Orkney

Last weekend, I took Friday and Monday off and went to Orkney with my friend Ann as a sort of early birthday present to myself while the boys stayed in Edinburgh playing video games and drinking beer.

I am not a fan of flying. I am even less a fan of very small planes. But seeing as how pretty much no one in their right mind goes to a windy, cold, wet group of islands in the middle of the North Sea in winter, they don’t exactly send 747s on the daily runs to Kirkwall. So I spent an hour in a tiny, noisy Saab 340 being tossed around by said wind and convinced I would not make it to the ground in one piece. But in the end, as always, it was worth the terror.

We were staying in our friend Flossy’s house for the weekend. She’s teaching in Orkney for the year because she checked the ‘send me wherever you want’ box on the teacher training form. She was originally going to be around, but had to go off on a school underwater hockey trip (I didn’t know it was a sport either) to Manchester, so she just left us her key. Except she got to the ferry and realised she forgot to leave the key. We got a text saying she’d given it to a taxi driver to go hide near her door.

Immediately, we were thinking, ‘Great! Not only will the key be gone, but so will everything in the house.’ But this is where we got our first taste of island life. There were two taxis at the airport (out of about 3 on the entire island, or so I believe). When we gave the first one Flossy’s address, he turned to the other and said ‘Hey, isn’t that where you left that key this morning?’ Seriously. So the second driver told us exactly where he left it as though providing access to other peoples’ houses was something he was asked to do on a regular basis.

After settling in and deciphering the various maps left for us, we went for a wander into town. I think I might have frightened the girl at tourist information, if only because I asked her a question at a time of year when there aren’t many tourists around to ask questions. We explored the possibility of taking a ferry to one of the smaller islands, but eventually decided to rent a little red Ford Ka instead. There was a deal on where we got Friday afternoon to Monday morning for £64, so it would have been silly not to take it.

After lunch at the Albert Hotel (a haggis cheeseburger and a pint of Scapa Special), we stocked up on provisions at the local Tesco (Yes, even Orkney has a Tesco. I’m not sure if this is a good thing.) and went for a short drive to Stromness before heading home for some pizza and hot chocolate and an early night.

The next day, we set Radio 2 as our soundtrack for the weekend (starting with the Beatles singing ‘She Loves You’ in German) and ventured out into the cold, rainy wind in our little ladybug of a car to explore the western mainland of Orkney.

Our first major stop was Maes Howe, ‘Orkney’s largest and finest chambered cairn’. At first we thought we’d be the only ones on the tour, but we were joined by two others in the end. You aren’t allowed to take pictures inside anymore, but we ended up getting a better view of everything than most probably do in the high season, if only because the barriers had been taken out to paint. We were able to get our noses right up to graffiti that’s thousands of years old.

Robert, our tour guide, was one of those people who is so happy to tell you what he knows about history and archaeology that he could probably make almost anything interesting out of sheer enthusiasm. He was also extremely good at running down the one-meter-high 14.5-meter-long passage into the tomb.

While the structure itself was pretty impressive, I’d be lying if I said the coolest part wasn’t the Viking graffiti. It’s all over the place and says things like “Haakon singlehanded bore treasures from this howe” and “Many a woman has come stooping in here no matter how pompous a person she was”. And, in the tradition of all graffiti, it’s uneven and runs off the sides of things and is mostly boasting (about axes and other such Viking things in this case). But it is strange to stand inside something so old that is essentially the center of a hill.

Across the loch from Maes Howe, and our next stop, were the standing stones of Stenness followed by the Ring of Brodgar, which is apparently one of the biggest henged stone circles in the world. Way bigger than Stonehenge and, according to Robert, far more impressive. The stones at Stenness were fairly enormous, although there are only a few left. But Brodgar is huge. And the thing is, they’ll never really know what these things were used for. They can make educated guesses, and they may even be right, but I sort of think it’s cooler to wonder about it and come up with a bunch of options in your own head. And to be amazed at the fact that they managed to stand the things up.

There’s one stone at Brodgar they know was struck by lightning. The lightning blasted off a fairly significant chunk of the stone, which is lying next to the still standing bit. From this they’ve deduced that others may now be smaller than they originally were for the same reason. What we wanted to know was, were all these stones originally straight, square, and the same size? Because that would be even more impressive. But again, we’ll never really know.

Orkney makes a lot of money on things we’ll never really know. Our next stop was Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement that’s amazingly well-preserved. It’s easy to see that people lived there, but pretty much everything else they can say about it is guesswork. The steward on the site reckons that bringing people in from third world countries or tribal societies that don’t live life the way we do and getting them to have a look would probably give us better ideas of how spaces were used, but apparently no one has followed through on this thought. That’s too bad, because she’s probably right.

We were again pretty much alone on the site aside from the steward. She answered all our questions and pointed out the neolithic drain that led away from what were possibly the first indoor toilets. I figure if people were clever enough to build these houses and cluster them all together for protection and warmth and convenience and whathaveyou, they were sure to be clever enough to think of the indoor toilet. Againt hough, it’s very weird to look down on all these stone structures and think that people actually lived there so long ago we don’t really have the capacity to wrap our heads around the amount of time that’s passed since.

