View from W.

Description View from W.

Date 25/8/1997

Catalogue Number D 17912

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 657392

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 (left) the two-storeyed L-plan ranges which make up the main block of the 1904 house, and (right) the neat single-storeyed buildings associated with the original cottage with its projecting porch. Standing only about 1.6km north of what became the naval base at Lyness, it was temporarily used by the Royal Navy in World War I and was requisitioned again in late 1939 as accommodation for the Admiral Superintendent of the Lyness base. From 1940 to 1946 that duty was undertaken by Admiral Macnamara whose family thus had Rysa Lodge as their wartime home. 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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