Et in Orcadia ego: Sunday 14 July
I'd hired an electric bike for the weekend, and today was the day I planned to make use of it.
I was spoiled for choice on the destination front and took a while to make up my mind, although I was sure that whatever direction I went in would not disappoint. Eventually I decided that, having been to North Ronaldsay, it would be fun to go to South Ronaldsay. This route also meant lots of crossing from island to island, and I always enjoy going over water.
I saw many lovely things as I pedalled along the quiet, smooth-surfaced roads. Greylag geese; a cat who took fright at my approach and bounded off up the field, running straight through the legs of several sheep in the process; calves learning to be big bulls by butting heads and attempting to mount each other.
The island crossings were made extra fun by the fact that I was going over Churchill Barriers, built by Italian prisoners of war to protect Scapa Flow. Further obstruction was provided by block ships, which have largely been left where they were:
The tip of South Ronaldsay boasted a disused ferry terminal and not much else, so I headed back, stopping at a beach where I'd hoped to see seals but had to content myself with beautiful scenery. On my ride I saw the back end of a stoat whisking into the verge ahead of me, then the little head popped back up to check me out before disappearing.
(They're an invasive species on Orkney, having arrived in the 2010s, and I later saw a poster requesting that all sightings be reported. But I wasn't going to dob on my happy little stoat friend.)
I returned to Lamb Holm, where we had landed, to visit the Italian chapel, built by those same Italian POWs in their free time and from almost nothing. They were given a Nissen hut and furnished it using materials salvaged from shipwrecks; the red and white tiles were from a ship's toilets and the font rests on a lorry spring. Most of the prisoners were moved to Yorkshire before the work was completed, but the chapel, a temporary thing built out of wartime necessity, remains.
I reckoned I had the time and energy for one more island - well, a peninsula this time. Deerness is home to another distillery, where I tasted some samples and decided a bottle of vodka would taste all the sweeter because I'd cycled to fetch it.
It's also home to The Gloup. Wikipedia describes this as a 'collapsed sea-cave', which doesn't really convey the strange and majestic sight of it or the hollow thump of waves curling in on themselves below you.
I spent a while looking out across a dramatic sea and photographing the birds on the cliffs, including this lovely pair of fulmars, before heading back.
When I was a few miles from home the battery in my bike died. It grew instantly heavy as the magic left it and I was left in a Cindarella situation with an uphill gradient to combat. I made it back to the AirBnB under my own power, having covered 60 miles.
I was spoiled for choice on the destination front and took a while to make up my mind, although I was sure that whatever direction I went in would not disappoint. Eventually I decided that, having been to North Ronaldsay, it would be fun to go to South Ronaldsay. This route also meant lots of crossing from island to island, and I always enjoy going over water.
I saw many lovely things as I pedalled along the quiet, smooth-surfaced roads. Greylag geese; a cat who took fright at my approach and bounded off up the field, running straight through the legs of several sheep in the process; calves learning to be big bulls by butting heads and attempting to mount each other.
The island crossings were made extra fun by the fact that I was going over Churchill Barriers, built by Italian prisoners of war to protect Scapa Flow. Further obstruction was provided by block ships, which have largely been left where they were:
The tip of South Ronaldsay boasted a disused ferry terminal and not much else, so I headed back, stopping at a beach where I'd hoped to see seals but had to content myself with beautiful scenery. On my ride I saw the back end of a stoat whisking into the verge ahead of me, then the little head popped back up to check me out before disappearing.
(They're an invasive species on Orkney, having arrived in the 2010s, and I later saw a poster requesting that all sightings be reported. But I wasn't going to dob on my happy little stoat friend.)
I returned to Lamb Holm, where we had landed, to visit the Italian chapel, built by those same Italian POWs in their free time and from almost nothing. They were given a Nissen hut and furnished it using materials salvaged from shipwrecks; the red and white tiles were from a ship's toilets and the font rests on a lorry spring. Most of the prisoners were moved to Yorkshire before the work was completed, but the chapel, a temporary thing built out of wartime necessity, remains.
I reckoned I had the time and energy for one more island - well, a peninsula this time. Deerness is home to another distillery, where I tasted some samples and decided a bottle of vodka would taste all the sweeter because I'd cycled to fetch it.
It's also home to The Gloup. Wikipedia describes this as a 'collapsed sea-cave', which doesn't really convey the strange and majestic sight of it or the hollow thump of waves curling in on themselves below you.
I spent a while looking out across a dramatic sea and photographing the birds on the cliffs, including this lovely pair of fulmars, before heading back.
When I was a few miles from home the battery in my bike died. It grew instantly heavy as the magic left it and I was left in a Cindarella situation with an uphill gradient to combat. I made it back to the AirBnB under my own power, having covered 60 miles.