This midsummer will be the 50th St Magnus festival. Founded in Orkney in 1977 by the composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who had recently moved there, and the poet George Mackay Brown, who rarely left the archipelago, that half-century of festivals is a living legacy of connection across culture and community.
The first festival began with the premiere of Max’s opera, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, staged in the cathedral in Kirkwall named for the saint, a magnificent blood-red sandstone building, first established in Kirkwall by Magnus’s nephew Earl Rognvald in 1137, around which the rest of the city orbits.
