About

Gardemeles Museum archives objects found at Stove and collected on Sanday since 1999. Stove is a C19th farmhouse on Sanday, one of the outer isles of Orkney. It was previously inhabited by crofters Helen and John Scott from circa 1920 to 1990. Some of the objects included in the Museum were left abandoned in the house and remaining outbuildings. These are at the heart of the Museum’s collection. They tell a site specific story as well as revealing layers of accretive meaning.


Being part of an archipelago in the North Atlantic, Stove is a place with a vibrant history; a confluence of human endeavour. The present house is believed to have been built over a Neolithic burial cairn. Out on the bay are scattered cut stone blocks from an earlier farmhouse taken by the sea as well as the eroding remains of a 4th Millennium B.C. settlement emerging from the cliff where fulmars nest amongst the stones. 

With the Vikings came the naming of every field, rocky outcrop, headland and cove. They likened the island, Sanday - the sandy island, to a lobster stretching it’s claws towards Norway with Stove clutched in it’s tail.

In the mid C19th an agricultural and social experiment saw the building of Stove Model Farm, a complex of grand steadings, gutted 100 years later by fire although the house, stables and industrial brick chimney survived the conflagration. 


The Museum records lives past and present, objects left behind and also those brought in: by the sea, from the sky, by new generations drawn to the island. The objects remind us of an outward looking history, with international connections and interrelated implications of our actions. The Museum sends these objects back into the world like an outgoing tide before Stove, as it is now, returns to the sea.

The Museum Catalogue

Gardemeles Museum catalogue was launched as a blog in September 2019, it includes all the objects to date from the collection.

visit the Gardemeles Museum Catalogue


Museum curator Rosey Priestman is an Orkney-based artist

visit Rosey’s art website

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