Natural highs and lows

On Sunday I helped out with a recce of a walk near the Bay of Skaill. This area is famous as the location of Skara Brae, the 5000 year old Neolithic village, but we were more interested in the current flora and fauna along and around the clifftops. The coastline is cleft with many geos (pronounced with a hard 'G'), which offer nesting sites for all manner of birdlife, principally auks and Fulmars, but with the occasional corvid like this Hooded Crow. For instance, this is Yettna Geo, facing out towards the Atlantic Ocean, and brutal testimony to the erosive force of wave power. There are myriad circular structures in the Orcadian landscape, dating from many time periods, be their origins Neolithic, Bronze Age, Viking, Georgian or wartime 20th Century.  Whilst sat on a clifftop, I noticed a faint outline on a nearby headland, which didn't take too much imagination to be viewed as circular. Closer investigation revealed that it wasn't some previously-undiscovered Neolithi...

Travelling away from Orkney during the pandemic has obviously been severely limited. Aside from attending my dad's funeral in England and a 'same tier' trip to Inverness, my only lockdown journeys have been to do with work. I realise how fortunate I am in being able to have a change of scene (even in the midst of sea-sickness somewhere in the North Sea), as these trips reduce the mental stress of cabin fever. Last week was a case in point, with a visit to attend in Shetland. Twenty four hours outwith Orkney, thirteen of them at sea. With the Covid restrictions, this means that a bleary-eyed blogger was unleashed upon the empty streets of Lerwick at 7.30am, way too soon to be knocking on a customer's door or, perhaps even more importantly, before the shops open. Salvation was at hand in the form of the New Harbour Cafe, which opens its doors at 7am and is a haven until a more sociable hour (not to mention the possibilities for breakfast). On this trip, there was only one...