Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Orkney (Scotland) – History – Fiction”

Alasdair Gray is one of the most influential post-war Scottish writer along with Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, and James Kelman. He is wellknown not only as a contemporary novelist, intellectual, and esthete but also as a political activist and a Scottish independence supporter. Although his novels are written exclusively in English, they are characterized with a strong national flavor and are inspired by the ideas of the eminent Scottish scientists, philosophers, and community leaders. The article dwells on the analysis of Scottish national emblem in Alasdair Gray’s fiction. This emblem manifests itself through female nation figures, which were first used in Scottish nationalist discourse by Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon during the period of Scottish Literary Renaissance. One of the most recurrent themes in Alasdair Gray’s fiction are female suffering and entrapment, which serve as political allegories of the national inferiority complex («Scottish cringe») and subordinate position within the United Kingdom. Thus, the writer strives to include Scotland into the post-colonial framework. In order to re-imagine Scottish nation figure Alasdair Gray addresses both the literary tradition and the latest feminist ideas of his time. Unlike other contemporary Scottish writers who tend to present this figure as a passive victim of political injustice, Alasdair Gray intentionally makes her initiative and active non-victim. She is also constructed as a female monster, which alludes to discrepancy between country’s rich history and its «young» parliament.

Commercial cruising began around 1880. Underlying factors were the iron steamship that enabled scheduled sailings and larger, more comfortable vessels and growing incomes in industrialising countries that increased the potential market for tourism. Britain took the lead in cruising development. This article examines a pioneering enterprise, The North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steamship Navigation Company – the name reflects its sphere of operation. In 1886, the company began providing cruise voyages out of Aberdeen and Leith. It offered a new product, cheap and short cruises to the Norwegian fjords. The success of the first season led to the ordering of a new vessel, the St Sunniva, specifically designed for cruising and arguably the first cruise ship. The Company operated cruises chiefly to the fjords, but also to the Baltic and the Mediterranean, completing a total of 224 cruises between 1886 and 1908. Such sustained participation was due to imaginative and efficient organisation. Press advertising, the employment of travel agents, block bookings and private charters were used to gain business. The Company's vessels employed local pilots and from early on carried ‘conductors’, who were forerunners of the ‘cruise director’. The Company's success and innovations encouraged other firms to enter the cruising market, notably large liner companies such as P&O, Union Castle and Royal Mail after 1900. These used much larger vessels with better, more luxurious facilities. The North of Scotland Company, with its smaller and older vessels, could not compete and it withdrew from cruising in 1908.

Red deer ( Cervus elaphus ) have played a key role in human societies throughout history, with important cultural significance and as a source of food and materials. This relationship can be traced back to the earliest human cultures and continues to the present day. Humans are thought to be responsible for the movement of a considerable number of deer throughout history, although the majority of these movements are poorly described or understood. Studying such translocations allows us to better understand ancient human–wildlife interactions, and in the case of island colonizations, informs us about ancient human maritime practices. This study uses DNA sequences to characterise red deer genetic diversity across the Scottish islands (Inner and Outer Hebrides and Orkney) and mainland using ancient deer samples, and attempts to infer historical colonization events. We show that deer from the Outer Hebrides and Orkney are unlikely to have originated from mainland Scotland, implying that humans introduced red deer from a greater distance. Our results are also inconsistent with an origin from Ireland or Norway, suggesting long-distance maritime travel by Neolithic people to the outer Scottish Isles from an unknown source. Common haplotypes and low genetic differentiation between the Outer Hebrides and Orkney imply common ancestry and/or gene flow across these islands. Close genetic proximity between the Inner Hebrides and Ireland, however, corroborates previous studies identifying mainland Britain as a source for red deer introductions into Ireland. This study provides important information on the processes that led to the current distribution of the largest surviving indigenous land mammal in the British Isles.

