October In Orkney 2002

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October In Orkney 2002 Photos

STROMNESS, Orkney, Scotland. Outside, the cold rain is driven sideways by a relentless wind. The ferries have been canceled, and I am stranded. My traveling companion, who must be back to work in a day, has abandoned me, catching a flight out at the tiny airport at Kirkwall. There is nothing to do in this weather but what I am doing—having a pint and a dram at the Stromness Hotel, watching the raindrops pelt the windows. I couldn’t be happier.

It pays to be flexible, and traveling in Scotland in October gives you a flexibility impossible in midsummer. I started visiting late-season because I had no choice, but quickly found it an ideal time to wander the country in a rental car. Most tourist sites are open through the month, but the summer crowds are gone, and, with a little care, finding lodging daily is not a problem. Yes, the weather is iffy, but if that bothers you, well, you’re in the wrong place, anyway.

The place…I’ve been to most every corner of Scotland, from Edinburgh to Lewis to Shetland to Islay. There is no place as magical as Orkney. I visited these mysterious isles on my first trip to Scotland, dashing around the main island for a day and a half, trying to see the astonishing array of archeological sites as quickly as possible. I realized that I was giving the place short shrift, and vowed to return. This year I planned a week, but when my good friend Harry decided to come along, we reduced it to five nights to suit his schedule. Three more nights were dedicated to the loop around the northern mainland.

Tuesday

I pick Harry up at the airport in Inverness, the figurative capital and transportation hub of the Highlands, and we drive to the west coast ferry port of Ullapool. Along the way, we visit the evocative remains of Urquhart Castle on the western shore of Loch Ness. A visitor center has been added since last I was there, which not only helps to provide some focus to this extremely popular site, but also is remarkably sensitive to the surrounding landscape. Historic Scotland is the agency responsible for maintaining and interpreting this and hundreds of other archeological, cultural, and historical sites across the country.

We arrive in Ullapool late in the afternoon, a bit too late to take advantage of the souvenir shops along the front street. It’s a small but pretty town, the gateway to the Outer Hebrides, and our room at the Waterside House has a view of the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry awaiting departure for Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. I can feel the pull of the Western Isles, but my return there will have to wait for another year. We eat a serviceable meal at a large pub in the center of town, and then retire to the Ferryboat Inn.

I have picked the Ferryboat out of a book called The Good Beer Guide to Great Britain, which is published by CAMRA. CAMRA is the Campaign for Real Ale, a British consumer organization that champions the cause of traditional cask-conditioned ales. These are the beers Americans often think of as warm and flat, although they are neither. Properly served at cellar temperature and subtly carbonated, real ales are a uniquely British product, and once the taste is acquired, nothing else can possibly measure up. Deuchars IPA is a fine Scottish example, and is in fact the first Scottish beer to win CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Britain award.

CAMRA also concerns itself with the traditional British pub experience, and most any pub in its guide is worth a visit. The Ferryboat is no exception. It’s small and rather smoky, and as pubs go, it's a bit short of physical charm. But the bartender this evening is a schoolteacher who fills in on occasion, and we are engaged in a wide-ranging conversation that touches on politics, history, and geography. This is Harry's introduction to pub culture, and he is impressed.

Wednesday

In the morning we drive up the west coast and across the north coast of Scotland. It is spectacular country, and well off the beaten path. Harry, normally a fidgety passenger, is happy to let me negotiate the single-track roads and passing places. It’s not difficult, as long as you remember always to keep left. We take a couple hours’ hike to the Point of Stoer, explore the spacious Smoo Cave, and pass an hour on one of the many achingly beautiful beaches along the way, collecting shells for the aquarium at home. In a shop in Durness, we are amused by the peculiar flavors of crisps—potato chips—available, and grab a packet of Roasted Chicken & Thyme. We arrive in Thurso later than we’d meant to, and do not check in at the ferry terminal in nearby Scrabster, as originally planned. Our B&B is disappointing, but the Station Hotel has a pretty good restaurant, and Top Joe’s Bar has added cask ale since my last visit, so the evening is not a total loss.

Thursday

We rise early to catch our scheduled 6:45 ferry. This route was operated for years by P&O, but the contract has just recently been awarded to a new company called Northlink. I booked our passage online long before our trip. What no one has bothered to tell us is that the brand-new Northlink ferry is much too large for the pier at Scrabster, and the new government-built pier is months behind schedule. A smaller ship has been leased from Caledonian MacBrayne (a partner in Northlink), and the schedule has been adjusted. Our 6:45 crossing departed at 5:30. The next crossing is at 2:00pm, much too late for us to make our planned connection to one of the outlying islands.

We are doubly fortunate. There is another service departing from Gill’s Bay, 15 miles to the east, at 9:45. (I’d planned to use this ferry on our return trip.) And it’s October, and we don’t have to worry about it being booked up. We sit in the parking lot at Gill’s Bay; Harry pops a DVD into his laptop. We plug the audio into the rental car’s cassette player and pass an incongruous hour listening to Jethro Tull.

