Orphir Round Church

The Orphir Round Church, also called the Round Kirk or St Nicholas's Church, stands in Orphir parish on the Orkney Mainland. It is the oldest surviving round church in Scotland, and the only other medieval one is at Roxburgh near the English border. A round church anywhere in Britain is rare; two in one country is nearly the whole national supply. It consisted of a circular nave about six metres across with a semicircular, barrel-vaulted apse on the eastern side carrying a central window. The walls are a metre thick. Those dimensions make it a small building by any standard, and its interest lies entirely in its shape and its story.

The design was borrowed from Jerusalem. Round churches imitated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the form became popular with returning crusaders attempting to reproduce the building they had seen. Very few of those imitations survive anywhere in northern Europe. It is thought to have been built by Jarl Haakon Paulsson, Earl of Orkney from 1103 to 1123, as penance for murdering his cousin and co-ruler Magnus Erlendsson — later Saint Magnus — in the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Penance on that scale was a normal instrument of twelfth-century politics as well as of conscience.

The Orkneyinga saga records that Haakon took sole power in 1117 after the killing, and the round kirk was afterwards rededicated to St Magnus. A church built in penance for a murder, then rededicated to the murdered man, is an unusually complete circle. The saga is the principal source for all of it, and it is a source with its own interests.

The saga also describes a large drinking-hall with a magnificent church nearby. The remains of that hall, known as the Earl's Bu, can still be seen alongside an eleventh-century Norse horizontal watermill. A hall, a mill and a church together give an unusually complete picture of a Norse earl's establishment.

Almost the whole church survived until 1757, when most of it was pulled down to provide stone for a new parish kirk — which has itself since been demolished. Only the apse and a small segment of the nave wall now remain. Robbing a church for the stone to build its replacement was ordinary practice, and it is why so little medieval fabric survives in Orkney. The site is in the care of Historic Environment Scotland, open to the public, and protected as a scheduled monument, a designation applied to it in 2014. What is left is a fragment, but it is the oldest fragment of its kind in the country.