St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall

Founded in 1137 by Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson, St Magnus Cathedral rises in red and yellow sandstone above the heart of Kirkwall. Rögnvald raised it in honour of his uncle, Magnus Erlendsson, an Orcadian earl killed by an axe blow around 1116 and later venerated as a saint; the cathedral became the seat of the Bishop of Orkney and the resting place of Magnus’s relics. The building is essentially Romanesque, with pointed Gothic arches added in the fourteenth century as the work continued over generations. Its masons drew on red stone quarried near Kirkwall and paler stone from the island of Eday, setting the two in alternating courses and chequerboard patterns that give the walls a warm, banded colour. Much of the medieval fabric survives intact, and it is often described as the only wholly medieval cathedral in Scotland. In 1919 a hidden cavity in one of the piers yielded bones marked by an axe wound, thought to be those of Magnus himself. No longer a bishop’s seat, the cathedral today belongs to Orkney Islands Council and serves as a Church of Scotland parish church, holding memorials to notable Orcadians alongside its centuries of weathered stone.