St Rognvald Chapel

about this project

A Chapel for the Founder

The chapel at the east end was not inherited. It was made, in the 1960s, in a part of the building the organ had left rather cut off, and the Friends paid for it.

The cathedral was founded in 1137 by Earl Rognvald, in memory of his uncle Magnus. For eight centuries there was no chapel dedicated to Rognvald himself. The idea came from Stanley Cursiter, the Orkney-born artist and Queen’s Limner, who proposed a chapel to the founder of the cathedral in the space behind the organ.

The timing was not accidental. 1958 marked eight hundred years since Rognvald’s death, and the Society of The Friends of St Magnus Cathedral was founded in that same year. Kirkwall Town Council minutes from 1958 record the Council agreeing to “further consider fitting out East end of Cathedral as a St Rognvald Memorial Chapel".

Cursiter designed the furniture for the chapel himself, and it was subscribed for by the Society of The Friends of St Magnus Cathedral. He did not work alone: throughout 1965 he worked alongside Reynold Eunson.

Eunson (1932 to 1978) was a Kirkwall joiner and carver. He had taken over the workshop of David Kirkness, the maker who did more than anyone to establish the Orkney chair, and carried on the trade under Kirkness’s stamp alongside his own initials. Examples of his chairs are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and several pieces of his carved work stand elsewhere in the Cathedral. Cursiter drew the designs; Eunson made them.

The chapel was officially dedicated on Sunday 28 November 1965 by the Rev J M Rose, who had been one of the moving forces behind the founding of the Society. Cursiter flew north specially to be present, and Eunson was there beside him. The Orcadian recorded that Cursiter, as a Freeman of the City, was seated with the members of Kirkwall Town Council.

Three carved oak figures stand in the arches behind the altar, made by Eunson to Cursiter’s designs. On the left is Kol, Rognvald’s father, who directed the building of the cathedral; he holds a plumb line and a scroll. At the centre is Earl Rognvald, holding a model of his cathedral. On the right is Bishop William the Old, his hand raised in blessing.

I’m glad to hear how the chapel project is getting on and feel sure that it will add something permanent (and fitting) to our cathedral interior. I sense your great love of designing your projected works and the pleasure it gives you. It makes me think of similar preoccupation in the old masters like Cellini whose genius branched out into so many forms of art.

Robert Rendall, writing to Stanley Cursiter in 1965

The chapel remains in use, and it completes something the founder himself began. Rognvald built a church for his uncle. Eight centuries later, the people of Orkney made a place in it for him.