The Orkney Museum is housed in Tankerness House, an early-sixteenth-century townhouse considered one of the most important historic buildings in Scotland. The central courtyard — with its "dole's seat" where the archdeacon who built the house distributed alms to the poor — is worth stepping through the gate for.
The collection spans the Stone Age through the Viking era to the present: Pictish symbol stones, a whalebone plaque from a Viking boat burial at Scar, and the wooden box that once held the relics of St Magnus. Rooms from the Baikie family's ownership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been preserved, giving the museum an unusual domestic warmth. Admission is free.