Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Kirkwall
Mon-Sat, 1030-1700
Admission Free

“He saved from extinction, single-handed, a whole corpus of myth, legend, and historical tradition which the educated Orcadians of his time ignored, even deplored,” wrote Ernest Marwick. The bicentenary of Walter Traill Dennison’s birth is highlighted in a special display of items generously donated by his descendants.

You can see his walking cane and his silver snuff-box and his tobacco pipe, made for him by his brother-in-law from wood from the Spanish Armada ship El Gran Grifon, wrecked on Fair Isle in 1588.

There are items that have been in the family for centuries, among them a pair of silver shoe buckles that was owned by James Fea of Clestrain, the man who captured the pirate John Gow. There is an ivory billiard ball that once belonged to another Orkney Jacobite sympathiser, Si r James Stewart of Burray.

The various items were donated to the Museum by Walter Traill Dennison’s great-grandson, Duncan McLaren, and his sister Jean McLeod. His son, Duncan Jnr, gave Walter Traill Dennison’s ‘West Brough Scrap Book’ which will also be on view. There is information online on the Orkney Museum’s webpages, as Part 1 and Part 2.

The donation is part of a long link with the Museum and the family that included an exhibition in 1994 marking the centenary of Walter Traill Dennison’s death. It was the first of the many exhibitions put together by exhibitions officer Tom Muir, who the following year compiled for publication a new edition of Walter Traill Dennison’s Orkney Folklore & Sea Legends. Tom, who retired from the Museum service this summer, is with his wife Rhonda preparing a new edition for publication this year by Orkneyology Press which they co-founded. On Tuesday 9 September he will be hosting several Festival talks looking at folklore links to modern research and giving a One O’Clock Toast to Walter Traill Dennison.

Orkney Museum is located in Tankerness House which for three centuries was the home of the Baikie family of Tankerness, hence the name. The north and south wings were originally separate houses for the Cathedral’s sub-chantor, in charge of the music, and the archdean. When the Reformation came, the archdean Gilbert Foulzie became the first Protestant priest and secured both houses and joined them up into the expanded building which we see today, with the arms and initial of him and his wife over the arched gateway.