Winter Zoom talks 2025, Colleen Batey,The Earl’s Bu, Orphir, Orkney. The beating heart of a Norse Estate, from feasting to trade.

The Earl’s Bu, Orphir, Orkney. The beating heart of a Norse Estate, from feasting to trade.The Round Church and Earl’s Drinking Hall at Orphir form a focus of a much larger estate, which supported the Late Norse Earl’s in agricultural resources as well as providing homes for their wider retinue. The building of a Norse horizontal mill by the Earls added to the central focus of the Estate which can be broadly identified through a study of the Rentals of 1492. The antiquarian excavations of the so-called Drinking Hall brought little understanding of either the complexity, nature or extent of the Norse remains. Through excavations completed in 1993, the role of the mill and, more significantly the middens upon which it was constructed and then infilled after it went out of use, we now have a much fuller understanding of the wider economy of the site, in particular through international trade as well as the management of local cattle and sheep herds and island wide fish resources. Through excavation, survey and geophysical investigation, documentary research and antiquarian re-assessment, it is now finally possible to situate the status of the Earl’s Bu at the heart of the Norse Earldom in Orkney.
Dr Colleen Batey holds honorary Research Fellowships at the University of the Highlands and Islands and the University of Durham and is Honorary Professor at Hunter College, New York. For the past 50 years she has been involved in research on the Viking Age in Scotland and the North Atlantic, both as director of excavations and teacher. Since 2004, Colleen has combined her research interests with lecturing on expedition ships travelling widely throughout the Viking world from the Black Sea to Canada! She has published extensively, both books and journal articles and given invited/endowed lectures in Canada, USA, Iceland and Scandinavia. In 2000 Colleen was the UK representative for the major exhibition created by the Smithsonian Museum, Washington and which toured several North American venues with visitor figures in the millions. More recently, on her retirement from Glasgow University in 2019, she moved home to the Orkney Mainland, where her beautiful 1700s house and garden lie on the shores of Scapa Flow. In her retirement she has been focussing on bringing to fruition aher long standing research on the Earl’s Bu in Orphir Orkney.