Detail of datestone on entrance porch on N side.

Description Detail of datestone on entrance porch on N side.

Date 25/8/1997

Catalogue Number D 17914 CN

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 657396

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 is a detail of the datestone set in the short gabled porch on the north-facing front of the house. It bears the date 1904 around a letter M (for Middlemore) in raised carving on a stugged (pecked) background. In 1904 Rysa was extended by Thomas Middlemore as a two-storeyed shooting lodge to designs by William Richard Lethaby. 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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