1016307 |
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The striking but gaunt shell of the Earl's Palace still dominates the village and the broad bay of Birsay, and the walls convey a strong sense of its original massive grandeur, but it takes a little imagination to restore an impression of its once magnificent elegance: it was described in 1633 as 'a sumptuous and stately dwelling'. The rooms on the upper floor were attractively decorated with painted ceilings, including biblical scenes with appropriate texts, and they would undoubtedly have been furnished with brightly coloured wall-hangings. The exterior of the building seems always to have been fairly austere, befitting its status as a fortified residence of the Earl of Orkney, but the upper windows of the north and east wings were embellished with carved and pinnacled pediments. [...] |
1996 |
1016309 |
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The Bishop's Palace is Kirkwall's oldest surviving secular building, although there has been some controversy in academic circles over just how old its foundations may be. Most of the building as it survives today dates from the time of Bishop Robert Reid in the mid 16th century, but it has been argued that the lowest part of the main block includes the remains of an earlier episcopal residence, perhaps that of Bishop William, under whom the seat of the bishopric was transferred from Birsay to Kirkwall to accompany the building of the new Cathedral in the mid 12th century. This early palace would have been a rectangular hall house, with a ground-floor given over to storage and workrooms and a great hall on the first floor. It was here that the Norwegian King Haakon died in 1263 after his crushing defeat in western Scotland at the Battle of Largs. Nothing remains of this hall-house above its basal courses, and even those are overshadowed by the rise in ground-level outside. [...] |
1996 |
1016322 |
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There is a long history of activity on this site from iron-age times onwards into the 20th century. Initially there was a domestic settlement established around the 6th century BC and including a massive roundhouse, and this settlement appears to have continued through the first thousand years AD. Excavation in 1990 caught the last vestiges of the roundhouse before coastal erosion claimed it, but the site had been known, and indeed visible in the cliff-section, for more than a century. The settlement was clearly of some importance, probably the major farm in the island in its time, and it was the obvious place to choose when a Christian monastery was established in the 8th century. Folk memory of this monastic site lingers on in the name Munkerhoose, monks' house. [...] |
1996 |