Scotland - Orkney
- Polina Rendak
- Sep 28, 2020
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 31, 2021
The Orkney Islands are one of the most remote places in the UK with their own Table Mountain and dramatic waters.
The ferry from Britain's Mainland arrives in Stromness, gateway to the Orkney Islands. Located in Mainland Orkney, it is the second largest town in Orkney.
When the first people arrived in Orkney (assumed to be 13,000 years ago), it used to be one big island accessible by boat through Scapa Flow, a bay in the south. Now there are around 70 islands connected by a network of ferries and flights (the world's shortest flight is available here with a record flight time of 47 seconds).
The ferry to Orkney from mainland Scotland departs from the Scrabster terminal near the town of Thurso on the UK's mainland and takes around three hours. It is relatively easy to get to Thurso by train from the south - we took a morning train from Inverness and really enjoyed the views from the window over the Scottish moors. You could see how the sea becomes more and more dominant in the life of local communities as you move north.
One contemplated origin of the name "Orkney" is the word "Orc", which used to be the name of a Pictish tribe meaning "young pigs" (this is most likely the reason orcs in LOTR are pig-looking; Tolkien however was never reported to hold any grudges against the Orkney Islands - inspiration lies purely in the field of linguistics). The old Irish historians called the islands "Insi Orc", meaning "the island of the tribe of the wild boar".
Our ferry's name was Hrossey, which is also the name of the Orcadian island of Mainland. Hrossey has a Norse origin and stands for the "island of horses".
On the approach to Hrossey and the port of Stromness, you get some great views of the Ocradian coastline.
Erosion of sandstone along the shore line due to strong winds and high energy waves has led to the creation of numerous sea stacks across Orkney, the Old Man of Hoy being one of the tallest (c. 140 m). It was formed some time in the second half of the 18th century and until early 19th century had two "legs", hence the name. Since its creation, it lost a leg and a few decades ago a long crack has formed on its top, so the expectation is that it will soon collapse and cease to exist. While it is still there, the stack has been popular with climbers. The first person to climb it solo was a woman who was at the time 4-months pregnant. It was also climbed by blind people and by kids as young as 8 years old...
Beneath the Old Man of Hoy, there is evidence for volcanic activity that affected the area some millions of years ago: the sandstone stack sits on a hard base of lava that avoided erosion of the sea.
Orkney has been populated since prehistoric times. Its land, due to the climate and soil type, contains well-preserved evidence of early settlers. Given there are only around 22,000 people inhabiting the 70 islands at the moment, there still remains a wealth of unearthed discoveries to be made.
It is estimated that 80,000 man-hours were required to construct the Ring of Brodgar.
There is a short walk along the path between the Loch of Stenness and the Loch of Harray that connects the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness - a smaller group of standing stones however thoroughly guarded by a bunch of sheep. The Standing Stones of Stenness date back to 3100 BC.
Standing Stones of Stenness neighbour with the neolithic Barnhouse settlement. It is thought that people who constructed the Standing Stones of Stenness may have lived there.
As the Barnhouse settlement seems rather small to be able to provide so many man-hours needed to construct the nearby Ring of Brodgar (and some 12,500 man-hours more for the Stones of Stenness), there is another theory that suggests different people brought the necessary materials including stones from all over Orkney to partake in the construction.
We booked our accomodation in Kirkwall, so that it would be convenient to leave for Shetland the next day from there. Kirkwall is in a 20 minutes drive away from Stromness and is currently the largest town in Orkney. It is also the Orcadian capital. Founded in the 11th century by the Norse people, it was originally called Kirkjuvagr. Norwegian jarls ruled it for a few centuries. It became Scottish only in the late 15th century, like neighbouring Shetland, because it was part of the security package provided to garantee the dowry of princess Margaret, daughter of the King of Norway, getting married to the King of Scotland. The dowry was never paid so the islands passed to Scotland.
