Orkney: Scotland’s Windswept Islands at the Top of the World

There is a moment, standing on the cliff edge at Yesnaby on a grey October morning, when Orkney stops feeling like a place you have merely visited and starts feeling like a place that has claimed you. The wind is so strong it leans into you like a living thing. The sea below is not blue or green but a colour somewhere between iron and jade, throwing itself against the red sandstone stacks with a violence that is almost musical. Behind you, a field of frost-stiffened grass stretches toward a horizon so wide and unbroken that the sky feels twice its normal size. And you think: how did I not know about this?

That question follows visitors home from Orkney more reliably than any souvenir. These islands, sitting just off the northern tip of mainland Scotland, are one of Europe’s most remarkable and least understood destinations. They are ancient in a way that few places can claim, home to Neolithic monuments older than the pyramids. They are wild in a way that is not threatening but intoxicating. And they are inhabited by a people who carry their history lightly, with a quiet pride and a dryness of wit that makes it easy to stay in conversation for hours in the warm interior of a pub while the gale does its worst outside.

This is a guide to Orkney for people who want more than a list of things to do. It is for people who want to understand why these islands matter, what makes them feel so different from anywhere else in Britain, and how to visit in a way that respects both the landscape and the communities that have tended it for five thousand years.

A Brief Geography of Somewhere Extraordinary

Orkney is not one island but an archipelago of around seventy, of which about twenty are permanently inhabited. The largest, known simply as the Mainland, is where most of the population of roughly twenty-two thousand people lives. It is a place of broad, fertile farmland, more rolling than rugged, punctuated by lochs that reflect the enormous sky. The capital, Kirkwall, sits on a narrow isthmus between two bays and has the feeling of a medieval town that never entirely woke up — which is meant entirely as a compliment. The other main town, Stromness, is a beautiful tangle of flagstone streets running along the western shore of the Mainland, its narrow lanes threading between houses that back directly onto the harbour.

The other islands range enormously in character. Hoy is dramatic and mountainous, the most obviously “Highland” of the group, home to the Old Man of Hoy, a 137-metre sea stack that is probably the most photographed rock in Scotland. Westray and Papa Westray are farming islands in the north, known for their seabird colonies and a passenger flight that holds the world record for the shortest scheduled air route — just one and a half miles between the two islands, taking under two minutes when conditions allow. Sanday is flat, pastoral and ringed with beaches of an almost Caribbean whiteness. South Ronaldsay connects by road to the Mainland via the Churchill Barriers, a series of causeways built during the Second World War and now serving as bridges between communities.

The sea is never more than a few miles away anywhere in Orkney. This matters not just aesthetically but practically and culturally. Orcadians are boat people, historically at least, and their Norse ancestry — the islands were a Norse territory until 1468, and the dialect retains traces of the old Norn language — reflects centuries of maritime life.

The Stone Age Monuments: A World Heritage Site Hiding in Plain Sight

No visit to Orkney makes sense without spending serious time among the Neolithic monuments, and no account of Orkney is honest without saying at the outset that these are among the most astonishing archaeological sites in the world. The Heart of Neolithic Orkney, as the UNESCO World Heritage Site is known, encompasses four main sites: the Standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, Maeshowe chambered cairn, and the settlement of Skara Brae.

Skara Brae is perhaps the most viscerally affecting. Buried under sand dunes for thousands of years and uncovered by a storm in 1850, it is a cluster of stone houses built by farming communities around 3100 BCE, which makes it older than Stonehenge and older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. What astonishes visitors is not just the age of the place but its intimacy. The houses have stone furniture: dressers, beds, cupboards, hearths. You look down into a home where someone kept their belongings and slept and cooked their food five thousand years ago, and the distance between you and them suddenly collapses in a way that no amount of museum glass ever achieves. The site sits on a spectacular stretch of coast overlooking the Bay of Skaill, and the visitor centre does an excellent job of providing context without overwhelming the site itself.

