The Italian Chapel in Orkney: A Wartime Story of Faith and Ingenuity

On the small island of Lamb Holm, joined to the Orkney mainland by one of the Churchill Barriers, two corrugated Nissen huts have been transformed into one of the most affecting places of worship in Scotland. The Italian Chapel in Orkney was built during the Second World War by Italian prisoners of war who had almost nothing to work with beyond cement, scrap metal, and paint salvaged from a wrecked ship, and yet produced something of genuine artistry. Travellers on Odyssey Traveller’s Scottish Isles small group tour visit the chapel on the same day they cross the Churchill Barriers themselves, and few sites make the human side of wartime history feel quite so immediate.

Prisoners on Lamb Holm: How Italian POWs Came to Orkney

Orkney’s role in the story begins not with the chapel but with the sea. Scapa Flow, the great natural harbour sheltered by the Orkney islands, had served as a Royal Navy anchorage in both world wars. In October 1939, a German U-boat slipped through the defences at Scapa Flow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak, with heavy loss of life. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered a series of causeways built to seal the eastern approaches to the anchorage for good. These became known as the Churchill Barriers, and building them required a workforce Britain could not easily spare from the war effort.

That workforce arrived in the form of around 550 Italian prisoners of war, captured during the North African campaign and shipped north to a camp built for the purpose on Lamb Holm, known simply as Camp 60. Conditions were basic and the work was hard, hauling rock and pouring concrete in a landscape a world away from the Mediterranean the men had left behind. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war could not be compelled to do work of direct military value, so the barriers were officially classed as improvements to a road, a legal fiction that satisfied both London and the men doing the digging.

From Nissen Huts to a House of God

Camp life on Lamb Holm had few comforts and no chapel, and for a group of predominantly Catholic men, that absence was keenly felt. In 1943, with the arrival of a new camp commander sympathetic to the request, permission was given to convert two Nissen huts, joined end to end, into a place of worship. What followed was an exercise in resourcefulness rather than resources. There was no dedicated budget and almost no proper building material, so the men improvised: concrete was hand-rendered over the corrugated iron to form an entrance modelled on an Italian church facade, complete with pinnacles and a bell turret built from scrap metal.

Inside, the transformation was even more striking. Sheets of plasterboard lined the curved iron walls to create a flat surface for painting, and the sanctuary end was decorated to resemble carved stone and marble using little more than paint and patience. A wrought-iron-style rood screen, one of the chapel’s most admired features, was in fact fashioned from scrap metal by a prisoner with a blacksmith’s training. None of the men involved were professional builders by trade; they were soldiers who had, by circumstance, become craftsmen.

Domenico Chiocchetti and the Artists of Camp 60

The chapel’s interior decoration was led by Domenico Chiocchetti, an artist from the Trentino region of northern Italy who had trained before the war. Chiocchetti painted the sanctuary’s centrepiece, a Madonna and Child, working from memory and from a small devotional card his mother had given him when he left for military service. Around it he painted a scene rich in trompe l’oeil detail, giving the illusion of carved stonework, arches, and drapery on what was, underneath the paint, still corrugated iron. Other prisoners contributed according to their own skills, working on the ironwork, the font, and the surrounding grounds, so that the finished chapel represented the combined effort of the camp rather than one man’s vision alone.

What makes the chapel resonate with visitors today is not just the craftsmanship but the context behind it. These were men held far from home, with no certainty about when the war would end or whether they would see their families again, choosing to spend their limited free time building something for the community they found themselves part of, rather than simply enduring their captivity.

A Chapel That Outlasted the War

When the war ended and the prisoners were repatriated in 1944 and 1945, the rest of Camp 60 was dismantled, but local Orcadians petitioned to keep the chapel standing. It survived, though decades of exposure to the Orkney weather took their toll on the paintwork. In 1960, a preservation committee tracked down Chiocchetti in Italy and invited him back to restore the artwork he had created seventeen years earlier. He returned again in 1964, and in the years since, the Lamb Holm Chapel Preservation Committee has maintained the building as a small, free-to-visit place of reflection, still consecrated and still occasionally used for services and weddings.

Chiocchetti’s connection to Orkney outlasted his wartime service by decades. He kept in contact with the island community for the rest of his life, and his family has continued that relationship, visiting Orkney for anniversaries and restoration work on the chapel he helped build as a young soldier who never expected to leave much of a mark on a group of islands he had not chosen to visit.

Seeing the Italian Chapel Alongside Orkney’s Deeper History

The Italian Chapel sits within a landscape that has drawn settlement and building for thousands of years, and travellers who spend time on Orkney’s Neolithic sites often find the chapel a striking counterpoint: one built in a matter of months by soldiers with borrowed materials, the other constructed over centuries by Orkney’s earliest farming communities. Nearby, the causeways the prisoners built to seal Scapa Flow, the Churchill Barriers, remain in daily use, carrying the road that links several of Orkney’s southern islands to the mainland.

For travellers planning ahead, our broader guide to the Orkney Islands covers the archipelago’s Neolithic and Norse history in more depth, including the prehistoric village of Skara Brae, which sits on the same small group itinerary as the Italian Chapel.

Visiting the Italian Chapel Today

The chapel remains open to visitors year-round and free to enter, with donations supporting its ongoing upkeep. It sits a short drive from Kirkwall, Orkney’s main town, and is easily combined with a visit to the Churchill Barriers themselves, where the rusting hulls of blockships sunk to close the channels before the barriers were built can still be seen offshore. Because the building is small and unheated, comfortable, weather-appropriate clothing is worth packing regardless of the season, as Orkney’s weather can turn quickly even in summer.

On Odyssey’s Scottish Isles tour, the Italian Chapel is visited on the second of the group’s days on Orkney, after the Earl’s Bu at Orphir and the Barnhouse Neolithic Village and on the same day as the Churchill Barriers; Skara Brae and the Broch of Gurness come the day before, and the palaces of Kirkwall the day after. It is one stop among many on a route that also takes in the Isle of Arran, Mull, Iona, Skye and the Outer Hebrides before Shetland, with groups of up to 16; readers planning the wider trip may find our route through Scotland’s islands, from Arran to Shetland, useful for seeing how it all fits together.

Few buildings anywhere manage to hold both grief and hope in the same small space the way the Italian Chapel does. It is a reminder that even in the middle of a war that separated men from their homes and families for years at a time, something lasting and beautiful could still be made by hand. Odyssey’s Scottish Islands and Shetland small group tour visits the chapel as part of a wider journey through Orkney’s long history, and it is well worth building time into any Orkney visit, whether travelling independently or as part of a guided small group.