St Magnus Cathedral is right accross the street from the Earl's Palace built in early 17th century by Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, who ruled the Earldom of Orkney that at the time covered not only Orkney and Shetland but also some parts of mainland Scotland. A few years earlier, Patrick Stewart built a similar castle in Shetland. Things did not eventually work out well for the earl despite such progressive architectural drive (for multiple reasons including the use of forced labour at construction sites), and two years after construction the castle with the earl's son inside was sieged by the Earl of Caithness. The Stewart family was defeated and the line of the earls of Orkney ceased to exist (for a while).
Kirkwall is a compact town, but boasts a proper "old town" within it. There are a few streets with buildings dating back to the 16-17th centuries. Kirkwall remained the main town on the islands until the end of the 18th century, when the traders from Stromness (that was still a small harbour then) took Kirkwall to court over taxes and eventually succeeded in getting their trading rights on par. Stromness began its rise in the 18th cendury due to its convenient location for sailing to North America and being on the northern route for traders who avoided the English Channel due to the wars Britain was involved in throughout much of the 18th century.
The life in Kirkwall was not always quiet. In the second half of the 16th century, it was attacked by the English fleet, and in the 17th century the town hosted a Cromwellian garrison. The Orkney Islands also held out the defeated Jacobite officers in the 18th century and were the scene of operations of quite some pirates including world-famous John Gow who became the subject of Walter Scott's novel The Pirate.
During WWI, some 100,000 military people were based in Orkney as its strategic location was of great importance for the UK's fleet. During WWII, a few airfields were built around the islands to add to their marine might, and Churchill ordered to build what is now called the Churchill Barriers - a link connecting the mainland with four other islands to block access for German U-boats to the Scapa Flow harbour. The project was completed only after the war.
For a bit more physical challenge (although not the level of climbing sea stacks), we headed for a coastal walk. The walk from the prehistoric village of Skara Brae to Stromness is reported to be one of the most beautiful paths in Orkney and Shetland.
Its starting point, Skara Brae, is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement site in Europe. It is believed that people lived there in 3100 BC. For comparison, the pyramids of Giza were constructed in c. 2500 BC.
The village of Skara Brae is an example of how easy it can be to make an astounding archeological discovery in Orkney. A few decades ago, alocal land-owner was checking out his beach and saw some suspiciously well structured stones peering out of the eroded sand dune. Further investigation commenced, and shortly the village was unearthed, very well preserved and yielding a great lot of information fo the archeologists and historians.
We started walking to the south along the coast and for the most part of the route we walked on the edge of the cliffs, occasionally moving a bit more inland.
I am wondering if the black ash-like sediment on the rocks has anything to do with recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. May well be the case...
While the first signs of human presence in Orkney are around 13,000 years old, it is thought that Orkney has been farmed for at least 5,000 years. In those early days, the climate was more pleasant there, with trees around. The sea reached present heights only around 4,500 years ago though, so there is little evidence left from the first inhabitants and farmers of Orkney.
Around 3,000 years ago, Orkney started experiencing more and more storms and the temperatures started to decline. In 1159 BC, a volcanic eruption in Iceland adversely affected the climate in the region. That was about the time when peat started to form, the substance that helped conserve so many artifacts from those times.
Orkney was known to the Romans. Ptolemy and Tacitus marked Orkney on the map. There are some records that the Orcadian King submitted to the Roman Emperor Claudius in 43 AD when the Roman Empire was on its quest to conquer the British Isles. Some Roman artefacts were found in Orkney, which confirms these suggestions. The Orcadians seem to have been familiar with the dolce vita concept as some Roman artefacts found suggest that olives and sweet wine were imported to Orkney from the Empire.
In the 4th century AD, Orkney was an important part of Pictland, which at the time spanned across a lot of modern-day Scotland and had its centre near Inverness. It was during the times of the Picts that Christianity arrived in the islands, supposedly, in the 6th century. Orkney was under the Pictish rule for a few centuries until the arrival of the Norse.