Skara Brae was just off a nice beach, which wasn’t actually there at the time people were living there. The water was much further out. We used the proximity to look for seals though. Finding them would be the aim of the rest of the afternoon. We failed miserably at that, but we saw a lot of nice beaches and another stone settlement we were able to walk through. And for some reason, Mr T was on Radio 2.

Back in Kirkwall, we did a bit of shopping before everything shut for the day. Many of the shops sell an odd combination of things (jewelery and winter coats? Body Shop products, knitwear, and homebrewing supplies?) and I can only assume this is because the town is too small to warrant many separate spaces for these sorts of things. We went back home for pasta then out to the bars for a taste of some island nightlife. We went to Helgis first where I had another Scapa Special and we watched Jo Brand do her Britney Spears dance on the Comic Relief dance show thing. It was a trendy sort of bar which Flossy said is usually quite touristy. Shortly after we arrived, a huge group of women dressed as if they had come from a wedding overtook the place. They got pretty loud, so we went off to try Torvhoug, which Flossy described as ‘Like a Glasgow wine bar’. They had crap beer on tap (no surprise) but real ale in bottles so I ordered an Orkney Blast. It was the kind of place where no one probably ever orders real ale, so the bartender took about 3 minutes to figure out how to enter it on the register. Seriously. The place soon filled up with a large group of drunk guys to counter the ladies night happening in the other bar. We sat in the back room where another group of girls was and the music was low enough that we could hear each others’ voices. The only real disappointment back there was the old school video game table console that didn’t work. After one drink, we went home for more hot chocolate and sleep.

Sunday the sun was out, amazingly enough. We drove all the way to the southern tip of South Ronaldsay on another seal mission. We didn’t see any. Visitorkney.com claims that there is an enormous seal colony there, but I would like to write them a letter that simply says ‘LIES!’. We had a walk on the cliffs anyway, and it was clear enough to see mainland Scotland in the distance.

Next, we drove out to the Tomb of the Eagles, which includes a bronze age dwelling AND another tomb. Orkney is crawling with the things. We were the only ones there. Kathleen, the daughter of the guy who found the stuff we were about to see, gave us about an hour-long personal history lesson. It was a little intense, but quite cool anyway because we got to hold some of the artefacts. Call me a cooking dork, but I was most impressed by some stones that looked like simple rocks, but were actually shaped and balanced to be held in your right hand and used a certain way, like for pounding stuff up. Kind of how a knife is balanced. It was just a rock, but it was pretty amazing. It’s also intriguing that most people were still right handed then. I wonder why.

We walked out along the farm in borrowed wellies, squelching through the mud, and crawled into the tomb to have a look. Not as big as Maes Howe, but impressive nonetheless. especially since the site is run and maintained by the family that originally found it rather than by Historic Scotland. On the walk back along the cliffs, there was a sudden rainstorm, so we couldn’t exactly enjoy the view as the wind and rain was busy freezing our eyeballs. By the time we got back to the car though, the rain had stopped and there was a rainbow.

At that point it was about 2pm and we were really craving a proper Sunday roast. We drove back up to St Margaret’s Hope, the third largest town in Orkney, with our fingers crossed that there would be one little pub doing such lunches. Not surprisingly for low tourist season, it seemed we were out of luck. We found a little hotel pub which was full of locals huddled around the bar. The minute we opened the door they stopped talking and ALL turned around to look at us. Talk about awkward. I thinkt he barman felt a little bad for us, but we ate our food and got out of there pretty fast. The fish soup I had WAS quite good, at least.

We were losing steam after all the walking around in bad weather, so we drove around a few other places on the east end of the mainland, still looking unsuccessfully for seals. We said hello to some cows then got back in the car just in time for a ridiculous rainstorm on the drive back to Kirkwall.

We hung around for the rest of the night, had a curry when Flossy got back and stayed up chatting for a while, the I read some more Bill Bryson and went to bed.

Monday morning, Flossy went to work, we dropped our rental car off, and we called a taxi to take us to the airport. And who should the driver be but the guy who originally hid the key outside. I’m not even kidding.

Saying the Kirkwall airport is tiny would be an understatement. There’s not much to do or see there aside from stare through the windows at the tiny plane you’re about to get on which is sitting next to an even tinier 8-seat plane that you are thankfully not about to get on. I tend to try to pamper myself in airports as much as I can since I hate to fly so much. If something awful were to happen on the flight, the last place I’d have wanted to be alive is in an airport. These days, you have to spend 2 or 3 hours before a flight milling around the places, so I figure if I spend some money on myself I can at least feel like I had a decent meal or something. That’s hard to do in Kirkwall, but I managed a nice bacon and egg roll and a cup of tea.

The flight back to Edinburgh didn’t get hairy until the descent. It was pretty windy and the plane got tossed around in every possible direction, making me thankful for the experience of being on bigger jets that aren’t quite so sensitive. When we walked off down the tiny ladder-steps, I could hear the dog they put on the flight barking like crazy from the hold. It was only a little west highland terrier who probably had no idea what was going on. Poor guy. It was bad enough with a window. I can’t imagine what it would be like without.

Anyway, seeing as how I did make it back in one piece with stories to tell and pictures to show, it was an excellent short break. I’d like to go back to Orkney in the summer, or maybe to Shetland instead, just to see it when there’s more going on.