Days 81-83 Sat 4 - Mon 6 Aug : Orkney Interlude
Saturday: Stromness. After the treat of a cooked breakfast at Julia's Cafe we went our ways shopping and exploring the town. Stromness (on the bay of Hamnavoe in the local tongue) has a history as a village from the 17th Century, and developed as a shipping and trading centre during the 18th-19th. A principal employer was the Hudson's Bay Trading Company, both for whaling products and the fur trade, and most of the Company's workforce in Canada were Orcadians. The main street in Stromness runs parallel to the harbour front, and the houses are built with their gable ends facing the water, with narrow alleys between leading to individual small wharfs and piers, many of them still there and in private ownership. The long winding street, with wide paving slabs and cobblestones changes its name every few blocks, and there are numerous plaques on the walls celebrating famous earlier inhabitants. Login's Well providd water for many famed expeditions, including John Rae and Capt Cook. There are several interesting galleries and studios along the street, and we found some unique gifts. Cate had the interesting experience of witnessing a 'Blackening': this is a unique Orcadian variation on the stag party, in which the groom to be is ambushed, driven round on an open lorry with much banging of tins, stripped naked and tarred and feathered! The more modern equivalent uses treacle rather than tar, but in the version Cate watched, the victim was fixed to a lamp post with many yards of clingwrap, then force-fed beer down a wide-bore tube and funnel by a large crowd of inebriated youths, all of them muddy and several of them bleeding: not a ceremony for the faint-hearted! Cate filmed some of it and later learned that if you get too close they are likely to throw treacle at you, so she may have had a lucky escape. I spent much of the day searching for a car to rent to go and visit the archaeological sites of the islands, with no success: every car in Stromness and Kirkwall is booked up until the end of the month, because of the summer season and the number of cruise liners arriving. Our only altenative was a conducted tour, and on the advice of the Information Centre we called and booked with Orkney Uncovered for the next day. As you will read, we could not have done better. In the evening we returned to the Ferry Inn for supper and watched one of Team GB's most remarkable days in the Olympics: we have of course seen hardly anything so far, but this Golden day was worth waiting for!
Sunday: The Neolithic Heart of Orkney
We were met as arranged by Kinlay Francis, with his VW people carrier, in the drizzle! He had planned an itinerary which included most of the archeology of the Mainland of Orkney, including booking ahead for us for the sites which required it. We drove north to Skara Brae, certainly the most famous and best preserved Neolithic settlement in the world. Since about 3000BC it lay buried under the dunes until the winter of 1850, when a severe storm hit Scotland, and stripped the earth from a large irregular knoll, or howe. When the storm cleared, local villagers found in place of the howe an intact village, albeit without roofs, but the site was not seriously investigated until 1927. The village consists of a dozen small houses arranged closely together with easy communication between individual homes. The houses were built into mounds of pre-existing domestic waste known as "middens", which may have provided both stability and insulation against Orkney's harsh winter climate. Each house consists of a large square room of about 400 sq ft with a hearth, dresser, and sleeping space. It would have required cooperation between settlements to move the stones to build the dwellings, but it was not thought that there was any larger 'community' involvement beyond this. It seems likely that no more than fifty people lived in Skara Brae at any given time. It is not known why the settlement was abandoned. We wandered freely around the site, with Kinlay as our guide. Although his specialty is the military history of the Orkneys he is equally knowledgeable about the Stone Age,and was an excellent guide throughout the day.
Near to Skara Brae was Skaill House, a fine mansion with lots of interesting internal features which we explored.
Cate had been keen to visit the Woolshed, an establishment near the village of Evie, which specializes in wool from the seaweed-eating sheep of North Ronaldsay. Kinlay did not know the place, and it would be necessary to call to arrange a visit as it was Sunday, so he called his wife Kirsty to get the details and make the call. This worked well and we were greeted by Rosie, who showed Cate her wares and her workshop, and we left laden with a large quantity of Ronaldsay wool, Cate grinning widely!
The next stop was Maes Howe, a burial chamber buried deep within the large grassy mound (Howe). Our guide there was Amy, Kinlay's cousin. We entered at a crouch through a 10metre tunnel, into the main chamber with deep recesses to three sides, which are thought to be where the bones of the Stone Age men were interred, though strangely only a part of each body, so that the bodies must have been de-fleshed somewhere else first! The mound itself is about 35m in diameter and is some 7m high, and is surrounded by a wide circular ditch, all dated to around 3500BC. The tomb had been broken into through the roof by Norse invaders in the 12th century, and there are rich runic inscriptions on the stone walls.
