St Magnus Cathedral is far too large for a town of ten thousand people. Founded in 1137 by Earl Rognvald to honour his murdered uncle Magnus Erlendsson, it was begun while Orkney still belonged to Norway, paid for by an earl who needed both a saint and a political statement. The red sandstone came from Eday, brought across by sea, and the masons were probably some of the same craftsmen working on Durham Cathedral, which the building strongly resembles. Eight centuries later it is still in use, still owned by the burgh rather than by any church, a quirk of Reformation-era property arrangements. Inside, the medieval tombs of Magnus and Rognvald lie in pillars on the choir, their bones identified in 1919 by a fracture in the skull matching the saga account of Magnus's death by axe. The cathedral towers over a town that grew up to serve it.

Behind the cathedral, two palaces share a single courtyard with eight hundred years between them. The Bishop's Palace is the older, a twelfth-century residence for Orkney's bishops with a round tower added in the sixteenth century. King Haakon IV of Norway died here in 1263 after the Battle of Largs, the last serious Norse attempt to hold western Scotland. Next door rises the Earl's Palace, built in 1607 by Patrick Stewart, the second Earl of Orkney, on land seized from a man executed on fabricated charges. Patrick was beheaded in Edinburgh for treason and oppression in 1615. The two palaces are now linked by an arched gateway and managed jointly by Historic Environment Scotland. Both were closed for masonry inspections through the winter of 2023-24.

Highland Park sits on a low rise at the southeast edge of town, the world's northernmost single malt Scotch whisky distillery, founded by the smuggler Magnus Eunson in 1798 and licensed in 1826. A few miles southwest, on the shore of Scapa Flow, Scapa Distillery makes a honey-sweet, lightly peated single malt established in 1885. In the centre of town, the Orkney Wireless Museum at Kiln Corner preserves the radio equipment that connected Fortress Orkney to the rest of Britain during the Second World War. Together they hint at the layered economy of a town that is at once Viking-descended, Renaissance-haunted, wartime-strategic, and twenty-first-century commercial. The whisky pays the bills now.

Kirkwall is a small town with a deep harbour and an attractive cathedral, and the global cruise industry has noticed. On a busy summer day three or four ships may berth at Hatston Terminal or anchor off in Wide Firth and tender passengers ashore. A single large vessel can dump four thousand visitors into Kirkwall's narrow alleys in a morning, and they all visit the same handful of sites: cathedral, palaces, Highland Park, the Italian Chapel down the Churchill Barriers. Local opinion is mixed. The shops make money. The streets become unwalkable. Visitors who plan around the cruise schedule, head out to a cairn or a beach in the morning and return to Kirkwall in the evening when the ships have sailed, get the magic back. The Strynd Tearoom in its narrow alley beside the cathedral is the small treat that rewards the patient.

The Norwegian flag flies on Kirkwall's Norwegian Constitution Day, 17 May, when a parade with guests from Norway commemorates the islands' five centuries as Norse territory. In 1468 Orkney was pledged to Scotland as security for an unpaid royal dowry; the dowry was never paid, and the islands stayed Scottish, but the cultural memory is intact. The dialect still carries Norse words. The cathedral still venerates a Norse saint. In 2023 some Orcadians half-seriously discussed leaving the United Kingdom and rejoining Norway, citing decades of underfunding from Westminster and Edinburgh. The town faces both ways: a Scottish administrative centre with a Norwegian heart, the obvious base from which to explore Orkney's prehistoric sites, wartime relics, and the quiet villages of the outer islands. The ferry north takes you to Lerwick. The ferry south takes you to Aberdeen. Either is a long night on the North Sea.