”Our island adventure will start with the ferry from Houton where we can look out for seabirds and cetaceans on the crossing. Once on Flotta, we will enjoy a leisurely walk round the island enjoying the scenery and wildlife. Please bring a picnic. Please note the ferry fare is included in the price.”
Humans have been keeping track of time for millennia, to regulate aspects of daily life. Prof. Helen Margolis of the UK National Physical Laboratory looks at how we reached the era of atomic timekeeping and what technological advances this has ...
Meticulous studies of stone circles by Alexander Thom and Euan MacKie show geometrical patterns, often aligned to movements of sun and moon – but why? Dr Howie Firth puts the question the other way round. What branch of mathematics best expresses the Neolithic worldview? An Irish mathematician of 150 years ago provides an answer - and new insights.
Our guests today come from Finland, Iceland and mainland Scotland, to tell us about a new idea to generate visitor numbers. It’s called scientific tourism, and it brings together the feeling of exploration and discovery of a field trip with practical experiences and learning opportunities. Plans to develop it are being taken ...
Prof. Björn Kurtén, who died in 1988, was one of the world’s finest evolutionary paleontologists. In his native Finland, a country with almost no fossils, he created a paleontology tradition. He studied the great Ice Age mammals, the mammoth and the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and the cave bear, and he built a picture of their origins and patterns ...
The story of two of Greenland’s UNESCO world heritage sites, cultural landscapes with very different stories. Kujataa in South Greenland is the lushest part of the country and is a subarctic farming landscape which combines the cultures of the Norse ...
Live from the Inverness darkroom: a demonstration of the early photographic process – the Cyanotype. The process involves placing objects on paper soaked with iron-based chemicals, for gradual exposure in the sun’s ...
Award-winning wildlife cameraman and photographer Raymond Besant has been looking into his archive, to bring us some scenes of life along Orkney’s coast, including some footage not shown before. ...
A visual short performance film about the sea and its transformations, and our relationship to it. Is the sea an object to be gazed at from a distance, or a place of attachment for us? The moisture in our bodies links us to the rain from the sky and the water of the seas. Our bodies follow the tidal movement of ebb and flow, hope and despair, joy and sorrow – are we carried in a deeper flow?
What’s out there in space? Set off this evening on a scavenger hunt to collect stars, galaxies, quasars and maybe even some asteroids! After a short introduction you will be all set to access the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to go through their images of the night sky and start your ...
Dump it by the roadside, tip it in a waterway, throw it into the sea – from where it can often be washed ashore on beaches? It’s a global problem, but traditionally in islands where resources are finite, nothing was simply discarded. Driftwood became lintels and doorposts, worn-out clothes were turned into patchwork quilts ...
In this centenary of the birth of George Mackay Brown, whose father was a postman in Stromness, Prof. Tom Stevenson, whose mother ran the Quoyloo Post Office for fifty years, looks at the history of the postal service in Orkney. He tells of the early days of the Penny Black and Twopenny Blue stamps, the development ...
Join us for an informal evening gathering online. You can chat with some of the speakers about the talks of the day or indeed open up discussion on any topic. You can find out more about the Festival and Orkney itself, open up new discussion, or listen to some interesting stories.
A science festival has a radical role in developing a creative climate for a region. Here is the story of how it began, and how Orkney was involved from an early stage in the concept.
