Stromness is a small town on the west coast of the West Mainland of Orkney. Its known maritime history encompasses Viking seafarers, the 18th Century herring fishing boom and, these days, a fleet of recreational diving boats taking adventurous folk to explore the World War One wrecks beneath Scapa Flow. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Hoy Sound to the south and the sheltered inlet of Hamnavoe to the east, Stromness faces the sea. We live on the other edge, to the north, just where a town of approximately 2500 souls gives way to fields and moorland. This statement must be tempered with the phrase "for now", for even the peaceful haven that is Orkney is as susceptible as anywhere in the UK to rampant house building and the spread of human habitation at the expense of wildness. Indeed, three houses are imminently to be built around us, lessening the liminal feeling of our home as a place connecting urban and rural. This won't be completely a bad thing, as the new
In case you're wondering, yes, we survived last Sunday's beach clean at Orphir Bay despite the 40+mph winds. Fortunately (although actually unfortunately), there was so much rope on the beach, we were able to weigh down our plastic rubbish bags quite easily. Smaller bits of plastic were trickier to handle in the gusty conditions, for despite plunging the offending piece of litter into a bag, by some sort of venturi effect, it would be whipped back out by the wind. I had to pick up one particularly annoying food wrapper four times 🙄 At a rough guess, 95% of what the group collected was fishing-orientated: rope, string and netting. There was also plenty of parcel strapping and, new for 2024, some discarded coffee pods. The following day saw Megan and I head over to Deerness to carry out some vole monitoring, with the Spring survey for the Orkney Native Wildlife Project. Shortly after beginning the first of our two transects, Megan found a caterpillar of the Ruby Tiger moth clam