The Orkney Islands

Abstract

Perhaps surprisingly, in view of the position of the Orkney Islands (Figure 4.1) between the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the Quaternary deposits and landforms there have been little studied. Early work addressed whether Orkney had been glaciated or not (A. Geikie, 1877; Laing, 1877), but it was Peach and Home (1880) who first established the essential outlines of the glacial history of the islands. Following up the ideas of Croll (1870a, 1875), Peach and Home proposed that at the period of maximum glaciation, the North Sea had been inundated by ice from both Scandinavia and Scotland and that the combined ice masses flowed into the Atlantic Ocean in a westerly or north-westerly direction across the northern isles of Scotland. Hence the principal themes of studies of the glaciation of Orkney have been the direction of ice movement, the types of erratics found in the glacial deposits and, in particular, whether these erratics were derived from Scotland or from Scandinavia. Only minor attention was paid to the possibility of local glaciation, and it is only in recent years that a small amount of palynological information has become available on the history of the vegetation of the islands.