Administrative Boundary of Orkney Islands

About Orkney Islands

Orkney Islands is a council area comprising an archipelago off the north-east coast of mainland Scotland, separated from Caithness by the Pentland Firth. Covering approximately 990 square kilometres across around 70 islands, of which some 20 are inhabited, Orkney had a population of approximately 22,000 at the 2022 Census, concentrated on Mainland, the largest island, and its capital, Kirkwall. Heart of Neolithic Orkney Orkney contains one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric monuments in Europe, collectively inscribed as the "Heart of Neolithic Orkney" UNESCO World Heritage Site. Skara Brae, a remarkably preserved Neolithic settlement of stone-built houses complete with stone furniture, was buried by sand for millennia until a storm exposed it in 1850; radiocarbon dating shows it was occupied from around 3180 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nearby stand the Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic henge and stone circle of which 27 of an original 60 stones survive, the Standing Stones of Stenness, and Maeshowe, a chambered cairn aligned so that the setting sun at midwinter illuminates its inner chamber — and whose walls also carry the largest collection of Viking runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia, carved by 12th-century Norsemen who broke into the tomb. Scapa Flow and Naval History Scapa Flow, the large natural harbour enclosed by Orkney's southern islands, served as the principal base of the British Grand Fleet in both World Wars. It was here that the surrendered German High Seas Fleet scuttled itself in 1919 to avoid confiscation, and here that the German submarine U-47 sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor in 1939 with the loss of 833 lives — a disaster that prompted construction of the Churchill Barriers, causeways linking several southern islands that today double as roads. Italian prisoners of war who built the barriers also transformed two Nissen huts into the Italian Chapel, an elaborately decorated place of worship that survives as a monument to their craftsmanship. St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, founded in 1137 by Norse earl Rognvald in honour of his martyred uncle Magnus, remains the northernmost cathedral in Britain still in use. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Orkney Islands Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the OS Open Geography portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports Neolithic archaeology, naval heritage research, island ecology, and demographic analysis across the Orkney Islands council area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Orkney Islands county