About Orkney
The story of the making of Orkney’s rocks is part of the wealth of information in our new Orkney Landscapes website. The story begins several hundred million years ago, when sediments were gathering on the bed of a vast ancient lake, in which great fishes swam. Their bones survive today as fossils, some of which you can see in the Orkney Fossil & Heritage Centre in Burray.
A rich source of information about Orkney’s archaeology can be found on the UHI Archaeology site, and also on the Ness of Brodgar site.
We have been building up a varied mix of features in our online magazine Frontiers – there are stories of boat journeys and sea rescues, hill walks and woodland planting, food and folklore, with many images too: from dark island skies to swirling seaweed.
Those soft green hills, the ledged sea-cliffs, the shallow lochs, those curving sweeps of sand… the story of them all can be traced back, and much of the story goes back around 390 million years, to a time when the present-day rocks of Orkney were being laid down as sediment on the bed of an ancient lake.
An ideal place to start for planning a visit to Orkney today is the Orkney.com website. It is packed with information about getting to Orkney, travelling around the islands, where to stay, what to see, and much else besides. We have some general travel and accommodation advice here.
You can take an armchair journey from here around some scenes of Orkney.
The islands’ newspaper The Orcadian, publishes news, features and weather updates on the web, its site including Sky Notes. There is also a regular astronomy feature in the online newspaper The Orkney News; topics range from archaeoastronomy to developments in space.
And for more news, BBC Radio Orkney is available online as well as through the Orkney airwaves, and its Facebook page is hugely popular.
Another way to find out more about Orkney is through the varied books published on the islands. Stromness Books and Prints has a fascinating story of its origins; The Orcadian Bookshop includes a wide range of books published by The Orcadian; and they have now been joined by Orkneyology Press which is producing some sparkling and original books.
And if you want to research your Orkney roots, there’s the Orkney Family History Society website Sib Folk. Membership includes a quarterly mailing of their journal, which is a labour of love, full of insights from individual research and study.
The story of the making of Orkney’s rocks is part of the wealth of information in our new Orkney Landscapes website. The story begins several hundred million years ago, when sediments were gathering on the bed of a vast ancient lake, in which great fishes swam. Their bones survive today as fossils, some of which you can see in the Orkney Fossil & Heritage Centre in Burray.
A rich source of information about Orkney’s archaeology can be found on the UHI Archaeology site, and also on the Ness of Brodgar site.
We have been building up a varied mix of features in our online magazine Frontiers – there are stories of boat journeys and sea rescues, hill walks and woodland planting, food and folklore, with many images too: from dark island skies to swirling seaweed.
An ideal place to start for planning a visit to Orkney today is the Orkney.com website. It is packed with information about getting to Orkney, travelling around the islands, where to stay, what to see, and much else besides. We have some general travel and accommodation advice here.
You can take an armchair journey from here around some scenes of Orkney.
The islands’ newspaper The Orcadian, publishes news, features and weather updates on the web, its site including Sky Notes. There is also a regular astronomy feature in the online newspaper The Orkney News; topics range from archaeoastronomy to developments in space.
And for more news, BBC Radio Orkney is available online as well as through the Orkney airwaves, and its Facebook page is hugely popular.
Another way to find out more about Orkney is through the varied books published on the islands. Stromness Books and Prints has a fascinating story of its origins; The Orcadian Bookshop includes a wide range of books published by The Orcadian; and they have now been joined by Orkneyology Press which is producing some sparkling and original books.
And if you want to research your Orkney roots, there’s the Orkney Family History Society website Sib Folk. Membership includes a quarterly mailing of their journal, which is a labour of love, full of insights from individual research and study.
Those soft green hills, the ledged sea-cliffs, the shallow lochs, those curving sweeps of sand… the story of them all can be traced back, and much of the story goes back around 390 million years, to a time when the present-day rocks of Orkney were being laid down as sediment on the bed of an ancient lake.
play video
THE MAKING OF THE PENTLAND FIRTH
The narrators look at the marks in Caithness where great glaciers scraped over bedrock. Probing the boulder clay, they find chalk and shell fragments dredged from the bed of the Moray Firth by the moving ice. On Hoy, they search for glacial erratics carried from the Northern Highlands and find evidence for an ice flow into the valley of Rackwick.