Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Another busy day: beachcombing at Aikerness Beach in the morning, followed by a short hop down the road to the Broch of Gurness; back to Stromness for lunch at the delightful Julia’s Café and Bistro, followed by a couple of local shops; then back up the road to Stenness for our scheduled visit to Maes Howe. Finally, a coastal walk around Stromness before dinner at the Ferry Inn. Not a bad day’s itinerary.

The roads are great here. They’re mostly two-lane, wide and straight. The land isn’t as rugged as the western islands, so driving times between destinations are short.

Maes Howe was very interesting. It’s a hillock that was used by Neolithic people as a burial chamber some 5000 years ago. Because it’s a confined space, entry is with a guide only, so one has to book a specific tour. We booked on our first day for the 16:00 tour today.

Our guide was Moira, Orcadian through and through. She really brought the place to life and even stopped Eloïse and Lucas from getting too bored inside what was, after all, just a dimly lit stone room inside a hill.

We move on to Kirkwall tomorrow, which will be our base for the next few days.

What a day. We packed a lot in today, seeing much of the west coast of West Mainland.

From the sea stacks at Yesnaby, to the Neolithic settlement at Skara Brae; from the high sea cliffs at Marwick Head, with puffins perched on ledges and gannets diving like spears into the sea, to the tidal island that is the Brough of Birsay, where old Norse settlements lie at the end of a causeway passable from the mainland only at low tide.

The weather today was great. I got a good soaking in the morning as we hiked to the sea stacks — I had left my raincoat in the car — but that was pretty much it precipitation today. We had quite a few sunny spells, too, which really brought out the vibrant hues of the island’s coastline.

Thanks to our visit to the Brough of Birsay, which required waiting until this evening’s low tide, we didn’t return to the hotel until after sunset. The children are knackered, but had a fantastic day. I’ve scarcely heard a word of whinging out of either of them all day.

The whole family loves Scotland. In Sarah and me, the dramatic scenery and abundance of sea birds have reawakened memories of previous trips to Iceland and our 2004 trip to the Faroe Islands, giving us a renewed sense of appreciation for everything we saw and did on those remote North Atlantic islands. It’s high time we returned.

We’re already talking about the various school holidays next year and where we should go. I had become a bit jaded to travel, especially after our washed-out Italian jaunt in May, but Scotland has rekindled the flames in this traveller’s heart. I could never tired of a country this beautiful.

We should have come here years ago. I’ve always known Scotland was beautiful. I’ve seen books, documentaries, nature programmes, films, etc. and knew that the land was beautiful. Somehow, I still didn’t know quite how spectacularly stunning this country is. And it’s not just the land, of course. The people have been incredibly friendly and nice, the food is great, we speak the language (so we can read newspapers, listen to the radio, etc.), it’s not overcrowded, it’s not too hot (it’s not even warm!), etc.

This is definitely one of the best trips we’ve ever done.

There was plenty of driving on today’s route.

We were down at breakfast when it opened at 08:00 to ensure a timely departure for our long drive north over the highlands.

It took just over three hours to reach Scrabster on the northern coast, a place that masquerades as a town, but consists of little more than the ferry port and some oil storage tanks. Scrabster is just a couple of kilometres west of Thurso, which we unfortunately didn’t have time to see.

Most of today’s drive on the mainland was along single track roads through some of Scotland’s remotest terrain. No hotels, motels or tea rooms line the roads here. There aren’t even houses, never mind commercial ventures. In fact, there are barely any cars going in the opposite direction. You really don’t want to break down out here.

En route to Scrabster, the centre console got doused with water when I had to brake suddenly, causing a badly placed mug on the armrest to shoot forward and spill. There wasn’t a lot of liquid in the mug, but it was enough to make the MMI (which is Audi’s name for the car’s software interface) go haywire, which left us without sat-nav, CD, radio, etc.

Luckily for us, it started to work again a few hours later and seems to be OK now. That was a close call and a huge relief.

The ferry crossing to Orkney was nice, with a nice play area for children and an information area stocked with brochures and free papers about the islands. It wasn’t as busy as the crossings we’ve done in the west, so the lunch queue was short and there was plenty of seating all around the boat. This made for a nice, relaxed atmosphere.

The weather had also cooperated, so we got a good view of the islands as we came in, including a crystal-clear gander at the Old Man of Hoy.

We docked in Stromness on an island confusingly named Mainland. We had seen our hotel from the boat as it docked, so we knew that it was just around the corner from the quay. I checked us in, but didn’t bother to haul our suitcases inside, as that would take too much time and it was already nearly 15:00.

Instead, we drove out to Stenness to look at a couple of sites with standing stones. Afterwards, we came back to Stromness for a mosey around town. It’s an quaint little oddity of a place, paved with flagstones and flanked by a mixture of flowering gardens and drab stone houses. Its backdrop of water and the island of Hoy is indisputably appealing.

There appear to be fewer foreign vehicles here, but perhaps they’re all in Kirkwall. We’re certainly not the only foreign visitors, though, as they were swarming over the couple of sights we visited.

We’re in Ullapool, our first night on the Scottish mainland since Glasgow, which already feels as if it was an eternity ago.

There wasn’t time to do much before our ferry crossing, so we drove out to the beach at Tolsta and had one final play on the fine, golden sands of the Outer Hebrides. After a few days on these tranquil, isolated isles, one starts to forget the mayhem of the real world.

Here, time stands relatively still. I thought that growing up in Cornwall had been a remote, rural experience — and it was — but times have changed. Cornwall is no longer the unbearable cultural backwater that it once was. Broadband Internet and wider, faster roads have brought access to that far flung corner of England. I wonder what growing up there in the age of the Internet would have been like. In the seventies and eighties, it was pure, parochial hell.

The Outer Hebrides, on the other hand, are protected by their geographic isolation. In many ways, these islands are decades behind the mainland and, also in many ways, that’s perhaps no bad thing. Not all change is progress and the Western Isles seem blissfully ignorant of much of the strife of modern life. I’m sure life here has its own challenges — I’m imaginative enough to think of many on my own — but overcrowding, violent crime, issues of multiculturalism and pollution don’t appear to be amongst them. For young children in particular, a childhood spent here is a priceless gift from one’s parents; or so it seems to me in my ignorance.

The ferry crossing today was a relatively long one, at two and a half hours. Happily, there was a children’s play area on deck 5, so we settled there after yet another Caledonian MacBrayne lunch. I must surely be in the running for the world record of most fish and chip meals consumed in one calendar month.

Speaking of which, since we arrived in Scotland, my diet has gone seriously pear-shaped, along with my figure. I can’t imagine how many kilos I’ve gained. It’s back to the crosstrainer for me when we get home.

We arrived in Ullapool at about 17:15. The drive to the hotel was literally just a few hundred metres. Had we not gone to the beach this morning, our drive today would have come in at under 2 km.

Ullapool’s a charming little place and obviously a great base for exploring the surrounding area. Unfortunately for us, we’re spending just a single night here. In fact, it bears the dubious distinction of being the only place in which we’ll spend just a single night on this trip (except for Barvas, but that was down to circumstance, not planning).

Tomorrow morning, we have to be up bright an early for the drive to the far north of the mainland, where we’ll catch the ferry from Scrabster to Stromness in the Orkney Islands.

I’m very excited to be going to the Orkney. I think it’s going to be fantastic and I’m thrilled at the prospect.