Italian chapel and Tomb of the Eagles

We had a late start and an early finish today - we are on a CL site near St Margaret's Hope, with a sea view - and hook up to electricity. Luxury! It is quite cool and cloudy. Rain is forecast for tomorrow so we have left plenty of indoor things to do.

Today we called in at Kirkwall so that I could organise an early birthday surprise for Mr C. Then we drove to the Churchill Barriers and stopped to admire the Italian Chapel which was formed from to Nissan huts and decorated inside by Italian prisoners of war. They had been captured in the Western Desert and sent to Orkney. They helped build the Churchill barriers which were a defence to stop submarines getting into Scapa Flow. I'm sure that was against the Geneva Convention as they shouldn't have been put to work on the enemies war effort. The chapel was beautifully painted and the unsightly corrugated iron of the hut was hidden by plasterboard. Second-hand and scrap were used. The rood screen was made by an Italian wrought-iron worker from America. It is really beautiful.

A complete contrast was our visit to the Tomb of the Eagles down on the southern end of South Ronaldsay. The talk given at the visitor's centre was really interesting. Children got to handle Stone Age objects and even an eagle's claw. The grandsons would have loved it. We had a couple of miles to walk there and back along the cliffs to the actual tomb which was entered by lying on a little trolley and pulling yourself along by rope the 9ft into the chamber. Here were found the skulls in one chamber and bones of other limbs in a different chamber. It is thought that these people's laid out the dead to be pecked by eagles as it appears eagles were held to be of considerable significance, their bones being found in the tomb too

The collage is the chapel, the 3000 year old skull and me coming out of the Tomb of the Eagles.