I spent a week in Orkney. It’s about eight hours on the train from Edinburgh to Thurso, where I stayed the night and on the following morning caught a flash ferry that looked like an upmarket wine bar that could float, and was paid for by EU money. It also sat high up in the water, and I paced from one deck to the other, as passengers prone to sea-sickness do. The crossing takes about an hour and a half, and you sail past the craggy island of Hoy and are directed to admire the famous stack of the Old Man of Hoy.
The ferry stops at Stromness, a small, very stony town - even the streets are stone flagged.
I got a little ferry to Hoy, the hilly island, (Hoy means "high) that looks more like the Scottish Highlands than the rest of Orkney, which is low, green and rolling. I cycled to a crofting village called Rackwick, spectacularly situated just above a grand beach between high cliffs. Some of the crofts are deserted now, one was a museum and another a bothy by a campground where people were pitching tents flapping in a strong cold north wind, but some are still inhabited, restored and there are a couple of eco houses.
Trees are a rare sight in Orkney.
I visited the museum. It had a display about the hard life of the crofters, farming the steep slopes, taking out fishing boats with no harbour so the women had to wade into the sea to carry the catch, gathering eggs from the crags and on the Sabbath walking about five miles each way to the Kirk.
Stone slab roof, which is as characteristic for dwellings in Orkney and Caithness as thatch in Dorset.
There’s an hour's walk on a good path to the Old Man of Hoy on a path by the high stacked cliffs.
As you approach the cliffs you smell the bird colonies.
The week I was there the weather forecasts were full of the sunshine and heat in the UK but in Orkney it was generally grey and windy. However nobody would go to Orkney for sunshine. It is pleasant to cycle there as the roads are quiet, roll comfortably up and down, and people smile and nod at you as you pass. The countryside is mostly pastoral farmland and barbed wire fences, very green with sleek looking cattle and reminding me of the farming district in New Zealand that I grew up in, though people have left their marks here in stone, in rings, brochs and neolithic and Norse vvillages. Orkney smells are manure, silage, dame's rocket, which grows wild everywhere, roses, the sea and bird colonies. If you want to make a garden here, you have to make a wall around it first.
Grey stone prevails but it is coloured by lichens.
Kelp
After leaving Hoy I had a vile wet day on the mainland. The Rings of Brodgar were drenched and I was glad to get to Skara Brae because there was a cafe with soup and coffee. I had visited Orkney for one day decades ago and then you could walk about the Neolithic village and crawl into the huts but now it has been tidied up, with the usual café, shop and heritage centre, with reconstructions and buttons on displays for children to push, very nicely done. You are roped off from the huts, reasonably enough. You can also look over Skaill House, belonging to one of the local lairds, which I enjoyed more than Skara Brae itself partly because it was inside, and so out of the rain, partly because the history and life it dealt with was recent and intelligible. One display was Captain Cook’s dinner service, Lowestoft Orient, crimson flowers (pinks and sweet williams I think) on a white background. Rather a dainty dinner service for a man like Captain Cook, though of course English china was the grand thing to eat off at the time. After Cook was killed in Hawaii his ship the Resolution returned to Britain and its first stop was Stromness, where the crew flogged off the service. Now that to me is far more interesting than scratched and shaped bits of bone, stone shelves and querns and guesses about people who we don’t even know what they looked like, what language they spoke and what their social set up was like. (Each to their own, I know.)
I headed to my B&B through rain that grew thicker and thicker. Vehicles with their lights on would appear out of the cloud, becoming visible at ten yards away. I passed plenty of houses and was on the point of stopping to ask if this was the right road - had told myself I would definitely stop at the next house - which in fact was my destination. So dried off my waterproofs, found that my panniers had a leak or two and spread newspaper over the bedroom under the damp things and stuffed pieces of it into my boots. Then went and watched the telly with other guests, swapping stories about the rain while a beaming weather presenter told us the UK was enjoying sunshine, those little islands to the north east not being mentioned.
The next day the rain had stopped and I cycled thirty odd miles to Kirkwall to catch a ferry through the archipelago past many whale backed islands to Westray, which I fell in love with. It’s about fifteen miles long and three miles wide, and its main village at one end is Pierowall, a pleasant place with a good vibe. I was staying in a hostel which was a beautifully converted barn. The sitting room was in the long roof of the barn, so you could sit in an embrasure and look down at the bay. The village had a hotel with good food and friendly staff, a nice little café, a couple of shops and a gallery called the Wheeling Steen, a fine space, airy, light and colourful. The pictures are mostly photographs of Orkney (it is photogenic), well chosen, and tastefully mounted and framed. I bought one, astonishingly, as I hardly ever buy pictures, and on a cycling holiday you can’t carry souvenirs, but the gallery with its soothing music and excellent tea and drop scones seduced me. A couple were buying away, saying they had just dropped in for a cup of tea.
