April 27, 28 & 29: Last-minute backpacking, missing The Old Man & hunting The Stronsay Beast
I feel like we’ve come full circle and now
we’re sitting by the same loch with the same floating stone except that it’s
Wednesday and we leave Orkney tomorrow. Most
of our trip around Scotland has been relatively well planned. We had booked various B&B’s and made note
of things we wanted to see and had, more or less, stuck to these plans. On Monday, we threw caution to the wind and
packed a couple of backpacks and decided to visit some of the islands.
Monday morning went as planned – we visited
the Standing Stones at Stenness, but the weather was shit and we couldn’t see
very well and it was all a bit anticlimactic compared to the scene that had
spread nout in front of us at the Ring of Brodgar. We went into town, planning to do a craft
trail around the main island, buy some jewelry, buy some other bits and pieces
and souvenirs. We got into Kirkwall, found that it was essentially a condensed
craft trail, with every crafter represented in a shop of some kind, and
Nicholas ordered me a pair of earrings I quite liked by a designer called
Sheila Fleet, who has an OBE for services to jewelry. I didn’t know this was a thing.
As is typical, the colour of earring that I liked was shown in the same range but was a sample from the workshop, but the friendly girl in the shop said they could have it enameled by that afternoon. We had a couple of hours to kill, so decided to find somewhere with wifi for lunch so we could contact our families and check in on AIrBnB, etc. We found a cosy, Viking-inspired pub in Kirkwall with pretty good internet and, while we were waiting for our food, we thought we’d check out the ferry prices to visit some of the other islands. I had in my head that I wouldn’t mind visiting Stronsay, purely because a ‘monster’ washed up there and it was probably a decomposing basking shark. We decided to skip the craft trail and do a day trip to Stronsay. You can’t do a day trip to Stronsay, so we’d have to take the tent. We couldn’t do a day trip to Stronsay until Tuesday afternoon and we had 24 hours until then, and no craft trail takes that long.
The Standing Stones at Stenness are 5m high
The Cuween Chambered Cairn, which we stopped off at on the way into Kirkwall
The Chambered Cairn
This is a face that says 'it's not easy to get out of here'
The photos of this cairn make up for the lack of photographs of Maeshowe!
There was a pony guarding the tomb, so we fed him a sneaky carrot!
“I wouldn’t mind going to Hoy and seeing
the Dwarfie Stane,” said Nick.
So we decided to get the ferry to Hoy,
which left in little over an hour.
We hurriedly packed our bags, picked up the
earrings, drove to Stromness where the ferry left from, and literally ran for
the ferry (which we didn’t actually need to, because it had to wait for a bunch
of schoolchildren who went to the school on Stromness).
In this hour of madness and packing and
preparing, we had all but forgotten about Orkney’s terrifying, unpredictable
weather that had left us sleeping in the car for the last two nights. Now we had no car, only the tent, and we
hoped that the wind would let up long enough for us to pitch it.
Thirty minutes later, we arrived at
Hoy. The ferry made a short stopover at
Graemsay on the way, and we got up to leave.
A middle-aged man who looked a bit like the KFC Colonel chuckled at
us. “You’re not getting off here,” he
said. Graemsay appears to have two lighthouses,
a church and literally nothing else.
We’d planned to walk to Rackwick, where you
can leave to do the walk up the hill to the Old Man of Hoy, which is another
sea stack. The walk to Rackwick was
something around 8km, going via the Dwarfie Stane. A friendly man with a boarder collie and some
fishing gear in the back of his car offered us a lift, which I panicked and
declined, which we later regretted. We
decided that if anybody else offered us a lift, we would take it. We doubted that islands with only a couple of
hundred people would be full of murderers.
Nicholas sitting in the Dwarfie Stane
The Dwarfie Stane is a huge rock that had
slid down the hill beside it after the last Ice Age (I think). It was probably a tomb, but when it was
investigated, it had been raided of anything it had housed. The tomb had a door – a huge chunk of the
same slab of rock that the tomb was made of – that seemed to slot well into the
entrance, forming an impenetrable, sealed tomb.
