Detail of downpipe and vents on SE elevation.

Description Detail of downpipe and vents on SE elevation.

Date 30/5/1996

Collection Records of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinbu

Catalogue Number C 73065

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 642849

Scope and Content Vents, World War II signal station, Wee Fea, Lyness, Hoy, Orkney Islands In World War II military activities in and around Scapa Flow generated a complex communications network of wireless, cabled and manual signals equipment associated with all three armed services. These ranged from traditional methods of intelligence-gathering, monitoring and signalling, as practised in World War I, to the sophisticated systems of detection and communication which developments in radio and radar offered. The Royal Navy possessed its own radar network (known as AES, Admiralty Experimental Stations) with at least one station in Orkney, on Ward Hill in South Ronaldsay, but its land-based communications operated mainly through a local group of Port War Signal Stations at Stromness (Ness Battery), Kirkwall (Rerwick Head), Stanger Head on Flotta and here at Lyness on Hoy, where a state-of-the-art signal station came into operation in 1943. This shows part of the series of vents of maritime, port hole style on the main south façade of the building, together with one of the down pipes associated with the drainage of the open, roof-top parapet. The building is of bomb-proof concrete construction with cement-rendered facework. At the heart of the Orkney archipelago, Scapa Flow was the main fleet anchorage for the Royal Navy during both World Wars. Its vital importance led to the creation of one of the most concentrated defence networks in Britain. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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