The crossing of the Pentland Firth is uneventful, if a bit rough; the ferry has to make two attempts at docking. We disembark in St. Margaret’s Hope on the southeastern island of South Ronaldsay. It’s the third largest town in Orkney, tiny as it is, but we have no time to check it out, as we are well behind schedule. We are booked on a ferry to the northern isle of Sanday in the afternoon. South Ronaldsay is connected to the main island of Orkney, called Mainland, by a series of causeways called the Churchill Barriers, built during World War II to discourage the passage of German warships. Scapa Flow, the rectangular body of water bounded by Mainland and the southern isles, is the final resting place of a scuttled WWI German fleet, and is very popular with divers.

We drive toward Kirkwall, the capital and largest town in Orkney. To the west of town stands Wideford Hill, and a short hike up the side of the hill brings us to Wideford Hill Chambered Cairn.

Orkney is positively lousy with archeological sites. That’s why we’re here. A number of factors make this a prehistorian’s paradise. One is that there are few trees here, and ancient communities built everything with the flat slabs of stone that are so readily available in Orkney. Another is that the climate changed at some point several thousand years ago, turning fine agricultural land into peat bog, and driving away rich schools of fish. Whole villages were abandoned and covered by storm-driven sands, only to be uncovered again by storms many centuries later. Such sites are still being discovered today. Most of Orkney’s ancient sites are between 2,500 and 5,000 years old.

One of the hallmarks of the early communities of the northern Scottish Highlands is the chambered tomb or chambered cairn. Wideford Hill is a splendid example. No one knows exactly how these tombs were used, but they are certainly burial sites of some kind. Typically, they have a low, narrow passageway into a central chamber, which is usually high enough to stand up in. There are several side chambers, in which usually have been found human remains and a variety of artifacts. The whole is built of stone, with a corbelled roof in the main chamber. At Wideford Hill, access is through the roof, rather than the very tight passageway; the capstone that normally tops the main chamber is missing, and has been replaced by a sliding hatch and a ladder. If you don’t mind crawling in the dampness, you can see the fine capstones atop the side chambers. Historic Scotland provides a flashlight at many of these tombs, but it doesn’t hurt to bring your own.

We drive back into Kirkwall and board the afternoon ferry for Sanday (pronounced “Sandy”—“ay” is the Orkney variant of the Old Norse word for island, seen elsewhere as “ey” or “oy”). We land an hour and a half later and check in at the Kettletoft Hotel. It’s late in the day, and we rush off to see the spectacular Quoyness Chambered Tomb, much like Wideford Hill, but much larger, and situated on flat ground near the beach. Nearby are the overgrown ruins of a dozen other cairns. As darkness falls, we return to the Kettletoft. Our accommodations are a bit spartan, but dinner in the pub is decent. There is a cask ale at the bar, but alas, it needs to settle another day, and we make do with one of the draught beers, which are not so bad. Behind the bar, sitting in a small dish, is a potato, with facial features made from various vegetables, and sprouts representing hair. “Who’s that?” I ask the lively barmaid. “Oh, that's Mr. Tattie Heid,” she bubbles (pronouncing the latter word “heed”). Harry will call me by that name ever after. I have called him “Blindhæd” since our visit to Iceland a few years ago, after the road sign there denoting a blind summit.

Friday

In the morning we have time to take a drive out along one of the many beaches which give Sanday its name, with a view of the largely sunken remains of a German destroyer from WWI. We are suffering today; the Roasted Chicken & Thyme crisps we bought in Durness have left our lips desiccated—nay, mummified. We stop into a shop to look for some sort of lip balm. The tiny shop reminds me of the one in the movie Local Hero, the kind of place where you can get most anything. If they don’t have it, you don’t need it. An older woman arrives on a motor scooter and shops with her helmet on. Another older woman (the flight of youth from these remote isles is a major problem) asks our help in getting something off an upper shelf. Four customers make for a very crowded shop. We ask our new friend for help in finding lip balm. There are two types—regular (which turns out to taste like soap) and strawberry. “Strawberry, that’s good for kissy-kissy,” she tells us. “Not with him,” I answer, and we all laugh. We buy our lip balm, and as we drive away, Helmet Lady zips off up the road. Upper Shelf Lady is just getting into her car. Harry leans out the window and calls, “Kissy-kissy!” and blows her a kiss. She blows one back.

By midday we are back in Kirkwall. Harry has some business to conduct and goes off in search of an internet café. I take a quick run through the Orkney Museum in Tankerness House, which recounts the archipelago’s history, from Neolithic and Iron Age settlement through the medieval earldom of the Vikings and on into 20th century military history. I’ve seen much of this information in various other sources, notably the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, so I feel no need to linger; but the museum gives an excellent overall picture.