When it was raided, the thieves broke through the roof of the tomb,
where the rock was thinner and somehow got out, somehow removing the chunk of
rock in the entrance. Nicholas and I
pondered over how on earth somebody could get the rock out – it wasn’t a ‘put
your back against it and push against the rear wall’ job. It was a huge rock.
Another hour later, we arrived at
Rackwick. We had seen on the map that
there was a Bothy, which we had heard existed in Scotland, but not yet
encountered. Bothy’s are a kind of
shelter, which can be anything from a fully decked out cabin, to a concrete
box. The one at Rackwick was something
in between. As we approached it, I was
hesitant that what was ahead of us was a Bothy, because it looked a bit too nice. It was the Bothy, though, and it was nice,
though a little smoky inside (we read in the guest book that somebody had tried
to use the fireplace and smoked the place up) and other guests had set about
burning the minimal furniture inside.
There was a stone wall that surrounded the garden (garden here refers to
‘a patch of well-maintained grass and several circle pits for fire’) so we
decided to pitch the tent there, using the wall for shelter. We did, however, cook our food in the shelter
of the Bothy, which meant our water boiled far more quickly. It was a relief to be out of the wind for a
while.
A few days ago, the citizens of Hoy had
joined at the Bothy for a project called “Bag the Bruck” which was a community
project to clean up the litter that came in from the sea onto the beaches. They asked that if anybody stayed at the
Bothy, they pick up some rubbish too, so we head out onto the cold, windy,
briny beach to sift through the detritus.
We think we found a North Ronaldsay sheep, with horns so brightly red
they looked like $2 devil horns and a decaying stomach full of seaweed and a
couple of shells.
The devil sheep
Some treasures on the windowsill at the Bothy
Our tent pitched out front of the Bothy
The night was quite windy and cold, and we
woke several times to hear rain pounding heavily on the roof of the tent. When
we woke, it was still relentlessly beating down, and we stuck our heads out to
find that it was, in fact, pellets of hail.
We looked up to the hill that gives the view of The Old Man, and there
was a whiteout there, because the hail and snow was falling so thickly. We decided to seek shelter in the Bothy and
skip the walk up because walking along the edge of a cliff during a whiteout
doesn’t sound safe or appealing. When
the weather calmed down and we’d had some breakfast, we went walking along the
beach, bagging some more bruck, and looking out for nesting seabirds in the
cliffs.
The weather after the snow
Oh, these are my earrings!
This is definitely not a rock, but the egg of a sea monster
Our tent minutes before we pulled it down
-
This friendly highland cow moved into the passing place for us to walk along the road
Instead of walking along the road for the
walk back to Moaness, where the ferry left from, we decided to take the ‘short
cut road’ which was advertised as Not Suitable For Peddle-Cycles. It certainly wasn’t suitable for
peddle-cycles, or any other kind of cycle, because it was primarily bog. We did find some ponies though who, in the
absence of carrots, tried to eat my Goretex.
We also found some shaggy Highland cows (or coos, depending on who you ask)
who didn’t really care about us at all.
There were a lot of sheep, but they just bleated at us and ran
away. The lambs would come over
curiously, then hear the bleat, then run away from us and start suckling at
their mother.
Leaving Hoy
I want to make an A-Hoy joke, but nothing springs to mind. This was the bay at Moaness.
We were the only ones on the ferry back
this time – just us and some cargo (probably letters) to go back to the
mainland. For an island with less than
300 people, there were a lot of letterboxes on Hoy.
There were a few hours to allow us a break
before the ferry to Stronsay (pronounced like STRON-zee not stron-SAY which is
how I’d been pronouncing it). We popped
by a café in Stromness called Julia’s, where I had some more Fentiman’s
lemonade, which is the best lemonade, and Nicholas had Macaroni Cheese and some
tea. Fearing that we wouldn’t be so
lucky and find another Bothy to seek enough shelter to boil water, we washed
out the thermos and boiled enough water to fill it, taking the full thermos
with us instead of the cooker and gas.
This proved to be a very good idea.
We were running for the ferry as they were
about to pull out of the harbour.
“Are you going to Stronsay?” Nick called
out.
“Yes, but you’re late!” yelled the master,
who was standing on the stairs.
