The discovery of medieval deposits beneath the Earl's Palace, Kirkwall, Orkney

Abstract

Discusses the 1982 archaeological investigations below the tennis courts and walls of the seventeenth-century palace which revealed a range of medieval features and deposits probably associated with the earlier Bishop's Palace or Palace of the Yards. A major find of the excavations was a wooden Scandinavian-type comb and it is suggested that it may have been brought from Trondheim in Norway in the thirteenth century (given the close connection between the two ecclesiastical settlements). Anne Crone writes on `Waterlogged wood' (576) and Leonie Paterson on `Faunal remains' (576--7).