Qualla: Stromness Museum

Stromness Museum: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wendy, CC BY-SA 2.0. Curators were going through what they thought was the last unopened box in the Skara Brae collection in 2016 when they pulled out a small whalebone figurine. It had been catalogued sometime in the nineteenth century, then misplaced, then forgotten. The carving turned out to be five thousand years old, one of the earliest known representations of the human form from Neolithic Britain. It had been sitting in a drawer at the Stromness Museum the entire time. Small museums often have this problem: they are full of things their predecessors collected for reasons nobody now remembers, and occasionally one of those things turns out to be priceless.

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Image: Wendy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stromness Museum: A Town Hall That Became a Museum

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reading Tom from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0. The building was built as a town hall. Stromness grew quickly in the early nineteenth century on the back of the herring fishery and the Hudson's Bay Company trade, and by 1856 the population had reached the point where the area was created a police burgh. The new burgh council c...

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Image: Reading Tom from Reading, UK | CC BY 2.0

Stromness Museum: The Arctic Collection

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Shaw, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stromness was for two centuries the last British port that Hudson's Bay Company ships called at before crossing the Atlantic. Generations of Orcadian men joined the company as labourers, clerks, and traders, and many of them spent their working lives in what is now northern Canad...

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Image: Mike Shaw | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stromness Museum: Cook Came Here Twice

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PunkToad from oakland, us, CC BY 2.0. Captain James Cook's third voyage, the one that took him to Hawaii where he was killed, ended in Stromness in 1780 when HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery sheltered in the harbour on their long limp home from the Pacific. Some of what the crew brought back with them stayed in the t...

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Image: PunkToad from oakland, us | CC BY 2.0

Stromness Museum: Fragments from Scapa Flow

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unukorno, CC BY 4.0. Stromness sits on the western edge of Scapa Flow, the great natural anchorage where the interned German High Seas Fleet was scuttled in 1919 and where HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed by U-47 in 1939. The museum's naval history collection reflects this geography. There are artefacts r...

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Image: Unukorno | CC BY 4.0

Stromness Museum: Shabti and Whalebone

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chmee2, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2020, researchers from the National Museum of Scotland visiting Stromness identified two Egyptian faience shabti dating from 1145 to 986 BC in the collection. Nobody in Stromness had known what they were. Shabti are small funerary figurines, placed in Egyptian tombs to act as ...

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Image: Chmee2 | CC BY-SA 3.0