Kelp working sites are situated on both sides of Whale Geo (Burness, Sanday), at Whale Point to the south and the Holms of Ire to the north (Canmore ID 3484).
The site (NGR HY 65106 45584) was visited as part of the project launch in Sanday in winter of 2023 with recording undertaken by the ORCA team and local volunteers in May 2024.
Holms of Ire
The kelp workings on the Holms of Ire are nestled among the remains of the medieval chapel, St Colm’s (Canmore ID 3483). The chapel is ruinous and barely visible due to heaped rubble and storm beach debris, conditions which hampered easy recognition of the kelp workings. Eleven features were identified, however, comprising seven kelp pits and four tangle dykes.
The kelp pits were visible as circular depressions in a generally uneven landscape and varied from in diameter from 0.9m to 3.0m.
The tangle dykes were orientated perpendicular to the shoreline, bounding the edge of the storm beach and often the seaward end could not be clearly defined within the debris. They varied in length from 3.4m to 7.8m with an average width of 0.9m.
Whale Point
An extensive spread of kelp workings were identified across the headland, with 36 kelp pits and three tangle dykes. The features were concentrated along the east side of the Point where the coastal section was lower and less steep than that on the west side, and with the rocky foreshore extending further into the sea.
The kelp pits were preserved as depressions in the ground surface with clear, circular edges and varying in diameter from 0.8m to 2.7m.
The three tangle dykes were formed of earth-fast stones, distributed fairly evenly across the site and intermingled with the kelp pits. All three were oriented parallel to the coastal section, varying in length from 2.9m to 6.1m with an average width of 0.9m. It was not clear if their reduced height was due to most of the stone being removed or to wind-blown sand building-up against the sides and then turf growing across the sand.
