As we drove north through the highlands, we planned to climb The Buachaille at the mouth of Glen Coe, but our flight was late, so we only made it part way up. This is the view of the mountain from the highway.
As we drove north through the highlands, we planned to climb The Buachaille at the mouth of Glen Coe, but our flight was late, so we only made it part way up. This is the view of the mountain from the highway.
The clouds were very dramatic on the ferry ride to Orkney.
We spent our first couple days on Orkney Mainland (the largest island). We visited standing stones, explored ruins, and walked along the sea cliffs.
Our first destination was the Brough of Birsay. It's on a tidal island: at low tide, you can walk across a causeway, but the rest of the time, it's surrounded by water. The ruins Nancy is exploring here was a 12th century church.
This is us at Birsay with the tidal causeway behind us.
This is on another point near the Brough of Birsay. It's a whale vertebra held up by a whale rib.
In Kirkwall, we toured the northernmost distillery in Scotland: Highland Park. This is the barley being malted -- they get it wet and then spread it on the floor for a few days, allowing the roots to sprout, and the enzymes which turn the starch to sugar to become active. They have to turn it over regularly to keep it from rotting.
This is where the distilling takes place. I could only take a picture from outside the door, so the view isn't great. Each of these copper stills extends below the "floor" a long ways -- this is a second story platform. Each holds 44,000 gallons, and there are four of them.
The entrance to the distillery complex.
This is the Broch of Gurness. It was a Pictish settlement built before 200 BC. The remaining walls are over 10 feet tall, and the original tower was probably around 20.
This is part of the Ring of Brodgar. Today, there are 36 standing stones, but when it was built around 2000 BC, there were between 60 and 120. The stones come from all over Orkney, and the initial archaeological digs indicate it wasn't used in ceremonies (there are no ash remains from fires or the like). Whatever its purpose, it seems that building it was the important part, not using it. Perhaps it had some community significance with each settlement bringing a stone in some sort of competition. Whatever the purpose, it was a lot of work: tens of thousands of man-days. We arrived late in the day, so the shadows were long. It had been rainy, but the sky opened up blue to the west to give me a well-lit scene with a dramatic backdrop.
I tried to do some creative backlit shots, but they never turned out quite right.
Another view.
Here's Nancy next to a stone so you can get a sense of scale.
Another view.
Next, we went to the Stones of Stenness. There are many fewer standing stones here, but three of them are far larger than Brodgar. In Scotland, there's no trespassing -- so long as you don't disturb the livestock or trample crops, you can walk wherever you like. Apparently, the farmer who owned this land in the early 1800's got tired of people walking across his fields to look at the stones and started to take them down until the local lord paid him off.
Another view.
After touring Orkney Mainland, we visited some of the other islands. Our first was Westray, famed for its nesting sea birds, especially puffins.
The cliffs along here are protected because of the nesting birds. The water below is shallow for a long ways out, making for good fishing, and the cliffs are one row of shelves after another, making for good nesting sites.
We had never seen puffins before this trip. They're quite entertaining to watch. Not only are they pretty goofy looking, they're also clumsy -- the live most of their life at sea, and their big paddle feet are not good for walking. They waddle and hop like penguins. The other bird in this shot is a razorbill (which, like the puffin, is a kind of auk).
The cliffs were covered with nesting birds. On this cliff, there were gannets (very large graceful white birds with pale orange heads), guillemots, and fulmars.
Photographing flying puffins is hard. This was the most in-focus shot I got. When they fly, they flap their wings furiously with very little gliding. Some birds make flying look effortless. Puffins make it look just barely possible.
The wind was very strong onto the cliffs. The puffins would come in along the cliff and then turn out towards sea and try to "back in" to a landing. This puffin is being blown backwards as it lands, and it's about to land on the other puffin, causing both of them to fall over in a charmingly clumsy manner.
The fulmars, however, were very graceful fliers. They're related to albatrosses and live to be 40 years old and apparently mate for life. With the strong wind against the cliffs, the updrafts were significant, and the fulmars were just hanging out riding them, apparently for fun, almost within reach.
A nice view on Westray.
Many of the older houses around Orkney had stone roofs. Not small slate shingles, but large slabs of stone. I imagine it was a little frightening to have that over your head in windy storm.
We spent our final day in Orkney on the island of Hoy. We took a foot ferry to the island and then climbed the highest hill in Orkney, descended the back side across to the far side of the island, and then walked around the sea cliffs back to the ferry dock, for a total distance of about 15 miles. We lost the trail at one point, and descended about 600 feet down a very steep heather-covered slope. We found that heather is soft and has amazing traction, so we were able to walk straight down a slope well beyond 45 degrees. We also found a bog quite accidently and had visions of preserved corpses as our feet were sinking. But we also saw beautiful (and high!) sea cliffs and thousands of birds. This was one of my favorite hikes I've ever done.
This is the view from the ferry toward Hoy. The tall hill is Ward Hill. We walked up the valley to the right from it and climbed it from the back side. It's about 1500 feet tall.
This is a view as we were climbing Ward Hill that looks across the valley the runs across the island.
Another view climbing.
Us on top of Ward Hill, looking out towards Orkney Mainland. From the top, you can see every island in Orkney but one.
The view from the top of Ward Hill. The very dropped us off at the point between the two sandy bays.
The center of the island was covered in Great Skuas. Skuas are very large birds that nest in the Heather. When you get to close to a nest, the birds start dive bombing you. They don't actually make contact, but they're trying to scare away predators. The birds are quite large with sharp beaks, and they come uncomfortably close when they dive bomb. There were signs at the beginning of the hike suggesting that you hold an arm above your head when you're being dive bombed to keep the birds from getting too close until you can get far enough away from the nest that they leave you alone. The problem was that there were so many birds, we found ourselves too close to someone's nest most of the time. Despite the unnerving dive bombing (or perhaps because of it), we both liked the Skuas quite a lot.
Here's Nancy being dive bombed. She had just escaped one pair of Skuas and sat down to take a rest, not realizing she was now too close to another nest. As you can see, Great Skuas are big birds -- this bird is on the far side of her, so it's even bigger than it looks.
On the far side of the island, we came to the Old Man of Hoy, a 450-foot-tall sea stack. We walked right out on the point near it that you can see behind Nancy here. This area is protected by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, so the ground cover was very different than the rest of Orkney -- heather and taller grasses instead of the low-trimmed grass indicative of sheep. Plus, this was the one place we went that wasn't covered in sheep poop. :-)
The cliffs we're walking along in this shot are the tallest in Britain -- over 1000 feet at their highest. It was quite a sight.
We also saw a cute hedgehog.