He let us on though, and we ran onto the
boat and up the stairs of the ferry, which was much larger than the ferry that
went to Hoy. This one had room for cars
(and three lorries).
For the first hour of the trip, I
napped. I think Nicholas went and looked
at the water. When he came back, I went
to the loo and came back to find him in conversation with a portly old man with
a very soft-spoken, quiet voice,
“This is Colin,” said Nick, “he’s going to
give us a lift to Rothiesholm Beach.”
Rothiesholm (pronounced like ROO-sum) is where the monster that was
probably just a basking shark was found, so we were doing a bit of a pilgrimage
there. Rothiesholm wasn’t on Colin’s
way, but he said he didn’t mind. I was a
bit tentative to accept a lift, but we decided that after our last walk to
Rackwick we weren’t going to turn down any lifts anywhere, so when the ferry
docked, we hopped into his car and began the drive to Rothiesholm.
Colin had been over on the main island for
a meeting with the Orkney Board or something, and to get the roadworthy for his
car. He had come to Orkney to retire,
wanting to retire by the sea after living in England as a schoolteacher for
most of his life. So far, his retirement
had been filled with odd jobs. He now
had 9 jobs. One was the relief janitor
at the school, which had thirty odd students.
We don’t know about the others, though.
He asked why we were coming to Stronsay,
because they didn’t get many tourists there.
I was a bit embarrassed having to explain that I was doing a pilgrimage
to a site where they thought they’d found a monster but didn’t.
“Anastaszia is an artist,” Nick told him,
“and she’s very interested in things that wash up on beaches and monsters.”
“And I hear there’s a lot of seals here,” I
added hurriedly.
“There are lots of seals in Stronsay,”
Colin replied.
There are around 250 people living on
Stronsay and literally thousands of seals.
There’s a little island nearby that now operates solely as a wildlife
reserve for seal breeding.
Colin also knew everybody on board. There’s another small island very close to
Stronsay called Papa Stronsay, and only monks live there. Colin knew the monks all by name, and he
waved goodbye to them as they got off the ferry and onto the little tinny that
takes you over to Papa Stronsay. He also
knew Jim, who drove the lorries back and forth between Stronsay and the main
island all day every day. As we drove,
he pointed out the shop and waved to everybody and pointed out Dave’s geese,
which were crossing the road.
“Do you know everyone on The Island?” I
asked.
“Oh, yes,” Colin replied, chuckling. “Oh,
there’s no need to do up your seatbelt.
There’s no police on The Island,” he added, as Nick and I buckled up.
“We wondered about the emergency services
in Orkney,” I replied.
“Well, there’s no police here. They come over here sometimes, but they
always let us know, so we know to do our seatbelts up then.” He laughed at this.
“What about crime? What about emergencies?”
“Well, there’s no crime on The Island,”
said Colin. “No burglary, no theft… No
crime at all. I haven’t even locked my
door when I came here today. I just
leave my keys in my car. There’s no
crime at all!”
I felt like this was the time that the
doors all locked and we were whisked away to be murdered on The Island, but he
dropped us at Rothiesholm Sands, apologized for the bags of rubbish on the bay
(“There’s just been the Bag the Bruck project!” he explained) and waved
goodbye.
We were left on a suspiciously
tropical-looking beach, with very clear, pale blue water, white sands and large
pebbles rubbed perfectly round. The wind
had let up for the most part and it was almost warm (in two layers of thermals,
stockings, jeans, a puffer jacket and a windcheater) so we pitched the tent to
go and wander along the beach.
Our view for the night in Stronsay
Every now and then, Nicholas would come to me with a handful of detritus - a 'collection', he called it - and would lay them on the sand for me to inspect
There were lots of things to be found, and
it was a gleaner’s paradise on Rothiesholm.
Even after most of the man-made debris had been collected, there were
bits and pieces for us to collect. There
were shells, not dissimilar to those found in Melbourne, but three or four
times the size. Obviously, we wouldn’t
be able to get those through customs, so we scoured for non-organic things to
collect as souvenirs. I found a white
plastic horse, and Nicholas found a big blue plastic hook, and several
electronic things to tinker with and dismantle. Obviously, all the good stuff needed to be
left behind. We found ribs that were
almost definitely whale in origin, and various pelvis bones, vertebrae (of
varying sizes) and many chest bones belonging to birds. For an hour or two, we walked along, until we
spied glossy black bumps in the water following us around the bay.
