OISF 2025

Travel the world, pole to pole, with Belgian explorer Christian Clauwers’s photographs at the Ship of Fools gallery. Orkney Museum highlights worlds illustrated by artist Jim Baikie, for comic book series like Star Trek and Dr Who. It also features items from Orkney folklorist Walter Traill Dennison, some going back to Armada and Jacobite times. Orkney Wireless Museum is a treasure chest of social history, and the Camera Club’s theme is Orkney food and the stories behind it. Stromness Museum shows Orkney’s pioneering role in energy, and the Pier Arts Centre blends photographs and poetry for grasses and their uses.

See the varied colours and patterns knitted or woven from the wool of native sheep. Learn how to bring science into poetry. Sing with a choir for health and wellbeing. Plan your autumn garden work, and see new crops growing under glass. Find out how a distillery is recovering waste heat, and how to recycle ocean plastic with tabletop equipment.

The planetarium is back at the Family Day, plus a wealth of other activities, from building medicinal molecules to making electric circuits; and travelling in virtual reality through the underwater sights and sounds of seagrass meadows and ocean kelp forests. There are coding workshops, astronomy, energy activities. And you can meet the robots! How could you find love as a honeybee? – Find out in a new family show. And in another family show you can enjoy some astonishing illusions and the science of magic – see a head mysteriously grow and shrink and a coin pass through a solid rubber sheet.

Sample carrots to see if adding quarry dust to the soil helps their flavour. Visit the centre for testing wave and tide devices of the future. Meet the robots and hear about plans for a new Orkney subsea test centre for them. Take an evening trip to Birsay to hear the story of Robert Rendall’s love of the shore in poetry and prose, or spend an afternoon at a working meal mill. Enjoy the Vintage Rally in Kirkwall, and later the sound of the pipes on Broad Street. Visit the Cathedral for the Sunday morning service. And don’t miss the closing ceilidh!

The buffet lunches of Orkney fare at the Peedie Kirk are a treat to look forward to. They’re an opportunity to meet some of the varied mix of people who gather, and each of the five lunches has a One O’Clock Toast, with the subject this year including an Orkney woman doctor, Orkney’s first county archaeologist, and a great 19th-century folklorist. And in the evenings we have a wonderful mix of talents in the Orkney Club – fiddle players, accordionists, stories of life at sea and explorations of the quantum world, a poet from Ireland and a choir from Aberdeenshire.

Our new landscape film spans the immensity of geological time – from the ancient mountains of Caithness to the Stromness granite, from the sand hills of Dunnet Bay to boulder clay in Shapinsay from a long-ago ice flow; with sweeping panoramas from our new drone above. The passage of time is the theme of a new film at West Side Cinema, looking at buildings in a world of rock and concrete. Live poetry and music accompany a film of the graceful movements of whales.

There is a Cathedral concert, a choir from the Mearns, and the sweet sound of synthesizers. There is the harmony of harp and harmonica, an insight into the role of numbers in musical structure, and music in a quantum landscape. We go on a musical journey north to Faroe and Iceland with fiddle and accordion; and onward to Greenland with poetry and film for stories of whales and whaling and a search for lost ships.