We next visited the Broch of Gurness, an even more extraordinary settlement in a remarkable state of preservation. The remains of the broch were discovered by Orcadian poet and antiquarian, Robert Rendall. While sketching on the knowe, one of the legs of Rendall's stool sank into the mound. Carefully removing some of the nearby stones, Rendall uncovered a staircase leading down into the mound. It is generally agreed that it was built between 200BC and 100BC - possibly on the site of an earlier settlement. Standing around eight metres high with an internal diameter of 20 metres, the broch was a tall, easily-defended, tower, surrounded by a series of small stone dwellings. All the dwellings are clearly visible from pathways round the site, with their hearths , dressers and bed spaces and toilets with a drainage system, and a spring-fed water tank, and would probably have housed about 40 families.
We stopped for a light lunch at the Standing Stones Hotel, before visiting the said Stones of Stenness and the impressive Ring of Brodgar, a mostly intact henge and standing stones, in which (unlike Stonehenge ) we were free to walk around, touch and enjoy.
The two sets of stones lie at the north and south extremes of a causeway between two lochs, one fresh water and the other a sea loch, and between the two is a mound shaped like the back of a whale, which was always though to be a natural structure until a cooled stone was turned up by a plough in 2003. Geophysical studies revealed a massive site with multiple buildings, some with walls 15m thick, and the ongoing excavation has found a settlement quite unlike anything else ever find from the Neolithic era. It has been the subject of recent television documentaries, and the find is said to have changed radically our understanding of life in those times. In particular, this is the first evidence of a communal site, and has been described as a temple or cathedral. Remarkably some of the finds include a colorfully painted wall, and small thumb pots which may have held pigments, a very early use of such materials. Cate thought the site was like something between a Neolithic craft fair or Ideal Homes Exhibition! The excavation is still in progress, thoughtless was no digging today as it was Sunday, but we had a most informative and very detailed demonstration of the various structures from one of the archaeologists involved (unfortunately in the rain!) - a brilliant end to a fascinating day. Kinlay returned us to the marina after a tour that lasted almost 8 hours, much longer than we had expected, and above our agreed time. We are most grateful. to Kinlay, and would certainly recommend his tours to anyone. It was back to the Ferry Inn that evening for more Olympics and good pub grub.
Monday: Kirkwall
We caught the bus to Kirkwall to see St Magnus Cathedral and the Earl's Palace, and check out the town and shops. We started with a coffee at Reels, a super wee cafe which specialises in traditional Scottish music, with its own regular music school run by the Wrigley Sisters (fiddle and guitar), but of course in accordance with the ever reliable Benjamin's Law, music in pubs etc is always yesterday or tomorrow! We did the shops (Cate finding more Ronaldsay wool, and Benj a limited edition Hughland Park malt), then the cathedral and palace. St Magnus is as magnificent as any European renaissance cathedral, with towering pillars and beautiful stained glass windows, the stone tomb of the explorer John Rae, complete with rifle and bible, and a Poets' corner with plaques to Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir. It dates from the bloody years of the 12th century, when feuding between earls resulted in the slaying of Earl Rognvald's uncle Magnus on the orders of his cousin King Haakon, and the site became a place of pilgrimage.
The Earl's Palace is a splendid ruin, with good information boards. It's builder was an infamous earl who used forced labour in the construction, but was eventually besieged and overthrown by the Earl of Caithness, and hanged for treason. We caught the bus finally southwards towards Burra and South Ronaldsay, crossing the causeway barrier protecting one inlet to Scapa Flow, to visit the Italian Chapel. The causeway was built using some 1200 Italian POWs who were housed in Camp 60 on the island in WW2, and they constructed a chapel using two nissen huts end to end, concrete, barbed wire and partof a rusting blockship. It was decorated inside by Domenico Chocchetti, and has the most exquisite tromp-l'oeil wall paintings, and mass is still celebrated there regularly. We caught the bus all the way home to Stromness and dined aboard, ready to resume the cruise the next day