Orkney Photos, May 2006
Back to home pageWe enjoyed a week in Orkney. We took the late afternoon ferry on Saturday 13 May from Thurso (Scrabster) to Stromness. We returned on the morning ferry the following Saturday.
Below are some photos with a narrative in the captions beneath each photo.
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Looking back at the north coast of Caithness from the ferry to Orkney.
The cliffs on the west coast of the Orkney island of Hoy are as high as 1100 feet. St. John's head, on the left, is the highest vertical cliff in Britain.
The sea has eroded the cliff face and left the standing pillar called the Old Man of Hoy. This photo is from the ferry. We later walked to the landward side for more photos of this remarkable stack. It's 450 feet high, from the high tide line.
Another view of the Old Man of Hoy. It shows how high the pillar is compared to the ship from which the photo is taken. The adjacent cliff is nearly as high as the stack, as can be seen in other photos.
The port town of Stromness is on the far right in this picture. The North Atlantic Ocean is on the horizon to the left. This view is looking west and the next land in that direction is Canada.
This photo is looking southwest from the same spot. The hills on the northwest end of the island of Hoy are across the water. The white cottage on the left is where we stayed.
The cottage is an old farm house that had recently been modernized for weekly rental to visitors. The cottage is one room wide. The kitchen is at this end, then the bathroom, then a small bedroom, then a dining/living room and then down a step is the main bedroom.
Skara Brae is a remarkably well preserved village that was used for several hundred years starting about 5500 years ago. Sand dunes buried and preserved the village. As protection from the winter gales, the dwellings were underground with a passageway connecting the houses of the village. The village street was underground, so that people didn't have to dress for North Atlantic storms in order to get to a neighbor's house. At the time that the village was occupied, the sea was several hundred yards further away than it is now.
The interior of the Skara Brae dwellings include stone furniture. The thin vertical stones along the far wall are the frames of beds, which were probably filled with springy heather and covered with a blanket or animal skin. It would have been a soft bed. With a peat fire in the center of the room and no wind able to penetrate the walls, it would have been a cosy home. Above the bed is a storage cupboard built into the stone wall. On the left is a large cabinet built of stone, which is opposite the entry door.
This is the village of Brough of Birsay, used by the Vikings about a 1000 years ago. It's on a peninsula at low tide and an island at high tide. It was low tide when we walked along the path visible on the right edge of the photo. Yes, that's my shadow, since it was late in the day and the photo is taken looking down a slope -- there was a wind off of the North Atlantic, so the shadow shows that I had my jacket hood on.
The walls of a Viking long house. The stone walls in the distance are the remains of the Viking church.
We walked along the cliff edge looking for nesting puffins. We saw one pair on a cliff but they were too far away to photograph. When we got to the lighthouse, we thought it time to head back to the low tide causeway path. This photo is from the mainland looking back at the Brough of Birsay village, as the rising tide covered the path. The weather had turned grey by that time. The ovals on the grassy slope are the walls of the Viking long houses.
The next day we took a passengers-only ferry to the island of Hoy. It was a damp day so we walked in our waterproof gear. This path is in the glen between the hills. We were walking down toward Rackwick. In mid-May it's still early spring at that latitude, so not much green has appeared yet.
In Rackwick there is a house open for visitors that is furnished as it was 100 years ago. This photo is looking back down onto Rackwick Bay from the hill. The path we are following is above cliffs not different from those in the distance.
After walking around the hill on a well traveled path somewhat back from the cliff face, we could see the top of the Old Man of Hoy nearly a mile away across moorland.
To get these photos I was afraid to walk out to the cliff edge because of the wind, so I went on hands and knees. To take this photo of the Old Man of Hoy, I lay in the grass and held the camera up and out to get a clearer shot over the edge of the cliff. I couldn't look over the edge myself. The grass on the edge of the cliff is in the lower left of the photo.
A view of the Old Man of Hoy showing a bit of the adjacent cliff. The immenseness of the pillar may not be evident in the photos. It's 450 feet high.
As we retreated, the sharpness of the cliff edge is still clear.
As we walked up the gentle slope we noticed several fairly large birds sitting at prominent places watching us. We realized there must be nests nearby, so we changed our direction to avoid getting any closer than about 150 feet. One of the birds is visible in the center of this photo with his wings outstretched. Looking at photos of nesting sea birds later we learned that we were seeing great skuas, a fairly rare bird. We saw about a dozen of them on that hill.
This is a view of one of the great skuas, just after he took off because of my presence. His wing span was between two and three feet. We assumed his flight was to divert us from the nest of his mate, so we went no closer to where he had been sitting and watching us.
We traveled by car ferry to the island of Westray and then by passenger-only ferry to the small island of Papa Westray. It is a small enough island that we walked around two-thirds of the island and made it back for the last ferry. These 6000-year-old dwellings, known as the Knap of Howar, are older than those at Skara Brae. These are long buildings, with one or two divider walls separating the rooms. I find it impressive that the long outer walls are not straight, because the weight of the sand would risk cave in, but instead are concave for added strength against the external pressure of the sand. Our ancient ancestors understood quite a few laws of physics.
The interior of the smaller building, which the archaeologists think may have been a workshop not a dwelling.
This view shows the connection passageway to the other building and the outside doorway. Note that the door frames are all stone slabs.
A seal swimming near the Papa Westray shore.
We saw quite a few things on Orkney for which we don't have photographs.
We went on a tour of Maes Howe, an amazing burial chamber for several reasons. The long narrow entry passageway was perfectly aligned for the setting sun on the Winter Solstice. About 1000 years ago some Vikings broke into the interior chamber through the roof and left lots of graffiti on the walls in runic writing.
Scapa Flow is a large body of water surrounded by many of the Orkney islands. It served as a major Royal Navy base during both the First and Second World Wars. At the end of the First World War the German fleet was held in Scapa Flow during the initial armistice and was scuttled by the Germans. Some of the German ships are still on bottom of the bay. During the first year of the Second World War a Nazi submarine entered Scapa Flow through a narrow channel between two islands, thus bypassing the antisubmarine defenses across the main entrances to the anchorage. The U-boat sunk a major battleship and many Royal Navy sailors died. The U-boat escaped.
We drove across the causeways to the string of islands to the southeast. The causeways were built during the Second World War to prevent any more U-boats from entering the east channels to Scapa Flow.
Many of the workers for the causeway construction were Italian prisoners of war captured in North Africa. POWs were not to be used for military works, so they were told the causeways were for the economic benefit of the inhabitants of the eastern islands. Since the War the causeways have indeed had that benefit.
The Italian prisoners were housed in several camps of temporary buildings, which the British call Nissen huts and Americans call Quonset huts. The Italians, on their own initiative, decorated one hut as a chapel. That chapel is the only Nissen hut that wasn't dismantled after the War. The painting on the interior of the Italian Chapel is remarkable, as are the photos of some of the former prisoners returning to Orkney as honored guests about ten years after the War.
In Kirkwall, the largest town, we visited St. Magnus Cathedral, an impressive medieval Viking cathedral. Across the street we toured the ruins of the Earl's Palace.
Also in Kirkwall we spent a few hours in the Wireless Museum. It isn't a big building, but it has an impressive collection of early radio equipment. They have several rare pieces of Second World War electronics, including a spy's radio, and a U-boat radio. Then there is a table of albums full of Second World War photos taken on Orkney. During the War the people in Orkney on military duty tripled the population of the islands.
Stromness as we departed on the ferry back to mainland Scotland.
A final look at the cliffs on the west side of Hoy, with the Old Man of Hoy in the distance.
The blue background on this web page is a photo of a Scottish sky.
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