Hello,
Anne Billing, ODIN Chair here, and with any question about Deerness you hit the jackpot, not necessarily because I know the answer but because I might know a man who does.
Yes, some good external images on the Canmore site, and perhaps some too in the Orkney Photographic Archive which has many images relating to wartime Orkney and well worth a visit of a windy, wet winter afternoon.
The Radar set-up was serviced largely from RAF Deerness, very little of which now remains and the book about Deerness \'Almost and Island\' has extracts from an account of being stationed there. I hope to be able to post the account in its entirety on this website later this year. It doesn\'t say much about what was a top secret place in waritme but certainly gives a marvellous flavour of being stationed here.
It is also the plan, all being well, that the Friends of St Ninian\'s in Deerness will host a talk in next year\'s Science Festival by the noted wartime historian Geoffrey Stell on the radar station and other aspects of Deerness\'s role in World War 2. He and I have come across a couple of Deerness wartime puzzles which we hope can be opened to the light of day when he visits for the Science Festival.
I recently had a fascinating afternoon\'s visit to the site accompanying Geoffrey Stell and Alan Scott, Colin Wylie (ex ROC Orkney) Billy Bruce and Jimmy Wylie all local Deerness men with knowledge of the site whilst they went over its chronology, the buildings and how they were used and its subsequent role with the Royal Observer Corps.
www.radararchive.freeserve.co.uk gives contact with Scotland\'s prime expert on its wartime radar, Ian Brown and it would be very interesting to follow through anything you can learn from him, in the ODIN forum.
Best wishes, Anne
