Field Visit
Date June 1982
Event ID 873891
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/873891
St Boniface's Church, Binnas Kirk and Munkerhoose HY 488 526 HY45SE 17, 26
The old parish church of Papay stands above a rocky shore in the now sparsely inhabited NW corner of the island. It is associated with extensive settlement-remains of the Iron Age and Pictish period, with two discoveries of Early Christian cross-slabs, and a Norse hogbacked monument; added to the place-name evidence, they indicate that the whole complex was an important early ecclesiastical centre.
The church, still in use in 1920 but abandoned by 1930, is essentially a twelfth-century church, which was extended westwards in 1700. The site of its chancel is occupied by a family burial-place. The building is still entire, but there are holes in the slab-covered roof, and the internal furnishings and some of the structural timbers are succumbing to decay.
The hogbacked gravestone lies immediately E of the family tomb, but only its top now protrudes from the grass. In 1920, when for the first time burials were made on the N side of the church, a slab was found at a depth of about 1m; a portion was left in the
ground, but the part now in NMAS (IB 200) has an encircled cross pattee with a small incised cross, of unusual design, above it. In 1966 a second slab, now in Tankerness House Museum, Kirkwall, was found during grave-digging near the NE corner of the
church. This is a water-worn beach-slab, standing 790mm high above the display-stand in which its base is set; it is elliptical, its maximum width, near the top, of 320mm narrowing to 175mm at the base, and 64mm to 69mm thick. The obverse has a weakly executed encircled cross pattee with a boldly-cut square-armed cross above it; to the lower left of the upper cross is a running human figure, very faintly incised, and another, unidentifiable design seems to lie to the upper left of the cross. On the reverse is a rectilinear pattern apparently representing a standing robed human figure. The incised designs, executed by pecking, have an unfinished appearance.
RCAHMS 1983, visited June 1982.
(Name Book, Orkney No. 26, p. 11; Dietrichson 1906, 124 (Norwegian text); Kirkness 1921; Scott 1922; Marwick 1925, 33-4, 40; 'Taylor 1938, 386, 388; RCAHMS 1946, ii, pp. 179-80, Nos. 518-20, p. 184, No. 526; Gudmundsson, Orkneyinga Saga, footnote, p. 163; Lang 1974, 230; CJ Arnold, Report on four composite bone comb fragments found in the erosion-section 1975, in Tankerness House Museum files, ref 731; Arnold 1975; OR 847).