In the summer of 2006 author Margaret Elphinstone, embarking on a novel set in the prehistoric period (Elphinstone 2009), sought out archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones to discover more about Mesolithic Scotland. The resulting process proved to be more than a simple question and answer session: over three years, the two of us, novelist and archaeologist, each renegotiated the boundaries of our perceptual frameworks. This paper is intended to examine the learning process that most students of archaeology unconsciously experience, and it goes on to champion a respected role for fiction. As the status of history is reduced in the school syllabus, the number of people learning about their past from fiction will increase. Very few people learn much about the Mesolithic through formal education; indeed we are both astonished at how many well-educated people have no idea when or what the Mesolithic was. As representatives of our professions, we here demonstrate the special and timely benefits of what we term the informed novel.

In 1222, Adam, bishop of Caithness, was murdered by a group of Caithness landholders. Although it appears in a fourteenth century manuscript, the Old Norse text Brenna Adams Byskups (The Burning of Bishop Adam) originated in Iceland in the 1230s. It provides a Caithness-based perspective on Adam’s death to compare with other accounts from around the world. Including a new transcription and translation of the text, this article contextualises Brenna Adams Byskups and the events of Adam’s death. At this time, the bishops of Caithness were used by the Scottish kings to promote royal authority in the territory of the jarls of Orkney and Caithness, leading to moments of violence. By comparing Brenna Adams Byskups to other accounts, Jarl Jón’s (died 1231) role in Adam’s death can be established, as can the extent of King Alexander II’s (1214–49) punishments. Adam’s murder had a significant impact on northern Scotland, consolidating Scottish royal authority in Sutherland and possibly contributing to Jarl Jón’s murder in 1231.

The subject of this study is Viking-Late Norse settlement (c. AD800-1200) in the North Atlantic, focusing on Orkney and on longhouse complexes constructed on mounds. For the first time these mound settlements are investigated as a group and as deliberately constructed mounds. Settlement mounds in Orkney are also closely associated with nearly 40 Skaill ON skáli ('hall') place-names, which place-names linked the sites with the social and economic networks of Orkney's peripatetic leaders. This association is examined more closely. The analysis also demonstrates that constructing settlements on mounds required particular building techniques, which relied heavily on the use of midden-type material. Those techniques are examined using new and freshly analysed material from published and grey literature-published excavations and surveys of sites from the Viking-Late Norse period in Orkney and elsewhere. Three core data-sets were established to provide the evidential basis: the first, also drawing on site-visits, looking broadly at mound landscapes and skáli-areas in Orkney; the second at the building techniques and materials used on settlement mounds; and the third, also requiring site-visits, at all the skáli place-name sites. The possible origins of settlement mound living in the settlers' Scandinavian homelands are investigated, then the extent to which mound living was also followed in Shetland, Caithness and the Western Isles, and finally in previously unoccupied lands, using Iceland as a case study. The mound-sites, their archaeology, mound architecture, place-names and landscape setting are also analysed in a new theoretical framework to reach fresh understandings of Viking-Late Norse settlement in Orkney. The analysis thus considers the wider cultural significance of constructing and living on settlement mounds, and what that communicated about Viking-Late Norse society. The thesis argues that Viking-Late Norse groups chose prominently-placed sites for their visual dominance and commanding views, but also that the rebuilding of mound structures in one spot, and building out and up of the mound itself using midden material, set strong cultural messages about stability, continuity and association with the surrounding landscape. The mounds were complex features of culturally meaningful architecture.

