28/04/2025, by aezcr

Pinpointing Paplay… the priests, the parish, the place-name…

The place-name Paplay occurs in the Saga of the Earls of Orkney (Orkneyinga saga) on several occasions. In chapter 42 we hear that Gunnhildr, daughter of the late Earl Erlendr who had died in Trondheim, was married off by King Magnús to Kolr Kalason a well-connected Norwegian landowner, and that ‘some properties in the Orkneys were part of her dowry, as well as an estate in Paplay’ (bu i Papuli). That Paplay was mentioned in addition to the general collection of estates suggested by ‘some properties’ implies that it was a place of some importance, worthy of mention on its own.

Paplay continued to be a place connected with important people in the saga narrative. We hear for example in chapter 52 that Þóra, mother of Earl Magnús (son of Earl Erlendr and later to become St Magnus), was married to a man called Sigurðr whose estate was the ‘bu i Papule’. That the estate seems to have been passed down via Earl Erlendr’s daughter might imply that the estate was in fact Þóra’s but that it was convention for land holding to be assigned to men and so the saga described it as belonging to Sigurðr? If this was the case, could it be that it was in Paplay that Þóra held the feast to which she invited the killers of her son and at which she made the most moving of pleas for the return of his body? (chapter 52, and read by Judith Jesch at 51mins in this In Our Time episode). Later, in chapter 67, we learn that it was at Paplay that Magnús’ half-brother Hákon karl, ‘a great chieftain, wise and temperate’, lived. How ever the land passed down to Hákon karl it is clear from the saga evidence that Paplay was no run of the mill farm.

So where was the estate of Paplay based? The problem for us is that there is no current farm or croft with that name, nor do we find one explicitly mentioned in the early rentals. The name itself suggests that it had long been associated with an early, possibly pre-Viking, religious community, deriving from ON papi/papar ‘priest/priests’ and ON byli ‘home’, giving a meaning of ‘home of the priests’.

Certainly, Paplay seems to have been the name of a parish or district. The name Paplay is shown in association with the church by Blaeu (1654), by MacKenzie (1750), as well as by William Aberdeen (1769), although the parish is given as Holm. No other church is shown on any of the maps in the parish, however, the 1903 OS 6” map gives the site at Mass Howe further along the coast towards the Loch of Graemshall as the site of St Nicholas’ church. The evidence for this being the church site is very slim. The earlier editions of the OS do not show a church here, nor does a mention of a church occur in the OS name book although Mass Howe and a Mass Gate are recorded there. There is no other record of a church here, or indeed elsewhere in the post reformation parish of Holm, and ‘the available evidence suggests there was never a church at this place’ (Orkney SMR,1964). It may be that the place-name evidence records a lost tradition of a church, or possibly a later rationalisation of a landscape feature.

The place-name Paplay is clearly associated with the area around the site of church as seen on MacKenzie’s map above. The known church of St. Nicholas has been re-built more than once, and a cross slab said to be tenth-century in date was found at the site and later removed to a private house. It is not unusual for estates of the Viking/Norse periods to be associated with a church building and it could be that this site included a settlement site and a later church although there is no evidence to back this up. There are several other places that indicate the status of Paplay. Firstly, there is the location itself, set on the south shore guarding the entrance to Scapa Flow and the approaches from the east. That this was a strategic location is emphasised by the fact that to the northeast of the church we find Wart Hill and the Ward of Paplay, a likely beacon site in the beacon system that we find throughout Viking-age Orkney. The church itself is another symbol of status, and just further along on the coast is the intriguing site of Castle Howe, a structure that has been described as ‘indubitably a Norse castle’ (Canmore reports).

Outside of the saga Paplay first occurs in a document of 1422 in which a Peter of Paplay gave his testimony (Clouston, p. 34) and later in 1481 we hear of John of Paplay (Clouston, p. 193). Personal names given in documents of this date and type tend to be associated with farms, not districts, and so we might expect there to have been a farm or estate called Paplay during the fifteenth century. However, just a few years later in the 1492 rental we do not have a Paplay farm name, although it occurs as the parish Paplaye & Grenewall (Thomson, Lord Henry Sinclair, pp. 50–52). From this we might deduce that by 1492 the use of the name Paplay, for a farm had ceased.

So how do we account for this? If we return to chapter 42 of the saga, and as discussed above, we see that Paplay was part of the dowry of Gunnhildr, daughter of the Earl of Orkney, but by 1492 Paplay had ceasedto be a named farm and the name and lands had become associated with, or attached to, Greenwall, at least in terms of the estate/parish name. The land of Paplay and Grenewall in the rental is described as ‘all conquest land’, that is, it was land acquired and not inherited by Earl William Sinclair, the largest such property acquired by the Sinclair family (Thomson, Lord Henry Sinclair, p. xix). This ‘huge’ estate (Thomson, Orkney Land and People, pp. 35–36), some thirty-six pennylands in size is likely to be the same as that which is referred to in the saga . It seems from the rental of 1492 that Greenwall had taken over as the central place of this estate sometime after the Sinclair family acquired the land in the 1460s (Thomson, Lord Henry Sinclair, p. 50, see n. 192).

For the actual location of the centre of the earlier Paplay estate we have several options. Firstly, it is possible that the ‘the Bow of Scale’ as given in the 1492 rental was the site of the older farm and hall, but where is this today? There is a Skaills farm just northeast of Vigga on the 1882 OS map, this farm does not survive and Harrison suggests it is a recent naming (Harrison, Building Mounds, p. 466). More likely candidates are Upper and Nether Bu immediately to the east of Greenwall, and these were favoured by Marwick as the site of the Bu of Skaill (Marwick, Orkney Farm Names, p. 90). If this was the case then the location, adjacent to Greenwall, would fit neatly with a transfer of status from the bu to the nearby new farm. The other option is the potential site at Castle Howe, a location near to the church and at the water’s edge it has great potential, but this would need to be investigated further.

Matthew Blake

Further reading

For a broader discussion of Papa names and a section on Paplay see The Papar Project.

Clouston, J. Storer, Records of the Earldom of Orkney, 1299-1644, XV (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, second series Vol VVI, 1914). https://archive.org/details/recordsofearldom00clou/page/n5/mode/2up

Harrison, Jane, Building Mounds: Viking-Late Norse Settlement in the North Atlantic c. AD800-1200 (PhD Thesis, Kellogg College, 2016)

Marwick, Hugh, Orkney Farm Names (Kirkwall: W. R. Mackintosh, 1952).

Thomson, William P., Lord Henry Sinclair’s 1492 Rental of Orkney (Kirkwall: The Orkney Press 1996).

Thomson, William P., Orkney Land and People (Kirkwall: Kirkwall Press, 2008)

Orkney OS Name Book, volume 9, 1879-1880, Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland.

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