Day 9 Friday April 19th Kirkwall, Orkney

 Thursday night was quite bumpy but every thing was more peaceful as we approached Kirkwall harbour.  We docked,  breakfasted and got ready for the tour we had booked on.  We had previously been on a tour to Skara Brae and the Ring of Brodgar and so we chose to go to the Southern Isles and the Italian chapel.  

The Italian chapel

The Italian chapel has quite a 

Two Nissen huts!

story.  Italian prisoners of war in WW2 were brought from North Africa  to Orkney in order to build barriers around Scapa Flow to protect the British fleet which was normally anchored there.  The Italians initially refused to 

the altar

work because of the cold and hard nature of the work.  They were persuaded to work and augmented the existing barriers made from sunken redundant boats with total concreted barriers.  This was necessary because in October 1939 a U boat had managed to enter the anchorage and sunk the "Royal Oak" with a large loss of life.

the ceiling

  The POWs wanted a place to worship and the British offered them 2 Nissen huts and 

the font

they used their skills to build a very suitable chapel, decorated it - it has lasted very well and continues to be used. They used materials to hand and the font included a redundant lorry suspension spring.  All the men involved have now passed on but 

across causeway

relatives still come to see what their predecessors told stories about.  The barriers built are now causeways with permanent roads and so some of the 

sunken ship barrier

southern isles are not now strictly islands.

St Magnus Cathedral

We returned to Kirkwall, had 

Royal Oak memorial

some lunch and then decided to walk around the town.  We went to the cathedral, the largest building of the town, which included a memorial to the sailors of the "Royal Oak" lost in Scapa Flow.  We took some 

Cathedral interior

photos and then moved on to the ruins of two palaces which 

Palace ruins

were close by.  We carried on walking through the town centre visiting some of the individual shops which seemed to be flourishing.  We ended up at the harbour where the lifeboat was 

Kirkwall lifeboat

against the wall (pictured for Samuel) and ready for action.  We then took the shuttle bus back to the "Maud".

A full day, cold and windy, but now time to do some blogging and then have a nice meal before attending a lecture about tomorrow's activities in Stornoway and then retiring to our cabin.