Museum sights in Orkney Islands
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Tankerness House & Orkney Museum
This fine restored merchant’s house gives an intriguing glimpse into Orkney’s archaeological treasure chest, starting from the first settlers, who arrived over 5000 years ago. Exhibits include Pictish stones, ‘bone’ pins and Iron Age jewellery. The highlight is the photo archive downstairs, which offers snapshots of a technologically distant past. Keep an eye out for the temporary exhibitions.
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Orkney Museum
Opposite St Magnus Cathedral, in a former merchant’s house, is this labyrinthine display. It has an overview of Orcadian history and prehistory, including Pictish carvings and a display on the Ba’. Most engaging are the last rooms, covering 19th- and 20th-century social history; the earlier sections could do with a bit of a facelift (but then again, it’s free).
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Scapa Flow Visitor Centre
Lyness, on the eastern side of Hoy, was an important naval base during both world wars, when the British Grand Fleet was based in Scapa Flow. It isn’t a pretty place, but this fascinating museum and photographic display, located in an old pumphouse that once fed fuel to the ships, is a must-see for anyone interested in Orkney's military history.
Take your time to browse the exhibits about WWI and WWII, and have a look at the folders of supplementary information: the letters home from a seaman lost when the HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed are particularly moving. You'll find the story of the first-ever landing of an aircraft on a moving ship in 1917, and the construction of …
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Stromness Museum
Crammed with fascinating artefacts from maritime and natural-history collections covering whaling, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the sunken German fleet in Scapa Flow, this is a superb museum where you can easily lose a couple of hours nosing around the display cases.
Among the more unusual exhibits are South Sea Islander artefacts left here by the survivors of Captain Cook’s final expedition to the Pacific in 1776–79, and the tiny inflatable boat used by Dr John Rae in his Arctic explorations.
Across the street from the museum is the house where local poet and novelist George Mackay Brown lived from 1968 until his death in 1996. Further south on the main street is Lo…
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Orkney Fossil & Vintage Centre
The Orkney Fossil & Vintage Centre has a quirky collection of household and farming relics, 360-million-year-old Devonian fish fossils found in the local rocks and galleries devoted to the world wars. There's an excellent coffee shop here. Located on the A961 at Echnaloch Bay.
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Longhope Lifeboat Museum
At the southern tip of Hoy, near the causeway to South Walls, Longhope’s former lifeboat station houses a small museum centred on one of the old boats itself (the modern lifeboat is moored afloat off Longhope village). If it's not open, call the caretaker to have a look.
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Orkney Faerie Museum & Gallery
Set in a converted old crofthouse, Orkney Faerie Museum & Gallery showcases Orcadian folklore and legend with tales of faeries, wee folk, trows and mermaids.
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Orkney Wireless Museum
This museum houses a collection of more than 100 wireless and transistor radio sets from the earliest Phillips radios to the 1960s, plus a fascinating jumble of communications equipment dating from around 1930 onwards, much of it relating to the Scapa Flow naval base.
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