View from NE.

Description View from NE.

Date 25/8/1997

Catalogue Number D 17911 CN

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 657390

Scope and Content Rysa Lodge, Hoy, Orkney Islands During both World Wars the influx of tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel into Orkney meant the creation or adaptation of buildings for residential and communal use on a massive scale. The Kirkwall Hotel, the Stromness Hotel and the Lynnfield Hotel, Kirkwall, were used as service headquarters by, respectively, the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force, while other domestic buildings such as Rysa Lodge and Orgill Lodge on Hoy were also requisitioned as senior officer accommodation. The builder of both of these shooting lodges was Thomas Middlemore, a wealthy Birmingham leather merchant who had acquired the Melsetter estate, and the designer was the distinguished Arts & Crafts architect, William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931), whom Middlemore had already commissioned to redesign Melsetter House in 1898. This view of Rysa Lodge shows the plain, north-facing front of the house. The building was designed in 1904 in the traditional, plain style of an Orkney laird's house with harled masonry, crowstepped gables and Caithness stone slates, though the upper floor windows tucked below the eaves are of a paired Arts & Crafts casement design. Standing only about 1.6km north of what became the naval base at Lyness, Rysa Lodge was temporarily used by the Royal Navy in World War I, and in World War II became the wartime home of the Admiral Superintendent of the Lyness base and his family. 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.

Medium Colour negative

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