The first raids of the Norse people took place in the end of the 8th century. In the 19th century, a treasure was found in Orkney that is thought to have been hidden to avoid looting by the Norse. The treasure was lost again after a while, interestingly.
The Norse influence was probably firmly established in the islands when in the second half of the 9th century the Norwegian king gifted the islands to one of the earls, Earl Sigurd. It was the first earldom created to be subjected to the Norwegian kings. By that time, the Pictish population was already heavily mixed with the Scandinavians.
With Earl Sigurd also starts the Orcadian connection to royal Scotland. Sigurd's second wife was a daughter of the King of the Scots, and their son Earl Thorfinn was brought up in the Scottish court. Thorfinn later became the ruler of Ornkey and, while recognising the authority of the Norwegian king, he maintained close ties with Scotland. His power also covered the lands of Caithness (mainland Scotland). In Orkney, he is thought to have created the bishopric that was attached to Trondheim of Norway until 1472, perhaps inspired by his pilgrimage to the Holy Land - on the way he had an audience with the Pope in Rome.
Ever since then, the Scottish influence has been growing over the islands at the expense of the diminishing Norwegian power until the mid-13th century, when the Scottish earls of Angus eventually took over. In 1468, when the islands together with Shetland were pledged as part of the dowry of the Norwegian princess in her marriage to the Scottish king, Orkney officially became part of Scotland.
One of the signs of the Norse presence in Orkney that has been rather well preserved over the centuries is graffiti. It is believed that the Norse were fond of graffiti and left an extensive collection of runic messages across the islands. It is thought that literacy was wide-spread in the Norse society in Orkney, which for many centuries after that was not the case.
On a sunny day, the sea looks stunning with its water colour ranging from azure to dark-blue. However these waters carry a lot of power, and high energy waives have since recently attracted a lot of interest of renewable energy developers.
Since 2003, Orkney has been home to the European Marine Energy Centre focusing on the potential of wave and tidal energy generation. Interestingly, Orkney has been on the forefront of the UK's renewable energy endeavors for many years now. The first wind turbine in the UK was tested here in the 1950s. Since 2013, the islands have been able to more than cover its electricity needs with locally generated electricity from renewable sources and have been selling the excess to the UK mainland (the islands are connected to the national grid via two subsea cables) or experimenting with innovative storage solutions such as "batteries on wheels" or hydrogen production. Over the last two years, Microsoft has been testing an underwater datacentre powered by wind and marine energy in Orkney. The experiment showed underwater datacentres are a few times less prone to failures because, among other reasons, of the absence of employees at the site who could mess up with the equipment. This shows great potential, particularly given the recent vows of tech giants to become carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative in the next few years.
Despite complete energy self-sufficiency, the islands are also home to the large oil terminal that receives, processes and stores oil from the North Sea offshore oilfield. The terminal handles around 10% of the UK's oil output and since its opening in the 1970s has been one of the major contributors to the economic growth of the islands.
Orkney also happens to be rich in uranium, which is a topic of some controversy, as well as copper, lead and iron ore.
Cows are prominent inhabitants of Orkney. There are also lots of sheep around. There is one particulaly remarkable sheep breed on the island - the North Ronaldsay sheep - that live almost completely from seaweed. Truly sea-centric life!
People living in Orkney are entitled to a free trip to the UK mainland twice per year, which aims to reduce any possible feeling of remoteness and disconnection that can undersandably arise given transport links sometimes get disrupted by bad weather, not too rare around Orkney outside summer months. However, we learned that far from everyone on the islands wants to get away from Orkney, even temporarily, and the locals seem to be great patriots of their land. This is clearly visible, as the infrastructure, housing and public spaces are very well maintained and you can see a loving touch here in there. There is a unique, Nordic sense of community on the islands, which makes them quite special.
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