After our May 30 day in Dover, where a whole new crowd boarded, and an uneventful sea day on the 31st we anchored this morning off Kirkwall on Orkney Island. We were blessed with splendid weather, blue skies and temperature around 60° with no wind (which apparently this island is known for having most of the time). I had a very special tour today which I’ll write about in a moment.
I did get a couple of pretty good photos of Dover and its white cliffs as we sailed away so I'm putting them here.
First a little about Kirkwall and Orkney. Kirkwall is the largest city on Mainland Orkney which is part of the Orkney Islands archipelago. There are about 70 islands in the group but only about 20 are inhabited and they lie just off the tip of northeast Scotland. This island is about 200 sq. miles in area and has a population of close to 18,000 making it the most populous of the group. Like the others in the archipelago it is mainly low-lying with a few rolling hills and at the western end a few sea cliffs.
The island group and Mainland Orkney in particular are fascinating archaeologically. There is lots of evidence that the island was inhabited for at least 10,000 years. Stone age tools from the Neolithic age have been found indicating that there were people here as early as 8000 BC. A charred hazelnut shell dated back to between 6820-6660 BC was found at one excavation. The village of Skara Brae is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements and dates back to 3100 BC. All around the island there are remains like the standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, and the Maeshowe mound grave. As recently as 2021 at a dig scientists discovered two perfectly spherical polished stone balls about the size of a cricket ball in a Neolithic tomb dating to 5500 BC. Because of the importance of the island to archaeologists there is a college here that has a significant archaeology department.
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| This is Skara Brae, the Neolithic settlement |
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| The Ring of Brodgar. No murders went to these two places so I didn't see them. Next time! |
There is some evidence that during the Roman invasion of Britain, a “King of Orkney” was among British rulers who submitted to the Roman emperor Claudius in AD 43, but after that it seems that the Orkneys only became trading ports with the Romans. During the ensuing centuries Picts and Gaels migrated and then some Christian Celtic missionaries. The evidence for this is in the names of some of the islands which have the word “Papa” in their names which was a way to commemorate these missionaries. Then in the late 8th and early 9th centuries the Norwegian settlers came and Viking people began using the islands as home bases for raiding parties against Norway and Scotland. In response a Norwegian king attacked and annexed the Orkneys and the neighboring Shetland islands.
In the late 12th century the Scottish king claimed ownership of the territory in northern Scotland and the Shetlands and Orkneys and after the death of the last Norse earl early in the next century, Norse domination ended and Scottish prominence began. The absorption was complete in the 15th century when a king of Norway failed to pay a dowry when his daughter married a king of Scotland so Scotland completely took over the islands. With this change Scottish entrepreneurs began to arrive and the community became one dominated by farmers, fisherman and merchants instead of what had been a very feudal society dominated by aristocratic families.
The Orcadians (that’s what natives are called) are, I think, pretty clever people. When oil was discovered in the North Sea nearby and the oil companies wanted to use the Orkneys as places to establish transshipment ports and infrastructure to support all the rigs, Orkney made a deal so that they would receive a percentage of every barrel found and passing through their islands. That revenue was used to build schools, community centers, libraries and other human service facilities on the islands. As a result the Orkneys have a better educational system and community services than many places in the mainland UK. It was a wise decision to build those things because now the revenue from the gas and oil fields is beginning to decline. Most of the islanders now are involved in farming and in the largest industry tourism.
Enough about the history of the Orkneys, today I had a wonderful tour with 14 of my fellow shipmates to sites mentioned in “The Killing Stones,” the latest best-selling mystery novel by Ann Cleeves. I’ve mentioned earlier that she was going to be on part of this cruise which really got me excited. Her books and characters were the inspiration for the British TV series Vera and Shetland. Ann accompanied us on our tour and we visited sites in which events, including some murders, occurred in the book.
We had a wonderful local guide named Margot and driver Duncan, both native Orcadians. Margot was born and grew up on a cattle farm on the neighboring Orkney island Westray, the place that the first murder in the book occurred. We didn’t go there because that would involve a ferry ride and we didn’t have time for that. Margot married a fellow farmer from Westray. She lives now on Orkney mainland and was able to give us a wealth of information about life in this place. We set out from Kirkwall heading west on the island. The countryside is very green with rolling hills covered with grass and barley (not the kind that makes good whiskey, but rather makes good feed) and we saw lots of happy cows, mainly dairy ones, and quite a few sheep. Margot, a former cattle farmer, told us something I thought was pretty funny because she apparently doesn’t think much of sheep. She said a sheep gets up every day thinking of ways he can die that day whereas a cow wakes up thinking how much can I eat today.
