Discovering the Ring of Brodgar, June 2005. My first trip to Orkney in search of archaeology and I wasn’t disappointed. These are places were built with a purpose and are now abandoned.
I first travelled to Orkney in 2005, shortly after the death of my wife. Drawn there by frequent television programs about Skara Brae and the Ring of Brodgar I devised the Neolithic Whiskey Run, a quest for archaeology and Islay whiskey. With an MGF, pop-up tent and a boot full of cameras, I was seeking some sort of resolution of my grief if only through the distraction of photography.
The images that I took there (film and digital) became part of my ‘A’-level photography, which I was studying at the time. The locations themselves evoked a sense of abandonment and a strange connection with the purpose of their Neolithic inhabitants.
Nearly twenty years later, I returned to Orkney and discovered another archaeology scattered across the islands: WW1 and WW2 batteries, bunkers and optical ranging systems, particularly Ness Battery. What struck me immediately was the visual and conceptual connection between these wartime structures and the much older stone monuments. Both were once highly active places shaped by collective effort, observation and purpose. Both were now abandoned leaving just traces of their former importance.
In 2025 these later images became part of “Concrete at War”, an exhibition at the Modernist in Manchester which considered the brutalist design of WW2 costal defences, architecture designed with function over form.
In September 2026, I new exhibition will be held at the Northlight Gallery in Orkney and it will draw on the similarities of these Neolithic sites and the remaining WW1 and WW2 costal defences in Orkney.
But for now I am revisiting my files and negatives from 20+ years ago. The selection above are the first that I took of the Ring of Brodgar, a subject I have reworked many times with both digital and analogue processes.
You can follow my progress in preparing for the exhibition along with random image ideas on my Lazy Photon Instagram
Mark Wrigley 