I finished my previous post about our Orkney trip with a photograph of the salvaged propeller of HMS Hampshire, which sits in the forecourt of the Scapa Flow Museum on Hoy.

The Hampshire wreck actually lies on the seabed some distance from Hoy and Scapa Flow—between Marwick Head and Brough Head, on the Atlantic coast of Mainland Orkney. It sank in 1916 after striking a mine laid by the German submarine U-75, with the loss of 737 men. One of those on board was Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, who was travelling on a diplomatic mission to the Russian port of Arkhangelsk. Kitchener being something of a Big Deal, a tower was erected to his memory in 1926, on the bleak summit of Marwick Head.

The promontory in the distance is the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island. (Pronouncing unfamiliar -ough words is always a puzzle—this one is pronounced /brox/, like the Iron Age stone tower, a broch.)

The fact that it’s called the Kitchener Memorial, rather than the Hampshire Memorial, says a lot about the times. The dedication reads:

THIS TOWER WAS RAISED
BY THE PEOPLE OF ORKNEY
IN MEMORY OF
FIELD MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER
OF KHARTOUM
ON THAT CORNER OF HIS COUNTRY,
WHICH HE HAD SERVED SO FAITHFULLY,
NEAREST TO THE PLACE
WHERE HE DIED ON DUTY.
–o–
HE AND HIS STAFF PERISHED ALONG WITH
THE OFFICERS AND NEARLY ALL THE MEN OF
H.M.S. HAMPSHIRE ON 5^TH JUNE 1916.

The other 736 men come across as a bit of an afterthought, don’t you think? But in 2016 funds were raised to add the little curved wall visible in front of the tower in the photograph below:

On its inner curve, this memorial wall lists the names of all those who died on the Hampshire, as well as nine more from HM Drifter Laurel Crown, who died when their ship struck another of the mines laid by the U-75.

Apart from Scapa Flow and Vikings, Orkney is also famous for its Neolithic remains—you occasionally drive past a house with a standing stone at the bottom of its garden.

On a strip of moorland between two lochs sits the Ring of Brodgar:

We timed our visit to avoid the regular tour-groups, and had the site more or less to ourselves for twenty minutes, during which time the place was alive with birdsong—curlews, meadow pipits, skylarks:

We kept an eye out for an Orkney vole, but were disappointed.

Nearby are the Stones of Stenness—fewer in number than the Brodgar ring, but substantially larger:

The stones you can see here are all that remains of what is probably the oldest stone circle in Britain. These are Orcadian icons, and you can see their shapes echoed in everything from the glass restaurant awards on display in our hotel dining room to the Arctic Convoys memorial on Hoy:

And then, of course, there’s Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement beside the Bay of Skaill that had been hidden under a huge sand dune, until a massive storm in 1850 stripped off the stabilizing grass cover and blew away enough of the sand to expose the buildings beneath. (That vanished dune, by the way, was the original Skara Brae, brae being a Scots word for “hill”. Norse again, I need hardly say.)

Although being in the presence of something older than the Giza pyramids is quite a striking idea, the site itself was weirdly disappointing—having read about it often, and seen it frequently on television, the real thing felt oddly small and anticlimactic. Strangely, the reconstructed house beside the visitor centre seemed more impressive. I feel like I should actually apologize for that.

We both found ourselves more drawn to the neolithic site at Barnhouse, near the Stones of Stenness. For all that it lacked the three-dimensional, visibly lived-in aspect of Skara Brae, there was something pleasing about its symmetry—and, of course, we had the place to ourselves.

You’ll perhaps notice a distinct change in the weather, in the photograph above. The Boon Companion and I had been swanning around under pristine blue skies and light winds for several days, and found ourselves frequently congratulated by native Orcadians for “bringing the good weather”. In fact, a guide at Skara Brae laughingly assured us that, “there is no word in Orcadian for a fourth successive day of sunshine”.*

So it all started to go pear-shaped, midweek.

One day we drove out to the abandoned gunnery range buildings at Yesnaby, and the wind almost took the car doors off.

Wearing every item of warm clothing we possessed, we skittered along the top of the cliffs, keeping well back from the edge, to pay a visit to Yesnaby Castle sea stack:

Then we skittered back again, and the doors almost came off the car, again.

The next day, with the wind still howling across the flat fields, we decided it might be a day for indoors pursuits, so we visited Stromness.

The tourist guides say not to take your car into town, because the roads are so narrow. The main street didn’t seem that bad to me, but it does have some extremely steep and narrow lanes opening off it:

We dived out of the wind into the wonderland of Stromness Museum, a marvellous clutter of Orcadian history packed into a confusing sequence of tiny rooms. One section is devoted to Dr John Rae, the Orcadian Arctic explorer who (among other things) gleaned the first useful information about the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition to Arctic Canada (I’ve written quite a lot about that in this post). But Rae had the misfortune to be the honest bearer of bad news—he passed on Inuit testimony that the starving sailors had resorted to cannibalism when in extremis, which did not sit well with Victorian society, and he found himself attacked and defamed by no less a figure than Charles Dickens.

But he is now commemorated by a fine statue at Stromness pier-head:

And I have to say I’m much taken with the effigy that marks his tomb in St Magnus Cathedral. Rather than reclining stiffly and symmetrical on a marble slab, looking simultaneously pious and dead, Rae’s effigy is practically an action figure:

He’s quite obviously sleeping comfortably in the wild somewhere, his notebook and his rifle ready to hand.

So that was Orkney. All seasons in a single week, but mainly Spring.

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* We took his point, and enjoyed the joke, but now I’m left wondering if a language exists in which there is a word designating a fourth successive day of sunshine.