Three exhibitions are woven together in the gallery near the harbour front. Mother of the Sea is linked to the Northlight Gallery exhibition. A Fragile Correspondence brings writers, artists and architects together to look at language and landscape, including Orkney’s seashore and the vanished Orkney Norn language. Earthbound Orkney features techniques of building in earth and stone in the Orcadian Neolithic.

“The shore dweller has companionship with the free world of nature,” wrote the Orkney poet and shell expert Robert Rendall. “There is always life and movement, birds flying about, waves breaking, salt winds blowing, an occasional seal in the bay, seapinks and other flowers giving colour to the foreshore.” The Orkney shore, its beaches and rock pools, and the life around it, forms the theme for this year’s Orkney Camera Club exhibition.

The Peedie Kirk lunches of Orkney fare are not to be missed! Each day there is the One O’Clock Toast to a well-known Orcadian. Evening events in the Orkney Club include music from synthesizers and smallpipes, songs from Shetland and the Mearns, and a Slovenian wine evening.

This year has turned out wonderfully well musically, and includes three concerts, with varied themes and with new compositions, including world premieres and the presence of several composers themselves. Two of the concerts are in the Cathedral, and the third one is in the Orkney Theatre. There are evenings in the Orkney Club, with instruments from synthesizers to 3D-printed chanters, and from the music of the Mearns to old songs from Shetland. There are workshops as well for you to join in.

Victoria Crowe, renowned for her landscapes and portraits of subjects including Professor Peter Higgs, made two trips to Orkney as part of her Royal Scottish Academy/Pier Arts Centre Residency award in 2022. She looked specifically at the contrasting light around the summer and winter solstice, the two most extreme periods of the celestial cycle.

Looking back at two decades of excavation – and ahead to the project’s next phase, analysing, interpreting and publishing. Timed to mark the final season of excavation, this exhibition, the biggest in the Museum’s history, features hundreds of finds from the Ness never before displayed in public.