This study is an examination of the differing and competing representations of the Scottish Covenanters that emerged from the signing of the National Covenant in 1638 to the publication in 1835 of The Tales of the Wars ofMontrose, by James Hogg. The disserttion researches representations of the Scottish Covenanters in thee centuies offictional and non-fictional texts, for example, seventeenth-centu sermons, eighteenth-centu chapbooks, and nineteenth-centu Scottish literatue, and it notes and examines the discordance in the various modes of literar discourse. The disserttion is aranged chronologically as the most logical method of tracing and demonstrating the discordance. An historical context is provided to each chapter and also within each chapter as necessar to explain and to situate the discourses under scrutiny within their contemporar climate. Chapter One examines representations of the Scottish Covenanters from the first signing of the National Covenant in 1638 to their disappearance from Scottish mainstream thing with the 'Glorious Revolution' in 1688-9. The chapter begins by examining the document known as the National Covenant and reveals how radically different it was from previous Scottish bonds of allance. The early Covenanters or 'Politick Chrstians' who attempted to promote and to live up to the spirtual and secular aims of the National Covenant were concerned to present a tre image of what it was to be a Covenanter. The Royalists and anti-Covenanters counteracted by detracting the movement though irony which revealed the inconsistencies of Covenanting priciples. The paper war of words included contemporar news sheets, privately circulated letters, broadsides and ballads. After 1660, when Episcopacy was reintroduced into Scotland literar representations of the Scottish Covenanters were, on the whole, denigratory as the Scottish Privy Council, with the full support of the English governent sought to prevent a repeat of the events of 1638. The satirical work of George Hickes is revealed as a crucial factor in the demise of the popularty of Covenanting. As the Covenanting movement became defensive rather than offensive the Covenanters counteracted with books and pamphlets such as Naphtali, that included declarations and 'last testimonies' of those convicted for treason after the Pentland Uprising in 1666. This chapter closely examines one of the published Covenanting sermons and reveals that it is inauthentic propagandist literatue. The representation of Scottish Covenanters in the crucial post-Bothwell/opish plotÆxclusion Crisis altered significantly. A comparison of the draft manifesto published by Royal Warant under the title, 'The Fanaticks New-Covenant', with a later document published by the 'United Societies' reveals that there were moderate Presbyterians after Bothwell Bridge who proposed upholding the Covenants. Their 'manifesto' was published alongside of the more violently rhetorical 'Sanquhair Declaration', which led to them being wrongly associated with the Cameronians. The final representation to be examined in this period is of the Cameronian historian, Alexander Shields. He portayed the Covenanters of the 1680s in apocalyptic tropes as a 'suffering remnant' in exile within their own countr. Chapter Two examines the discordant discourses of the eighteenth centu. The 'Revolution Settlement' of 1688-9 re-instated Presbytery and as the tables were tued, so the Episcopalian satirsts denigrated the Presbyterians by implying that all Covenanters were of a similar violent propensity as the Cameronians had theatened. The move towards Enlightenment away from the enthusiastic raptue of the seventeenth centu can be traced though these satircal representations which concentrated an accusation that Presbyterian preaching was ineffective and ridiculous. As Covenanting fell out of favour historians such as Robert Wodrow, and also the 'United Societies' as the Cameronians became known tued to apologia. Their accounts portayed the Covenanting movement of the later seventeenth-centu as entirely defensive. This was disputed by satirsts such as Pitcaire and Swift, and Enlightened historians such as David Hume. Towards the end of the eighteenth centu Reformed Presbyterians, as the Cameronians were now called, published major works which promoted positive images of the Covenanters. John Howie's Biographia Scoticana significantly altered the perspective of Covenanting. He depicted Covenanting as the natul successor of the Reformation in his hagiogrphical collection which begins with the mardom of Walter Mil in 1550. Overall, this chapter examines the way that representations of the Scottish Covenanters altered in the changing political, religious and intellectual climate of the eighteenth centu. Chapter Thee examines the literar representation of the Scottish Covenanters in the early nineteenth centu to 1807. Using Gerard Genett's Paratexts as a model the chapter examines the interplay between the text and the anotation in John Leyden's poetr and in his editing of John Wilson's poem entitled, Clyde, in the anotation and introductory material that Scott appended to five Covenanting ballads in the third volume of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in the anotation to James Grahame's long reflective poem entitled, The Sabbath, and finally, to the imitation ballad entitled, 'Mess John' in James Hogg's collection of 'traditional' material entitled, The Mountain Bard. The chapter situates the subjective editing practices of Scott into the contemporar political climate of a heightened revolutionar atmosphere engendered by the threat of war between the United Kingdom, and France and Spain. This chapter offers a revision of the poet, James Grahame. A close reading of The Sabbath, that is taen in context with his earlier suppressed anti-clerical and anti-Enlightenment poetry reveals that it is an anti-Establishmentaan, as opposed to purely reflective poem. Finally, in this chapter the notion of James Hogg as Scott imitator is rejected. A close reading of his ballad, 'Mess John' indicates his move from imitator to independent author. Overall, this chapter reveals that Scott revised representations of the Scottish Covenanters though an appropriation of eighteenth-centu pseudo-Covenanting and anti-Covenanting works. Chapter Four is a study ofScott's series of novels entitled, Tales of My Landlord that he published between 1816 and 1819. The chapter begins with a close examination ofScott's satirical representation of Reformed Presbyterians and dissenters in his first novel entitled, Waverley. After establishing Scott's anti-Covenanting tropes the chapter then proceeds to an examination of the novels from the series which constituted his most intensively derogatory treatment of Covenanters and their descendats. Takg Par's study of Don Quixote as an exemplar the chapter discovers the extent of Scott' s anti-Covenanting satire. As in the previous two chapters the contemporar political and religious climate is also discussed. Chapter Five examines the literar response to Scott's anti-Covenanting satire, and to the subjective editing practices of Charles Kirkpatrck Share. It suggests that the battle over the documenta evidence of Covenanting material signified the battle for authorial control that became the central concerns ofHogg and GaIt. The prose fictions of James Hogg, John Galt, Allan Cuningham and John Wilson are compared and contrasted. This reveals that Hogg had developed an entirely new paradigm of positively representing the Covenanters by acknowledging their heroism and fortitude while rejecting their violence and wild rhetoric. John GaIt's anti-romantic novel Ringan vu Gilhaize offered an inovative interpretation of historical reconstrction that appears to have been deliberately aimed at counterig Scott.

