We held our second ‘Storylines’ workshop in Stromness at the Robert Rendall Building, on 15 November 2025, rescheduled from 4 October due to storm warnings.
We invited anyone from the local community with an interest in whaling, asking people to come and tell us about family stories and connections, and bring along material culture to show us. All of our Storylines events are facilitated by Kolekto and the UHI Transects team.
Jen Harland started the session with a short talk about whaling connections between Orkney and the wider world. These included 5 types of whaling:
- Traditional ‘subsistence’ drive hunts for pilot whales and other small cetaceans, practiced over the past 1000 years through to the early 20th century
- Arctic whaling for bowheads and other species, based out of larger Scottish towns and employing men from Orkney and Shetland in the 18th and 19th centuries
- Early 20th c. commercial whaling using shore stations in Shetland and the Western Isles
- Early to mid 20th century Antarctic commercial whaling, employing many men from Shetland and Orkney
- Mid 20th century Norwegian small boat minke whaling, using Orkney and Shetland as bases
Local community participants brought in objects to share with us, and discussed family connections and stories. We received many leads to follow up on stories, including finding out that some local women had married Norwegian whalers in the 20th century and moved to Norway. We discussed the Birsay whale bone monument which recently collapsed, hearing about its importance to the local community and attempts to reconstruct it, as well as projects underway to establish other whale bone monuments from recent natural strandings of fin whales.
We’re grateful to all of the local participants for sharing their objects and stories, and we look forward to following up and arranging more detailed interviews.