The Ring of Brodgar, a mile and a half to the east, occupies a narrow strip of land between two lochs and consists of a circle of standing stones — originally sixty, now just over two dozen remaining — surrounded by a ditch cut from solid bedrock. It was built sometime around 2500 BCE, and nobody is entirely sure of its purpose, though astronomical alignment is part of the picture. What is clear is that it required enormous communal effort and that the people who built it had an organisational sophistication we habitually underestimate in societies we label “prehistoric.” Walking the circle in early morning mist, when the stones emerge gradually from grey air, is one of those rare experiences that justifies the entire concept of travel.

Maeshowe is a passage tomb from around 2800 BCE, a grassy mound containing a stone chamber of such precise construction that at the winter solstice, the setting sun shines directly through the entrance passage and illuminates the back wall. The Norse who broke in during the twelfth century left runic graffiti on the walls, the largest collection of Viking-age rune inscriptions outside Scandinavia, some of them remarkably casual given the setting — “Thorni bedded Helgi” reads one, apparently unchanged in its essential human quality across eight hundred years.

Kirkwall: A Capital on a Human Scale

Kirkwall’s most prominent feature is St Magnus Cathedral, begun in 1137 and built from red and yellow sandstone in alternating courses that give it a warm, almost Italianate richness unusual for a Norse-founded church on the edge of the North Atlantic. It is the most northerly medieval cathedral in the British Isles and arguably the most beautiful, particularly in its interior, where Romanesque arches of deep red stone frame a nave of considerable grandeur. The bones of St Magnus himself, the martyred earl who gives the cathedral its name, were discovered in a pillar during restoration work in the twentieth century and are still there.

The town around it is worth exploring without agenda. The main street, called simply “Albert Street” in one section and “Broad Street” in another, runs between old stone buildings housing independent shops, bakeries, and the kind of hardware stores that double as community hubs in small island towns. The Orkney Museum, housed in a sixteenth-century townhouse just off the main street, is excellent and free, and covers everything from the Neolithic through to the wartime history of Scapa Flow in the kind of depth that rewards a couple of unhurried hours.

Kirkwall is also the home of a bakery tradition that takes itself seriously. The Orcadian oatcake is a staple, but the real local treasure is the bere bannock, made from bere, an ancient strain of barley that has been grown in Orkney for millennia and survives here when it has essentially disappeared from most of Britain. The flavour is nutty and slightly sharp, and eating one with local cheddar and a smear of butter feels less like a snack and more like a minor act of historical continuity.

Stromness and the West Mainland

Stromness deserves an afternoon at minimum and rewards an overnight stay. Its flagstone main street follows the curve of the harbour for nearly a mile without ever widening to anything you would call a proper road, and the houses that line it step down to private piers with a practicality that speaks of centuries of fishing and trading. The town grew significantly in the eighteenth century as a provisioning stop for ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company setting out for North America, and traces of that maritime mercantile history are still visible in the architecture.

The Pier Arts Centre, a small but serious gallery on the harbourfront, houses a collection of twentieth-century British art that includes work by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, acquired by Margaret Gardiner and donated to the people of Orkney in the 1970s. It is an unexpected treasure, presented with real curatorial intelligence in a building that balances a historic core with elegant contemporary additions.

West of Stromness, the landscape opens out into some of the finest walking on the islands. The cliffs at Yesnaby, mentioned at the outset, are reached by a short walk from a small car park and reward the effort with views of sea stacks and nesting fulmars and, on clear days, the mountains of the Scottish Highlands to the south across the Pentland Firth.

Hoy: The Wild Island

Hoy is the exception in an archipelago of gentle farmland. Its hills — the Ward Hill reaches 479 metres, the highest point in Orkney — are covered in heather and blanket bog, and the west coast faces the Atlantic with cliffs that seem designed to demonstrate what rock looks like when a sea has been throwing itself at it for millions of years. The Old Man of Hoy is the star attraction and justifies the ferry ride and the walk from the landing point at Moaness through the valley of the Rackwick burn, one of the loveliest short walks in Scotland. The Old Man itself, a sandstone stack standing alone off a clifftop, looks impossibly slender from above, a red pencil of rock balanced on a base that common sense suggests should have collapsed centuries ago.

