Tuquoy is not a ‘new’ Norse site. On the contrary, it was identified some forty years ago by the late Dr Raymond Lamb, then the Orkney Archaeologist, while he was walking the coastline of Papa Westray and Westray in 1981, and amassing sites for inclusion in his latest List of Archaeological Sites and Monuments (1983). Adjacent to the remains of Cross Kirk, ‘one of the most refined of Orkney’s medieval churches’ (Lamb 1983: 37, No. 148), Dr Lamb was surprised to find substantial lime-mortared structures erupting from the eroding section (Figure 18.1). With his usual perspicacity, he deduced that this was the high-status Norse settlement originally associated with Cross Kirk and hypothesised that the massive lime-mortared walls were the remains of a 12th-century Norse castle or hall, which he nicknamed ‘Haflidi’s Hall’ in an article for The Orcadian (1981). According to Orkneyinga Saga (OS; Taylor 1938), Haflidi was the son of a ‘quarrelsome and overbearing’ Norse magnate, Thorkel Flettir (Thorkel ‘Flayer’), who played an important part in the story of the usurpation of the Orkney Earldom by Rognvald Kali Kolsson in the 1130s (OS, Chapter 56). Dr Lamb immediately wrote to the (then) SDD Ancient Monuments Branch to request an urgent intervention – and so began the Tuquoy project.

Initially, we were tasked with carrying out a ‘one-season questionsolving session of excavation, with very limited objectives’. In the event, we carried out four discrete episodes of work:

• • limited trial excavation centred on the major walls in 1982–3 (by the Department of Archaeology, Durham University);

• • fuller assessment of the extent and character of the site through ‘tapestry’ excavation along a c. 100m stretch of the cliff section in 1988 (by the then Central Excavation Unit, later AOC Archaeology);

• • salvage recording of the section following serious storm damage in 1993 (as a one-off exercise by the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments, Historic Scotland); and

• • several discrete and mainly non-invasive episodes of additional fieldwork commissioned in 2017–19 in preparation for final publication (conducted by ORCA, the archaeological unit based in the Institute of Archaeology, Orkney UHI).