In the winter of 1263, a sick king lay in a draughty stone hall in the centre of Kirkwall, drifting in and out of consciousness as a priest read him the sagas of his predecessors. King Haakon IV of Norway was sixty years old, and he had spent the autumn losing a war. His expedition against the kingdom of Scotland had ended in a confused storm-battered engagement off Largs on the Firth of Clyde, after which the great Norwegian fleet had limped north for the winter. Haakon stopped at Orkney - then still Norwegian territory - to overwinter at the Bishop's Palace beside St Magnus Cathedral. He never sailed home. He died in the palace on 15 December 1263, and with him died Norwegian rule of the Outer Hebrides.
The palace was put up in the twelfth century at the same time as the neighbouring St Magnus Cathedral, the great red sandstone building that dominates Kirkwall to this day. Its first resident was William the Old, the cathedral's first bishop. William was a Norwegian Catholic prelate who took his ecclesiastical authority not from Rome directly but from the Archbishop of Nidaros - the medieval Norwegian archbishopric at Trondheim, far to the northeast. The Orkneys were still part of Norway then; the bishop's authority moved through Trondheim, his palace was built in a recognisably Norwegian style with a great hall above store rooms and an attached tower house for private quarters. Looking at the ruins today it is easy to read the building as a small Scottish castle. In its origin it was something else - a Norse hall translated into stone, sitting on a Scottish island only because the political map had not yet caught up.
After Haakon IV's death in 1263, the palace passed through a period of neglect and was already described as ruinous by 1320. The bigger geopolitical change came in 1468, when Christian I of Denmark and Norway, short of cash, pledged Orkney and Shetland to Scotland as collateral for the dowry of his daughter Margaret, who was to marry James III of Scotland. The dowry has never been paid, the islands have never been redeemed, and Orkney and Shetland have remained part of Scotland ever since. The pledge was technical and temporary in form; in practice it ended five centuries of Norse Orkney. The palace passed briefly to William, Lord Sinclair, in 1526, who was promptly ordered to give it back to the Bishop of Orkney. In 1540 King James V of Scotland visited and garrisoned troops in both the palace and nearby Kirkwall Castle.
In the mid-sixteenth century the palace was substantially restored by Bishop Robert Reid, the last of Orkney's medieval bishops and one of the most cultured men in Scotland of his day. Reid was also the founder of the University of Edinburgh, established by his will in 1582. To the existing palace he added the Moosie Toor - a round tower that gives the ruin much of its distinctive silhouette today. The restoration was barely complete when Reid died in 1558. The following year the Scottish Reformation effectively ended the medieval Catholic episcopate, and the palace passed into secular hands. In 1557 an English fleet under William Woodhouse and John Clere had already attacked Kirkwall on behalf of Mary I of England. Clere's men assaulted the cathedral on 12 August and tried to take the palace the next day. They were overpowered and pushed back to the shore. Many of the retreating English, including Clere himself, drowned trying to reach their ships.
In 1568 ownership passed to Robert Stewart, the first Earl of Orkney, an illegitimate half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots. Robert's son Patrick Stewart, second Earl, was a notably grandiose builder and a notably terrible landlord. He planned to incorporate the Bishop's Palace into his own ambitious Earl's Palace next door, but his debts and his cruelty caught up with him; he was forced to return the building to Bishop James Law in lieu of payment and was eventually executed in 1615 for treason. Patrick's son Robert seized both palaces in 1614 in a brief rebellion and was besieged - it is not clear how much damage that did, but both buildings ended up as the ruins they remain today. Both are now in the care of Historic Environment Scotland as scheduled monuments, open to the public for most of the year. The view from the top of the Moosie Toor takes in the cathedral, the harbour, and the low rooflines of the medieval town. Haakon IV would still recognise some of it.
The Bishop's Palace stands at 58.98°N, 2.96°W in the centre of Kirkwall on Orkney Mainland, immediately adjacent to St Magnus Cathedral. From the air look for the great red sandstone cathedral with its dark stone tower; the Bishop's Palace ruins sit just to the south of the cathedral and the Earl's Palace ruins immediately west of those. Kirkwall Airport (EGPA) is two miles east-southeast at 58.96°N, 2.90°W. Recommended viewing altitude 1,000-2,500 feet for a detailed view of the cathedral precinct. The round Moosie Toor of the Bishop's Palace and the larger pile of the Earl's Palace are best distinguished from the air in side light. Most visible structure: the cathedral itself, which dominates the medieval town centre.