This thesis studies the origin and role of wealth in the Viking Age (late 8th to 11th century) and Late Norse (11th to 15th century) earldoms of Orkney and Caithness, northern Scotland. It has four aims. Firstly, it attempts to elucidate the key sources of wealth in the earldoms and, more specifically, the possible economic role of fish trade. Secondly, it investigates how control of these sources of wealth may have been distributed within Viking Age and Late Norse society. Thirdly, it attempts to isolate chronological trends in the utilisation of different sources of wealth and the social relations surrounding them. Finally, it was hypothesised that a consideration of these issues might illuminate the character and causes of the transition of Orkney, Caithness and Shetland from a semi-independent and non-Christian Viking Age polity to a periphery of medieval Christian Europe. Part 1 is a geographical and protohistorical survey of Viking Age and Late Norse Orkney, Caithness and Shetland. It discusses available evidence and establishes the considerable wealth of the earldoms. Part 2 investigates the possible sources of this wealth. It concludes by highlighting circumstantial evidence for an export trade in cured fish. Zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical data receive particular attention. New methodological tools for interpreting the weight of zooarchaeological assemblages are also discussed. In Part 3, the possibility that medieval fish middens (at sites such as Robert's Haven, Caithness) represent waste from the production of cured fish for export is considered in detail.

