The Newark Project….
by Bernie Bell - 07:23 on 10 July 2025
The Newark Project….
I saw a notification in The Orkney News about an exhibition being held in St. Ninians Kirk, Deerness….
We’ve long taken an interest in what’s happening at Newark Bay….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/01/24/newark-bay-life-on-the-edge-of-the-ocean/
….and were keen to go and see the exhibition. As parking spaces are limited by the Kirk we parked in the little car park along the road, by the Bay, and walked along the beach, being dive-bombed by Arctic Terns! We were well away from their nesting sites, but it’s their territory and they didn’t like us being there.
We sat on the big stones by the jetty to eat our sandwiches, looking across to Copinsay and the Horse of Copinsay……
Then took the rather uppy-downy path to the gate at the end of the Kirkyard….
Walking through the Kirkyard, we came upon a sleeping dragon….
….and tip-toed past. My policy is….’Let sleeping dragons lie’.
The exhibition is very well put together and speaks for itself, so ….it’ll let it do so by simply presenting lots of images……
It presents the lives of the folk of the area through the millennia…..
From ancient shell burials……
....to an Anglo-Saxon silver penny….
.....to when the area became known as New Wark....
....to a way of life which is on the edge of living memory...
A plan of Geophysics surveys shows other sites of interest in the area…
The final display is where we ‘Meet The Ancestors’. Anyone who has watched the television series with Julian Richards……
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s9r3j
……will be familiar with the process of re-constructing an individual’s head from what remains of their skull, and that process has been carried out on some the skulls of the ancestors which have been un-earthed at Newark.
There is one truly extra-ordinary-looking individual with a big nose and not much chin.
Sometimes I see a face and I think…’That’s a face that needs a beard’.... and this Deernessian of the past had one of those faces. In fact, thanks to the magic of computers, the same face is presented with a beard – a big improvement!
There are plans for some of these re-constructed heads to be added to the exhibition. If so, I’ll go back and take some photos!
I strongly recommend that you go and see this exhibition for yourself – and give yourself plenty of time - there’s a lot to read and a lot to take in. I felt that I’d like to be able to take some of the booklets home with me to settle down to read and absorb properly.
Stepping back to before all of this took place, there’s a lava flow round the corner from Newark Bay!….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2019/01/05/orkney-walks-more-matters-geological/
St. Ninian’s is in something of a precarious position too……
https://theorkneynews.scot/2021/04/07/a-different-approach-to-sandside-bay/
Coastal erosion is the bane of Orkney.
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