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| The lush countryside |
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| There are lots of stone walls everywhere. When you have no trees everything gets made of stone. |
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| A happy cow |
Anyway, we passed one of the two freshwater lakes on the island and came then to an overview of Scapa Flow. I mentioned this place a while back when we were in southern England because this is the place that Britain moved its fleet in the world wars in an effort to keep the ships from attack by the Germans. In October 1939, just after the beginning of WWII, a German submarine made a surprise attack in Scapa Flow on the old British battleship HMS Royal Oak. She was sunk and 835 crewmen died. Following the raid Winston Churchill who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, ordered the construction of four permanent barriers around Scapa Flow to prevent future attacks on the fleet. Today those barriers are the causeways connecting a few of the islands. By the way, most of the labor to build the barriers was done by 1300 Italian POWs who had been captured in North Africa and interned in Orkney.
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| These three are photos of Scapa Flow. The thing in the water is an oil rig that's been towed there for either maintenance or demolition |
From there we went to the town of Stromness, the second most populous town on the island and the site of much of the action in the novel. We visited the harbor area and a very nice museum with traveling exhibits of art donated by several very wealthy benefactors of the Orkneys; we walked down the streets and past a church that figures in the story and then had coffee and some wonderful homemade sandwiches and pastries in a coffeehouse in the old town. I sat next to Ann there and I had the opportunity to talk with her about her writing. I was fascinated! She writes one book a year (that’s a lot I think!). I asked if she has a plot outline before she begins writing and she told me she doesn’t. She just begins writing. I asked if when she starts she knows who the killer will be and she told me she doesn’t have that in mind either. She just writes and as things unfold she figures it out as the story moves along. I don’t know; that just seems amazing to me because I thought you would have to have a story outline to begin with and if there’s a villain have him figured out at the beginning.
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| The lady on the right is Ann Cleeves. I wish I could write like her. |
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| At the art gallery they had displays of art and letters done by local children to penpals in Vietnam |
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| Our coffeehouse hosts. The wife made the delectable treats we had |
After leaving Stromness we next visited the Stones of Stenness, what’s left of a ring of standing stones similar to those at Stonehenge but not as intact. It’s thought that these stones are the oldest henge, an enclosure used for rituals not habitation, in the British Isles with evidence they were erected circa 3100 BC. The four remaining standing stones are slabs of stone about a foot thick and about 16 feet tall with sharply angled tops. Originally there were as many as twelve stones. In the 1814 a Captain Mackay who had recently come to Orkney and owned the farmland around the stones decided to remove them because he thought too many people were trespassing on his land. He smashed one, destroyed another and toppled a third before the outraged population stopped him. Unlike Stonehenge you can walk right up to these and touch them. They are cared for now by Historic Environment Scotland and they are part of the Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was a pretty neat experience being able to stand next to and touch something that was crafted by human hands more than 5000 years ago. There is another henge nearby on Orkney called the Ring of Brodgar. That one was a near perfect circle of which 20 stones are still standing. Our tour didn’t take us there because a murder wasn’t committed there, only at Stenness.
Next we went to a place called Maeshowe. Again this was the site of a murder in the book. Maeshowe is what is known as a chambered cairn and passage grave built back in the Neolithic period around 2800 BC. The chambered cairn is a grass-covered mound which houses a grave constructed of large slabs of flagstone and includes a narrow passage leading into a central chamber. What makes this cairn especially important is that the mound, the entry passage and the burial site are aligned so that on the day of the winter solstice as the direct light of the setting sun will pass through the passageway and illuminate the entrance to the burial cell. In the field nearby is a standing stone known as the Barnhouse Stone which was aligned perfectly to lead the pathway to the Maeshowe passageway. I’m astounded by the ability of the people who constructed places like this to align them to catch the sun at specific times, just like is done at Stonehenge on the summer solstice. I didn’t go into the passageway, nor did all but two of my fellow tourists. It is very small and cramped and has no railings or handholds and railings. The ones who did said it was very claustrophic. The interior walls are covered with runic inscriptions which appear to have been made by Norse visitors who broke into the mound in the 12th century. In The Killing Stones a murder happened here, hence our visit.
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| Maeshowe |
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| The entrance |
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| This is the inner chamber from the Historical Society's website |
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| The Barnhouse Stone |
This was the last site we visited on our half day trip and we were brought back to Kirkwall. As we drove back Margot pointed out other sites which are known to contain similar mounds which have not yet been excavated and explored. Apparently Orkney is an archaeologists paradise. It was a very interesting tour and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to hear an author talk about how these places inspired her and it brought the story to life.
I walked around the main pedestrian street in downtown Kirkwall. It is a very charming place actually. There were a number of art galleries and shops selling crafts by local artisans. Something I didn’t know is that Orkney is the silver-smithing center of the UK. There are many well-known silver jewelry designers who work from studios here and some of their things are stunning. It began to look like it was going to rain so I went back to the tender dock and caught one back to the ship. It was a good move because by the time I got back on the ship the rain had started. It was a lovely and interesting day. Next stop Iceland.
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| Main street downtown Kirkwall |
