Research students from three universities – Heriot-Watt, Robert Gordon, and UHI – share news of the progress of their work, hosted by Dr Mike Bell of Heriot-Watt University’s International Centre for Island Technology in the Stromness campus with its views out across the harbour to Graemsay, Hoy and Scapa Flow.
Take the first step in developing your wildlife garden by joining biodiversity specialist Eileen Summers in looking for wild seeds in the park. We'll be joined by its designer, Paul Green, ethnobotanist Anna Canning with information about plant uses, and artist Lin Chau showing how seeds and leaves can be incorporated into paper.
There’s a travelling planetarium from Dynamic Earth, and activities from Glasgow Science Centre, the Scottish Dolphin Centre, and the Scottish Seabird Centre. Go on a tick hunt, learn computer coding, see a model of a 2,000-year-old computer from ancient Greece. Find out how to navigate by the stars in the Polynesian way.
A tour of the Earl’s Bu site in Orphir, from the Round Church to the site of a horizontal mill, accompanied by archaeologist Dr Colleen Batey and rounded off by a brown bag lunch of Orkney fare, with the kind of items that might have been enjoyed by the Earls themselves!
At one time this would have seemed an unlikely question. But the quota system has already brought in ownership of fish. Could further development, such as offshore wind farms, extend this to the seabed? Dr Sandy Kerr of ICIT looks at future scenarios.
“It's a massive atom-smashing machine; a seething mass of electrified gases," says Prof. Robert Walsh of the University of Central Lancashire. With images from the very latest space-based telescopes, he guides us out from the solar core and helps us surf the solar wind – “And then run for cover from immense solar storms!”
Join Orkney wildlife guide Megan Taylor of Wild Orkney Walks on a 2–3 mile circular coastal walk, following a path along the Orphir coastline with views out over Scapa Flow and the islands. Discover the wildlife in a variety of habitats, including a small pocket of woodland. The walk is on a mixture of paths and quiet roads.
It’s a great sight in front of the Cathedral, with cars that can range in time from a Model T Ford from 1915 to a new electric vehicle of today – and with over a hundred years of vintage vehicles, classic cars and tractors in between, and the sound of engines in action, and all beautifully restored. Street food from 12 noon.
Join geologist Dr John Flett Brown on the classic Orkney walk along the West Shore of Stromness in this new film made by Mark Jenkins. The journey begins with a fossil beach on the shore of ancient Lake Orcadie, the great lake from which today’s Orkney rocks began their story as sediments.
Greetings Earthlings big and small! My spaceship is heading to Earth in September – but I have some problems with my Auntie-Gravity suit – the one my Auntie Gravity made to help me cope with the Earth’s gravity. Hence, I may materialise from the Space Ship Imagination in a sitting position rather than a standing one!
Hear more about John Rae himself, and the plans for his birthplace, and the story of the Northwest Passage. Polar historian Dr Maria Casarini tells of about the search and the final link put in place by Rae. Sea ice expert Prof. Peter Wadhams describes changing climate conditions which are now opening up the Passage.
Art explores the deep time of geology in a new Japan-Scotland exhibition, developed by Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin and Oban-based curator Naoko Mabon. Join them on a tour with artists Yoshihisa Nakano and Keijiro Suzuki from Yamaguchi and Orkney geologist Dr John Flett Brown, with a workshop and tea/coffee biscuits too.
Join Dr Ragnhild Ljosland and Mark Cook for a hands-on workshop on working flax. Textile production was a major part of Viking women’s daily responsibilities. Try some of the processes that transform flax plants into workable fibres, and make a cord. Learn how Norse people used flax and linen and hear some of their stories.
Naturalist/author Polly Pullar’s speaks of the joys and heartbreaks of hand-rearing and rehabilitating numerous wild creatures, from tiny naked squirrel kits to tawny owlets and hedgehogs. She highlights the pressing need to care for nature in all forms, from the smallest insects and plants to habitat restoration.
It was washed up on the rocks in 1808 and if it was a basking shark then it was fifteen feet longer than anything ever recorded. Archive documents suggest the story reached Lord Byron in Geneva in the gloom of 1816. Dr Howie Firth describes the implications, for literature as well as science.
Kirkwall City Pipe Band with their final parade of the season.
Oceanographer Dr Neil Banas looks at how a story by a master Haida mythteller, Skaay, reflects the marine ecology on the North Pacific Ocean’s edge. “He managed to capture the dynamics of ecosystems at the ‘edge of chaos’ in his mythic frame with an accuracy that mathematical modellers still struggle to duplicate.”
Charles Dickens never forgot his traumatic boyhood experience in Warren's boot-blacking factory. Two hundred years later, Neil Price found a series of clues in his own family history that pointed to Warren's main competitor, and its owner in particular. He travels back to 1836 with Dave and Laura Grieve on a trail of detection.
A group of synthesizer players in the north has been meeting online to play together through the pandemic and inspire each other, and this evening they’d like you to join them to listen to a mixture of pieces and find out more about the workings of synthesizers and their rich range of relaxing and sometimes ethereal sounds.
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.
