CHURCHILL BARRIERS - 1945

World War Two forever changed the face of Orkney. For, on May 12, 1945, just four days after VE day, the most tangible monument of Orkney’s war years was officially opened – the Churchill Barriers, linking the Orkney Mainland and South Ronaldsay.

It was, said The Orcadian, “a ceremony rich in historical significance, closing an important chapter in the story of the 1939-45 European War, opening a bright and glowing page in the annals of Orkney’s commercial and communal progress record.

“The ceremony was that of declaring open the most unique highway in the British Isles, a five miles thoroughfare that might well be titled Orkney’s Great Eastern Road. Almost a third of this Orkney land route runs across salt water, laid upon causeways containing half a million cubic yards of quarried rock and more than 300,000 tons of concrete.”

It had been one of the greatest civil engineering achievements in the world, the result of five years of work, about which Orcadians had been told nothing. Obviously, many on the Orkney Mainland would have seen the huge construction site, but for those in the North Isles, it was another world away. And, because of wartime censorship regulations, the announcement of the opening ceremony was the first time that The Orcadian had ever referred to the new barriers which had arisen from the sea in channels up to 55ft deep where the tide used to flow at ten knots.

Another tragic milestone of the hostilities saw an Orcadian, James Isbister become the first civilian of World War Two to be killed by German bombs on British soil at the Brig o’ Waithe, Stenness, on March 16, 1940.

The Machinery of War...