Gemma Hardy p. 297
Gemma refers to this clock when she is waiting for Mr. White at the jewelry shop in Kirkwall, wanting to pawn her watch for much needed funds. She glances at a wall in the shop and sees a variety of clocks on the wall, spurring her memory of the one at St. Magnus cathedral.
The St. Magnus cathedral clock in Kirkwall was built during the First World War in Edinburgh by James Ritchie and Son, makers of the famous Floral Clock in Princes Street Gardens. It was eventually transported to Orkney and installed in 1919, just as the conflict ended.
The clock features a winding mechanism, a pendulum, a set of weights and a large clock face. To wind it, custodians have had to make their way into the upper levels of the cathedral and slide the glass doors of the large winding mechanism case open. There they were faced with three large cylindrical drums wrapped in steel cables. The drums regulated the chiming of the hourly and quarterly bells from the clock tower, and the third was connected to the clock-face mechanism, turning the hands on the face itself.
Each drum had to be wound by hand – about 50 winds for the drums for the bells, and 10 for the clock. All in all, it was a task that we’re reliably told took ‘a good ten minutes’ (not including the climb upwards) and was ‘not for the faint-hearted’! However, just this past year the mechanism has been automated and no longer requires manual winding.