The seventy-odd islands that comprise the Orkneys are barely six kilometres off the north coast of Scotland, but their culture is more Norse than Gaelic, and despite their remote location and small size the Islands have played a disproportional role in the affairs of man ever since the first Celts settled there during the early Stone Age.
It was late morning when we pulled into Kirkwall, the capital and largest town on the Orkneys and joined local guide Ingrid for a tour of the Islands. Our first stop, the Ring of Brodgar, is a Neolithic stone circle consisting of towering sandstone slabs set into a circular ditch carved into solid bedrock. No one knows exactly how old the Ring is, but scientists estimate that it was built between 2500 and 2000 BC. Unlike Stonehenge the standing stones have not been reshaped, but considering the builders had no iron tools it is a remarkable feat of construction.
It would be a stretch to call the Ring of Brodgar a church, but it was certainly a gathering place for religious and cultural ceremonies for the people living in nearby Skara Brae, a Neolithic village dating back to about 3000 BC. The village is remarkably well preserved but the houses, if they can be called that, are little more than large holes that were originally covered by turf resting on driftwood beams and slabs of sandstone. Wood was a scarce commodity and almost everything inside the living space, from the peat-burning hearth to the cupboards; beds and boxes are fashioned from stone slabs. It must have been a harsh life but over the centuries the Orkney culture matured from stone to bronze and eventually to a modern iron-based technology.
Sometime during the 9th century the Vikings, better known for their pillaging than for their colonization, began settling the islands and for the next 300 years the Orkneys became part of a powerful and expansive Norse culture. The last of the ruling Norse earls was killed in 1231 but their language, architecture and traditions had a lasting impact on the Islands' culture. St Magnus Cathedral built by the Vikings in 1137 is still the very heart of Kirkwall. Built of red sandstone it is an awe-inspiring work of medieval architecture both outside and inside where the towering sandstone columns seem to reach for the sky. "The church gets used more and more" Ingrid told me as we walked in toward the alter, "attendance at church services is down but the building has become a sort of community centre where plays and concerts are held and gatherings of all sorts come together. It's truly the social centre of Kirkwall."
It was late in the day when we headed out to Scapa Flow the landlocked natural harbour in the centre of the Island Group that served as a British naval base during both World Wars. "We are going to the Italian church," Ingrid told us as she drove across one of the four Churchill corridors. We parked in a small gravel lot at the base of the hill below the tiny Italian Church.
Except for a wisp of smoke rising from one of the farmhouses on the opposite shore there was no sigh of human activity as we climbed up to the church. A small flock of sheep moved grudgingly off the trail to let us pass. It would be hard to imagine a more tranquil and peaceful scene, yet both the Churchill corridor and the Italian Church grew out of a violent act of war.
In October 1939 the British battleship HMS Royal Oak lay at anchor in Scapa Flow. She was on a training mission and for the hundreds of young recruits on board the newly declared war with Germany seemed as remote from their sheltered anchorage in the Orkneys as London and Berlin. But scarcely a kilometre away Gunther Prien slowly maneuvered his submarine up one of the four channels leading into the harbour. Before taking command of U-47 Gunther had fished these waters and he used his skill and knowledge to slip unseen into the harbour.
The first two torpedoes narrowly missed their mark but the next two hit the Royal Oak squarely amidships. Within minutes the stricken vessel had capsized and while British seamen and recruits struggled to free themselves from the wreckage U-47 slipped silently back into the deep protective waters of the North Sea.
Eight hundred and thirty-three British sailors lost their lives that day in Scapa Flow. Churchill was livid. He personally visited the site and vowed to make Scapa Flow a secure anchorage for the wartime fleet. But building gated barriers across the four access channels would require thousands of man-hours of labour. His solution — bypass the Geneva Convention by calling the barriers a civilian project and use prisoners of war to build them.
A POW camp was erected and over the next few years hundreds of Italian prisoners of war toiled to build the Churchill Barriers. The camp commandant agreed to let the men build a place of worship provided they did so on their own time and used only scrap materials. The tiny Italian church is the result of their effort. Two corrugated Nissen Huts, welded end to end form the main body of the structure while the entrance façade and tiny bell tower are made of excess cement left over from the barriers.
I stepped inside and was admiring the intricate artistic detail of the sanctuary and alter when Ingrid joined me. "It's still used as a chapel," she told me "and we get more than 100,000 visitors a year. It's become a shrine of sorts — a symbol of reconciliation and a memorial to the thousands of young British and Italian men whose lives were either cut short or tragically altered by the war."
The van was unusually quiet that evening as we drove back to our ship in Kirkwall. Our day in the Orkneys had given us a glimpse of human progress through the ages and left some of us pondering just how far down the road to civilization we had come since the Ring of Brodgar was built two thousand years ago.
This is the second in a series of three travel stories by Jack Souther on the British Isles. Part I ran Feb.16 in Pique.
