Islands are in the frontline for challenges of environment and resources – and for finding solutions. The Virtual Island Summit (7-13 September) is this week bringing together islands worldwide to share their experiences and stories of island innovation. We join them live with stories of development projects in several Orkney islands showing how communities can shape energy developments to solve problems.
It was one of the most significant and complex civil engineering achievements of the 20th century, closing off four fast-flowing tidal channels to form causeways that sealed off the eastern side of the anchorage of Scapa Flow and link today the island communities of Burray and South Ronaldsay with the Orkney mainland. The challenge was taken on by the construction company Balfour Beatty. Civil engineer John Andrew tells the story of how they solved it, and the massive scale of the operation with its quarries and rockworks, cableways and railways.
A newspaper obituary for a 19th-century stone mason led Neil Price on a trail of investigation: from Bristol to Tsarist Russia and a massive harbour development destroyed in the Crimean War. Andrea Price joins as reader for a story that starts with Catherine the Great and features Charles Gordon (later of Khartoum) and the first war to be recorded through the techniques of photography.
