Farewell To Orkney

Today was our last full day on Orkney and the weather treated us to glorious sunshine and blue skies.

After a brief walk into Kirkwall to purchase wool for Sarah to knit with, we drove out to Mull Head and spent 2½ hours hiking around the cliffs.

Eloïse didn’t complain once during the 5.6 km hike, which was very impressive. Some of it was over rough terrain and the wind was blasting in from the sea, but she didn’t once whinge about it. Lucas was asleep in the sling the whole time.

There were no lunch options in the area, so we drove down to St. Margaret’s Hope again and had lunch at the same place as yesterday.

As a treat for the children and because it was now quite late in the day, we decided to go to the Marine Life Aquarium, which showcases the sea life found in the coastal waters around Orkney. It was rather expensive for what it was, with only a couple of rows of tanks, but the place is clearly run with a lot of love by the couple who own it and probably only just breaks even.

There’s information everywhere and bizarre ornaments adorn the walls and ceiling wherever you cast your gaze. On the tank that should contain, amongst other things, a spider crab, the proprietor has written on the tank’s label that the “brown crab ate the spider crab”. It’s amateurism in a good way, the kind that warms the cockles of your heart.

Our final stop of the day was the Italian Chapel on the tiny island of Lamb Holm, which is a chapel built during the second world war by Italian prisoners of war, who wanted a place to worship. It’s a very impressive piece of work. Such was the devotion that went into creating the chapel that, when the war ended and the inmates were free to be repatriated, one of them chose to stay to finish work on the chapel. It ranks amongst the more interesting places of worship that I have visited. You can almost feel the presence of the POWs who built it.

Tomorrow, we catch the ferry from St. Margaret’s Hope to Gills Bay on the mainland and then drive south to Inverness.

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