Field Visit
Date August 1982
Event ID 1145989
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1145989
Eynhallow monastery HY 3590 2883 HY32NE 2
The shell of a quite grandly conceived but curiously executed church consisting of nave and chancel with a western 'porch', adjoining a complex of buildings which have been variously claimed to be medieval and monastic, or to be post-medieval and domestic. While both church and buildings have undergone numerous and drastic alterations in recent centuries, it is likely that this complex essentially represents a monastic layout, possibly originating as a Benedictine foundation of the second quarter of the twelfth century, and evidently extinct as a religious house well before the sixteenth century. The buildings are in guardianship but in recent years have become overgrown with nettles and infested by fulmars.
RCAHMS 1982, visited August 1982
(Sir Henry Dryden's drawings in NMRS; Muir 1885, 68-9 and 252-4; MacGibbon and Ross 1896-7, i, 116-22; Craven 1901, 16; Dietrichson 1906, 126-33 with plan (Norwegian text), 36-43 (separately paginated English text, full translation); Mooney 1933; Taylor 1938, 401; RCAHMS 1946, ii, pp. 230-4, No. 613; Mooney 1949; Guamundsson, Orkneyinga Saga, footnote, 269; Lamb 1973; Cowan and Easson 1976, 61-2; OR 551)
