The Earl's Palace is a gaunt stone shell beside the village road, built in the late 1500s for Robert Stewart, Earl of Orkney. It is less refined than the later Earl's Palace in Kirkwall, but its setting is better: open fields, low houses, and the sea close by.
The palace is free and open to wander. The surviving walls and window openings give enough shape to imagine the courtyard house it once was, and enough ruin to make the Stewart earls look as fragile as they were brutal.