Damsay is an island in the Orkney archipelago in Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. It is approximately 18 hectares (0.07 square miles) in extent and rises to only 11 metres (36 feet) above sea level. It is situated in the Bay of Firth north of the Orkney Mainland near Finstown

Finstown

Finstown in the parish of Firth on Mainland, Orkney is the third largest settlement on the island. According to travel author Linklater, the homes in Finstown are tidy and well cared for...

. Nearby is the smaller islet of Holm of Grimbister.

It is now uninhabited, but at one time a Norse hall stood there, and it was the scene of the killing of Earl Erlend by Earls Rognvald and Harald in 1154. Erlend celebrated Christmas on the island and retired to his ship the worse for drink. He and his men were taken by surprise and killed, a full moon notwithstanding.

Later a small nunnery was built on the island leading to a legend that no frogs or toads (or possibly rats and mice) could live there. It is said that unmarried woman who became pregnant would go there to pray at an abandoned shrine to St Mary.

Jo Ben's 1529 Descriptions of Orkney says of Damsay:

Here there are no hills, and it is the most pleasant of all, and is called Tempe.
The church in this island is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, to which many pregnant women make visits in style. No frogs, toads, or other noxious terrestrial animals whatever are ever found here.
The women here are sterile, and if they do become pregnant never bring forth with life. It is related that sometimes the haughty [the shores] are carried away for the space of one hour, but truly afterwards restored. The distance of this island from Kirkwall

Kirkwall

Kirkwall is the biggest town and capital of Orkney, off the coast of northern mainland Scotland. The town is first mentioned in Orkneyinga saga in the year 1046 when it is recorded as the residence of Rögnvald Brusason the Earl of Orkney, who was killed by his uncle Thorfinn the Mighty...

 is two miles.

"We have certainly got a lot of stonework. There are some quite interesting things. You can see voids or entrances. The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we'd like to see how they coped with it

Caroline Wickham-Jones, an archaeologist has discovered a number of submerged structures off Damsay, which appear to be of stone age

Stone Age

The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...

origin.

"There's this one feature that is like a stone table - you've got a large slab about a metre and a half long and it's sitting up on four pillars or walls so the next thing we need to do is to get plans and more photographs to try and assess and look for patterns.

"The quality and condition of some of the stonework is remarkable. Nothing like this has ever been found on the seabed around the UK."