This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

'"Transcolonial Circuits': Historical Fiction and National Identities in Ireland, Scotland, and Canada" explores the intersections between gender, canon-formation, and literary genre in order to argue that English- and French-Canadian historical fiction was influenced, both in form and content, by the precedent-setting fictions o f Scotland and Ireland in the early nineteenth century. Conceived in the spirit o f Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), this dissertation extends Trumpener's examination of nineteenth-century British and Canadian romantic fiction by exploring in greater detail the flow of ideas and literary techniques between Ireland, Scotland, and English and French Canada. It does so in order to revise critical understandings of the formal and thematic origins and development of Canadian historical fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter One functions as a series of literary snapshots that examine historically the critical and popular reception of novels by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in Ireland, Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, John Richardson, William Kirby, and Jean Mcllwraith in English Canada, and Philippe Aubert de Gaspe and Napoleon Bourassa in French Canada. I pay particular attention to the issues o f gender and political ideology as inseparable from the history of the novel itself. In Chapter Two, by focussing on the travel trope, I examine in detail how Irish, Scottish, and Canadian writers transformed the investigative journeys of Samuel Johnson and Arthur Young into journeys of resistance to the dictates of the metropolis. Chapter Three focuses on the complications of marriage as a metaphor o f intercultural union. It pays particular attention to the intersections between gender, sexuality, and colonial identity. The Conclusion extends the concerns raised in the thesis about the relationship between historical writing and national identity to the late-twentieth-century Canadian context, by examining the adaptation of literary and historiographical conventions to the medium of television in the CBC/SRC television series Canada: A People's History, which aired in 2001-02.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of archaeological research in Scotland prior to the publication of Vikings in Scotland in 1998. The main highlights of archaeological fieldwork and research from across Scotland concentrate on those from the Northern Isles, where most of the work had taken place. Key sites include the Brough of Birsay, Buckquoy, the Earl’s Bu, Brough of Deerness, Skaill, Pool and Tuquoy in Orkney, and Jarlshof, Underhoull, Old Scatness, The Biggings and Sandwick in Shetland. Fewer sites were investigated in the Western Isles and mainland Scotland, but the author gives an overview of the scarcer settlement evidence these latter areas, as well as other types of archaeological evidence from across Scotland, including that of pagan graves, Viking-Age gold and silver hoards. In conclusion, interdisciplinary work, considered ground-breaking in the 1970s and 80s, is discussed, an approach that has now become the norm in today’s research into Scandinavian Scotland.

A passage from Zoë Wicomb’s novel October reveals an affectively complex translocal association that is also a reflection of colonial history. Such affective experiences, crossing place and time, are typical of Wicomb’s writing; in particular, the historical connection between Scotland and South Africa produces moments of recognition and affective dislocation. David’s Story, like several other South African novels of its period, uses genealogy to traverse temporal boundaries. This novel also troubles the issue of representation, using the figure of an amanuensis to question the possibility of achieving the truth in a situation of political upheaval as in immediately post-apartheid South Africa.

This chapter unearths a sweeping account of the Age of Improvement in John Galt’s brand of non-fictional fiction (‘theoretical history’). It finds Galt exploring the capacity of a modernising society to cope with localised, historically rooted and distinctive cultural forms. His narrative of improvement draws on the first Statistical Account of Scotland in both formal and thematic terms. In Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Entail (1823), local and national cultures can function as cohesive agents that remedy the destabilising effects of rapid change, yet they can also be perverted into a dark influence working to misdirect the effect of global market forces. Galt presents history as a contest over the volatile substance of ‘story’, which his novels rhetorically disavow. His analysis of the law of unintended consequences is permeated by a dry sense of humour. Yet by The Entail, Scottish history has become a catalogue of tragic failures, as the changes wrought by improvement fracture the nation into incompatible alternatives.

