Patrick Stewart, second Earl of Orkney, is widely acknowledged among Scottish historians as one of the most tyrannical noblemen in the country's history, which is not a category with light competition. He was the bastard grandson of King James V, born into the wrong side of royal blood and determined to compensate. After inheriting the Orkney earldom in 1593 he ran the islands as a personal fief, manipulating courts, seizing land, and crushing local opposition. The Norse-descended Orcadians, who had long enjoyed a degree of legal autonomy under their own udal traditions, found those traditions ground down beneath Patrick's writ. The palace at Kirkwall was the architectural face of that grinding. He wanted it to look like the great houses of mainland Renaissance Europe, and he wanted his subjects to build it for free.

Construction began in 1607 and proceeded by forced labour drawn from the surrounding districts. The result was beautiful. The Earl's Palace is built in honey-coloured local sandstone, with oriel windows, a great hall of remarkable proportions, and corner turrets that recall Scottish baronial fashion turned outwards toward French taste. The masonry is detailed and confident. Architectural historians regard it as among the finest secular buildings of its period in Scotland. None of this comforted the men who quarried the stone or the families left short of labour at harvest. Patrick's reach extended to Birsay, where he was building another palace, and to a chain of smaller fortifications across his earldom. Orkney's economy bent around his vanity.

In 1609 the Scottish Privy Council finally moved on Patrick. He was arrested and imprisoned in Edinburgh on charges that included treason and oppression of his tenants. His bastard son Robert, perhaps believing the family could ride the storm out, started a rebellion in his father's name. Robert seized the palace, the Bishop's Palace, the nearby Kirkwall Castle, and St Magnus Cathedral itself. An army led by the Earl of Caithness sailed north to put him down. Kirkwall Castle was battered into ruin and never rebuilt. Father and son were both convicted of treason and executed in 1615, Robert hanged at Edinburgh's Mercat Cross in January and Patrick beheaded at the same place a month later. Witnesses said Patrick was so theologically confused that the execution had to be postponed until clergymen could prepare him to die.

After the Stewarts went to the scaffold the palace returned to the bishops of Orkney, who used it intermittently as a residence until 1688. Then it passed to the Crown. With no occupant and no maintenance budget, the building started its long decline through the eighteenth century. The roof went first, then the floors, then the upper masonry. By the time photography arrived in the nineteenth century the Earl's Palace was already a roofless shell, its great hall open to Orcadian rain and the oriel windows framing empty sky. Historic Environment Scotland holds it now as a scheduled monument. High-level masonry inspections began in 2023, with the building closed through the winter for conservators to check stones eighty feet up that no visitor was ever supposed to be near.

Visitors enter through the courtyard the way Patrick's guests once did. The great hall is the most affecting space. Light pours in through window openings that have lost their glass for centuries, falling on stonework still cut precisely enough to feel new. The fireplace is large enough to roast an ox. The corbels that once held up the wooden floor of the storey above remain in place, jutting from the wall in a line that maps a vanished ceiling. Standing here, you can imagine the Earl feasting his retainers. You can also imagine the men who built it, working for nothing under threat, never invited to eat at the table they were dragging into being. Both ghosts are in the room. The cathedral next door, where the bishops outlived the earls, still has its roof.