness…

(And the chapel is indeed very old - probably pre-Norse. Even after the Reformation, pilgrimages to it continued to be made until the 19th century.)

'It was the wish to show to oneself first, and to the world then, that in spite of being trapped in a barbed wire camp, physically and morally deprived of many things, one could still find something inside that could be set free.”

The Italian Chapel, built by POWs in Orkney…