At one point I called out, "Nick, I found a horse!" We took it home with us.
A bone belonging to a whale... or the Stronsay Beast?
Another 'collection'
Every time we started to move around, more
little heads would bob above the water, very occasionally enough to show us a
long, mottled neck. All in all, there
was probably something like 30 seals swimming around the bay, all keeping a
close eye on us. Hesitantly, curiously,
they would swim up a little closer to us and keep little more than their eyes
above the water. The sun had gone a
dusky pink, the clouds all brightly illuminated by the setting sun, making the
sky look like some kind of chapel ceiling. All it lacked were winged cherubs. The sky was almost perfectly reflected in the
windswept sea in front of us, and the seals were creating more ripples and
commotion. It was all a bit magic. It was also cold, though, so we hurried back
into the tent and out of the wind chill.
A little seal friend who was desperately curious to know what we were doing and who we were
The sunset at Rothiesholm Sands
We woke up with the sun the following
morning, and head down to Rothiesholm Head, walking along the beach past flocks
of nesting fulmars (did you know they’re related to albatrosses?) and hopping
over rocks in the sunshine. The wind was
taking another break, so it was a pleasant walk along the beach, finding many
more bones – from sheep skulls to more whale bones to many shags and other
birds. We found one seal washed up,
whole but for his eyes, and Nicholas proclaimed we’d found another Stronsay
beast.
Every now and then we would check over our
shoulders and see more curious seals, bobbing up over the surface of the water,
keeping an eye on us. One followed us
for a few kilometers, before deciding we probably weren’t going to come out for
a swim. Another was frightened away by
some aggressive fulmars.
This washed up jelly reminded me of some of my artwork from 3rd year art school
Hello!
A huge, perfect urchin we found on the beach
Taken about 2km after the last seal picture, he was still keeping an eye on us
Come ashore, selkie friend!
We found lots and lots of flint washed up, too - if we get transported back to Neolithic Orkney, we've got tools!
It was almost midday when we went back to
the tent for some brunch and to pack up camp.
Carefully avoiding stepping in any of the surrounding rabbit holes
(rabbit holes by the beach is the most surreal thing) we packed up, making sure
we left no trace, and head toward the opposite side of Stronsay, to Kirbister’s
Vat.
Stronsay is an island that is aptly
described as being ‘all arms and legs’, so we had quite a way to walk to the
Kirbister, which was a rocky cliff face filled with nesting fulmars. We got a little bit lost on our way, wandered
into a field of lambing ewes, were picked up by a farmer and driven to the
correct path. Crashing waves pounded
down around us at the Vat, sending spray all the way up the cliffs. One small waterfall attempted to drip down
between some of the seabirds, but the wind was so powerful that it blew
upwards, wetting us instead. There were
two sea stacks by the vat, one that showed the base of a Christian hermitage
built upon the stack, as a safety measure.
How they got supplies and things up there, we’re not entirely sure. They did, eventually decide to move though, and
found themselves over on Papa Stronsay which is a less dangerous place to build
a hermitage.
The arch at the Vat of Kirkbister
Here there used to be a Christian Hermitage atop the stack. Now the only ones brave enought o live here are nesting Fulmars
Fulmars!
The waterfall running upside-down
From here it was another 8km back to the
village where the ferry left from, so we set off on a relatively uneventful
journey, hoping in vain that another friendly Orcadian would pick us up and
take us to the ferry terminal. We arrived
with sore feet and a little hungry, but had racked up close to 30k’s all up, so
decided we were well-deserving of whatever pub meal awaited us back at
Kirkwall.
We found ourselves back in the same Viking
pub, this time playing Mumford and Sons instead of 80’s hits, had macaroni
cheese with ale in, and then fell asleep in the freshly heated seats of the
Vauxhall, too exhausted from our adventures to consider pitching a tent.
If I’ve tickled your interest in the
Stronsay Beast, you can read more about it here http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/seabeasts.htm
.
About the Author
0 comments