Westray also has a good “heritage centre”, the modern name for museum (which presumably has been dropped for its fusty connotations). It showed the Orkney Venus, a Neolithic stone figure of a woman recently discovered on the island, which looked to me like a small stone with scratches on it but which has caused great excitement in archaeological circles. Staying at the hostel was someone from Heritage Scotland and a young woman who had flown up to handle the object for a BBC programme about archaeological digs.
Dame's rocket and rhubarb - rhubarb grows everywhere and to a huge size and dame's rocket has evidently escaped - annoyingly my own rhubarb is fairly skimpy this year, probably because of the hard winter and I got only one stalk of dame's rocket. Orkney didn’t get much snow, someone told me.
I cycled up to Noup Head where the road stopped at a lighthouse and then began a walk along the cliffs, pushing my bicycle and lifting it over stiles and barbed wire. A bicycle not gliding along the road is like a seal on land. In its element it moves with perfection, out of it it’s an awkward, clumsy, stroppy sod of a thing. I’d lift it, the handlebars would swing round and clonk me on the head, or the front wheel would swivel and swipe me one. Westray is a big working farm, so the fences are very well maintained (ie, the barbed wire is taut and sharp) and there are a lot of them. Also, I had to take diversions as I couldn’t get down steep hillocks with the cycle. There were a couple of tricky parts where there was a very narrow path with barbed wire one side, a low drystone dyke of rock stacks the other, and below that, a drop into the sea. I had to get behind the cycle and carefully push it along. A few times I’d yelp with fear, because the tyres were rubbing against the barbed wire. My waterproof got caught on the barbs and was torn here and there.
However, it was a glorious walk. The sun had come out, though I could see the clouds below, the grass was covered with thrift and everywhere were birds - Arctic terns squawking and seeing off the skuas, oyster catchers scolding and curlews crying as well as the fulmars chuckling as they nested in the crags, and a mass of other birds that I couldn’t identify. Bird watchers love this place and the RSPB has reserves and notices everywhere. (I heard a corncrake at one point and was pleased to email the RSPB’s corncrake watch official as leaflets exhorted me to).
Thrift in the grass
It was a calm day, and the Atlantic heaved gently and gave a slight push
against the stacks. You could feel its latent power. Storms here must
be terrifying.
I lifted my cycle over the final barbed wire fences between us and the road, and then we dropped down back to Pierowall, straight into the haar which had lain over the lowlands all afternoon. I went to the hotel where I had a delicious meal of scallops in batter.
Papa Westray is a small island to the north of Westray. I got a ferry there and visited Knap of Howar, the oldest house in Europe. Like every ruin in Orkney it is lovely to visit as it’s by the sea and among wild flowers, but you have to be told of its age to get a frisson.
Knap of Howar
Puffins - I was thrilled to see them - it was the first time
Painted stones around the airfield. There’s a flight from Westray to Papa Westray which is the shortest scheduled flight in the world, and so people come from all over to experience it.
Water mill, Westray
Red campion in the rain
After 3 nights on lovely Westray I took the ferry back to Kirkwall and cycled south into a strong head wind. I stopped off at the Italian chapel, which was build by Italian prisoners of war who were brought to Orkney to construct the Churchill Barriers, causeways created to block access to Scapa Flow (I cycled over these and was side swiped by the wind). A guide was showing a bus tour around and said this was the most popular sight on the island, more visited than the World Heritage site of Skara Brae. I wasn’t surprised. The history is well known, deals with people you can understand and the story behind it is uplifting and touching. A novel has been written about it and it cries out for a film on the lines of Paradise Road. Also, in islands where the buildings are grey, there’s some colour in it.
One more night on Orkney, then I caught the ferry to Gill’s Bay and cycled to Wick where I got the train home. I really love the place and will go again. It’s very relaxing and it's magical, with a feeling of being out of the world. When you hear the people's voices, they don't sound Scottish but have a kind of heerly-beerly lilt, as if they had learned their speech from the curlews.