The North Sea is not renowned for its islands, and much of the modern land–sea interface is sharp, especially along the coasts of Jutland, North and South Holland and much of England. Nevertheless, the North Sea does contain a surprisingly large number of islands and archipelagos, which can be presented with reference to a clear north–south divide. In the northern half of the North Sea, most islands are of hard rock with shallow soils, and their islandness is the result of ongoing glacio-isostatic uplift of previously drowned lands and sea-level rise. With the exception of the Shetland and Orkney archipelagos, few of these islands are found at a great distance from the mainland, and the majority of the countless islands, islets, and rock outcrops off the North Sea coasts of Norway, Sweden, Scotland, and north-east England can be found within a few miles of the mainland. In the southern half of the North Sea, the islands are mainly made up of sand and clay and, in their history if not today, were frequently sandbanks formed by the sea utilizing both marine and riverine sediments. Most of the islands of the Wadden Sea in Denmark, Germany, and Holland are sandbanks elevated by aeolian-formed sand dunes. Further south, the core of the large islands of Zeeland is principally formed of riverine sands and marine clays intercalated with peat, reflecting coastal wetland conditions at various times in the Post-glacial and Holocene (Vos and Van Heeringen 1997). As with Zeeland, the islands on the English side of the North Sea, such as Mersey Island in the Blackwater estuary and Foulness Island in Essex, have now been incorporated into the mainland. Only a few islands cannot be so simply classified:Helgoland in the German Bight, a Sherwood Sandstone stack of Triassic date, is the best known example. Island archaeology, as we have seen (chapter 2), has for many decades approached islands as environments that were relatively isolated from the wider world.

Abstract The final years of Lang’s life showed no slackening of his activities or productivity as a writer. He made up for the loss of Longman’s Magazine by writing fiction and accepting commissions, while, on the scholarly side, he set about saying his last on long-contested issues: on the unity of Homer’s epics from archaeological evidence, on the fallacies of Frazer’s theories on totemism and exogamy, and on Joan of Arc. Lecturing on ‘Homer and Anthropology’ at Oxford, he urged the university to give the same support to anthropology as Cambridge. Controversial to the last, Lang followed up his History of Scotland by arguing that religious conflict, not economic progress or the development of constitutional government, made Scotland’s union with England inevitable. In 1908, The Book of Princes and Princesses was the first of the Langs’ annual anthologies for young people to have Nora’s name as sole author on the cover. In 1911, Lang agreed to serve as President of the SPR, hoping to extend its research to the field of cultural anthropology, but he resisted efforts to get him to stand as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Failing in health, and going blind in one eye, Lang continued working to the end, answering those who accused him of publishing lies on John Knox and the Scottish Reformation in a series of lectures at Glasgow University on ‘The Making of Scotland Presbyterian’ and completing a History of English Literature.

Orkney Islands Council is the Statutory Harbour Authority for Scapa Flow – a 324.5km2 area of deep water and sheltered anchorage in the Orkney Islands, north of mainland Scotland, with a long history and present use by all types of shipping. This paper will provide a short introduction to the development of the IMO and EU Directive compliant Ballast Water Management Policy for Scapa Flow which was approved by the competent planning authority in December 2013. Scapa Flow is in an environmentally sensitive area, this along with best practice was taken into account when developing the Policy – which includes strict and enforceable requirements on vessels and the Harbour Authority with regards to operations, monitoring and reporting. Since its approval there have been thirty-three occasions where ballast water discharge into Scapa Flow (by various types of vessels) has been requested. The Policy requires that vessels requesting to discharge ballast water into Scapa Flow must exchange and treat (where a treatment system is fitted) on every visit to Scapa Flow (no exceptions or exemptions allowed). To date thirty-one vessels have carried out exchange and two have carried out exchange and treat – all as per the Policy. This paper will deal with the setting of an IMO compliant Ballast Water Policy through to practical application by a Statutory Harbour Authority for a period of three years from 2013 to present day – with examples of ship types, amounts, any restrictions imposed, checks and reports made. It will include – with input from the Harbour Authority’s Marine Environment Unit lead by Jenni Kakkonen –a review of the positive actions, problems, solutions and overall results obtained so far regarding taking ballast water samples from these vessels, analysing the same and recording of details. There is a continual review and reporting process with regards to the effectiveness of the Policy to the Orkney Marine Environment Protection Committee (comprising of all the relevant statutory advisors and interested groups). The paper will contain the Harbour Authority’s way ahead in order to remain compliant, maintain its knowledge base of new technologies and environmental reports – all with the continued aim of maintaining the environment and commercial sustainability of Scapa Flow as a leading port and harbour.