Rackwick Bay, at the southern end of the valley, has a beach of rounded boulders in colours ranging from ochre to dark burgundy, backed by a cluster of stone cottages. It was once a fishing community; now only a few of the houses are permanently occupied. The writer George Mackay Brown, perhaps the greatest writer Orkney has produced, wrote about this valley and this light with an intensity that made it into something mythological, and it is difficult to stand here and not feel that something has been said about the place that cannot quite be said again.

Food, Drink, and the Orkney Table

Orkney produces food of exceptional quality, partly as a consequence of geography and partly as a consequence of the stubbornness of people who have always had to be self-sufficient. The beef is widely regarded as among the finest in Britain, raised on the rich grass of the Mainland and the outer islands and finished slowly. The lamb, particularly from the North Ronaldsay breed — a small, ancient breed that lives on seaweed for much of the year — has a flavour quite unlike anything else, mineral and complex in a way that chefs from the mainland seek out specifically.

Seafood is superb and varied. Brown crab, lobster, scallops, and the small and intensely sweet Orcadian shrimp called prawn locally are all fished from surrounding waters. The salmon farmed in Orkney loch systems is raised more slowly and in colder water than most Scottish farmed salmon, producing a firmer, richer fish.

The Orkney Brewery and the Highland Park Distillery — the latter one of the most northerly Scotch whisky distilleries in the world — both welcome visitors. Highland Park’s whiskies are characterised by a heathery, lightly peated quality that reflects the specific character of the Orcadian environment, and the distillery tour is one of the more illuminating in Scotland for the way it explains how place shapes flavour.

Getting to Orkney and When to Go

Orkney is reached by ferry from Scrabster (near Thurso) to Stromness, operated by NorthLink Ferries, or from Gill’s Bay (near John O’Groats) to St Margaret’s Hope, operated by Pentland Ferries. Both crossings take under two hours in calm conditions and significantly longer when the Pentland Firth is living up to its reputation as one of the most turbulent stretches of water in Europe. Loganair operates flights from Inverness, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and several other Scottish airports to Kirkwall Airport.

The question of when to go does not have a single answer. Summer — June through August — brings long days that feel almost surreal this far north, the sky still holding light at midnight, the meadows full of wildflowers and the cliffs loud with nesting seabirds. It is also when most visitors come, and while Orkney never feels truly crowded, the main sites are busier. Spring and autumn have their own character: softer light, fewer people, and the particular melancholy of landscapes winding down or gearing up that suits the archaeology well. Winter is not for everyone, but the people who choose it often speak of it most enthusiastically — dark, yes, but quiet, and the aurora borealis visible on clear nights several times a year.

Why Orkney Stays With You

There is a quality to Orkney that is difficult to explain to someone who has not been there. It is not the most spectacular landscape in Scotland — the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides compete fiercely for that description. It is not the warmest, the most accessible, or the most conventionally beautiful. But it has something that is rarer than any of those things: a coherence. The land, the history, the light, the culture, and the people feel like parts of a single thing, a place that has been shaped by specific forces over a very long time and has developed in response to those forces into something entirely itself.

Orcadians have a word for the feeling of homesickness that comes over them when they are away from the islands: they call it “hiraeth” in Welsh, though the Orcadian sense is captured in older Norn terms now mostly lost. What matters is that the feeling is real and that it is not unique to people born there. Many visitors report a version of it on the ferry back to the mainland — a reluctance that is not quite sadness and not quite longing but something in between. That feeling is Orkney’s best advertisement, and it has been bringing people back for as long as the seas have allowed passage.

Go once and you will understand why.