Italian Chapel

550 Italian prisoners of war, captured in North Africa, were brought to Orkney in 1942. It must have been quite a culture and climate shock for them. They were brought here specifically to work on the Churchill Barriers, a series of four causeways linking the south isles to the mainland of Orkney, which were designed to keep U-boats out of Scapa Flow and away from the Royal Naval fleet. Old ships, ruined and half-sunken, known as block ships, had already been parked at these key submarine doorways into Scapa, but they'd proved fallible. The Royal Oak, a Royal Navy vessel, was sunk by a U-boat in 1939, killing 833 men.

The Italian prisoners were not allowed to work on military projects, so the fiction was devised and maintained that the Barriers were civilian causeways. Roads were built along their length (which is how I can drive to town in 25 minutes from South Ronaldsay today, across three other islands).

Camp 60, a group of 13 Nissen huts, was built on the tiny island of Lamb's Holm, at the south end of Barrier 1, closest to mainland Orkney. The Italian prisoners were resourceful. They made a theatre, and a billiard table - a concrete one. They built paths, gardens and grew vegetables. And in 1943 they were provided with 2 Nissen huts, fixed end to end, in order to build their own Catholic chapel.

This is it. The lead organiser and designer-painter was a man called Domenico Chiochetti. He painted the frescoes on plasterboard, and did the trompe l'oeil bricks and flourishes. It's all flat painted board, though convincingly 3D. Glass was painted to resemble stained glass. Another prisoner made the railings out of iron scraps. The altar and font were made from concrete. The prisoners clubbed together to order the curtains from the south of England by post.

Chiochetti stayed behind at liberation in 1945 to finish the font. The BBC made a programme about the chapel in 1960 and paid for him to return. He did some restoration work and the service of rededication was broadcast on Italian radio. In 1992 eight of the original prisoners came back for the 50th anniversary of their arrival here. Unfortunately Chiochetti was too ill to accompany them. He died in 1999 in his home village in Italy.