We meet up again inside the extraordinary St. Magnus Cathedral, the northernmost in Britain. The bulk of construction was done in the first half of the 12th century, although there have been additions over the years, and of course numerous patches and repairs. I can’t recall seeing any other religious structures in Scotland of this vintage that have survived the Reformation intact. The sandstone gives the interior a warm glow unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This is a truly awesome place.

In the choir is a monument to one of my heroes, the 19th century arctic explorer Dr. John Rae. Dr. Rae worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, which recruited heavily in Orkney, and is credited with discovering the fate of the Franklin expedition, lost in search of the Northwest Passage. He was disdained by English society, however, both for having “gone native” in his explorations, and for reporting evidence of cannibalism amongst Franklin’s starving crew. For more information on Rae and the search for the Passage, read Pierre Berton’s book, The Arctic Grail.

We leave Kirkwall and head toward Stromness. A few miles outside the latter lie several of the more spectacular ancient monuments of Orkney—the Standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, and Maes Howe. The Stenness stones are the remnants of a larger array, tantalizingly incomplete. Brodgar is more readily appreciated, if no better understood—a large ring of standing stones in a picturesque setting on an isthmus between two lochs, one salt and one fresh, with the imposing hills of the southern island of Hoy in the background. It’s a place that makes you want to linger, and indeed, Harry will ask to revisit it later in the trip, despite a miserable rain.

Maes Howe is the most impressive of all the chambered tombs, rivaled in my experience only by Newgrange in Ireland. Built of neatly cut stones, its passageway is high enough to walk through bent over. As at Newgrange, the setting sun shines down the passageway for a few days on either side of the winter solstice. The neatness of the main chamber is spoiled only by the concrete cover over the top, made necessary by Vikings, who, unable to find the passageway some thousand years ago, broke in through the top, looking for treasure. The runic graffiti they carved into the walls indicate that this room was for them a place for illicit assignations: “Many a woman has lowered herself to enter this place,” reads one inscription archly. The British historian Simon Schama, in his BBC television series, A History of Britain, translates another as “Ingebjorg is one horny bitch.”

Maes Howe is one of several Historic Scotland sites in Orkney that charge a modest admission fee. A discount pass is available for all of these, at the visitor center for any of them.

We check into our lodging in Stromness, the Orca Hotel. The name evokes not only killer whales, but also the Roman name for the islands, Orcades. Our hosts are a remarkable couple: a striking Austrian woman named Doris, and her energetic partner Malcolm, a Geordie (i.e. from the northern English county of Northumbria). It is more a guesthouse than a hotel, but the hotel license allows them to serve alcohol in their excellent basement restaurant, Bistro 76.

Stromness is smaller than Kirkwall, with fewer services, but it has a charm that stems in part from its Nordic heritage. Stone houses turn their gable ends to the water, and the winding mile-long main street is more friendly to pedestrians than to cars. The town stretches along the waterfront, pushing only a few blocks up the hillside. Almost every house has a splendid view.

Dinner and pints this evening are in the Stromness Hotel, listed in The Good Beer Guide, naturally. The featured ale is the local Orkney Brewery’s Red MacGregor. A small bar off the main room serves a fine array of single malt Scotch whiskies, including several from the local Scapa and Highland Park distilleries. The famed beer and whisky writer Michael Jackson (no, not that Michael Jackson) calls Highland Park “the greatest all-rounder in the world of malt whisky”. We are hoping to have a visit there in the next few days, but will not find the time.

Saturday

In the morning we catch a ferry to Hoy, “High Island”, the hilliest in Orkney. Our intent is to take a three-hour hike to view the Old Man of Hoy, a 450-foot pillar off the western cliffs. We have managed so far to shield ourselves from Orkney’s mutable and blustery weather, but on this day we will be exposed. An odd kind of luck is with us. We are subjected to a five-minute squall about every half-hour, as is typical here this time of year. But, instead of rain, we are pelted by a fine, light hail, which bounces harmlessly off us, leaving us comfortably dry. The Old Man is a fabulous sight, as are the cliffs.

On the drive back to the ferry, we have time to visit Hoy’s other two famous sites. The first is the bizarre Dwarfie Stane, a presumed chambered tomb cut into a single large boulder. We crawl through the opening and find two rectangular chambers, one to either side. We lie inside and proceed to test the echoic qualities of the stone’s interior. When Harry softly hums the lowest note he can, it reverberates loudly through the chamber. We are simultaneously spooked and amused, and spend the next ten minutes humming and laughing.

Our laughter dies when we visit Orkney’s saddest spot, the grave of Betty Corrigal. In the 18th century, Betty was charmed by the false promises of a sailor, who subsequently flew the coop, leaving Betty pregnant and alone. Shamed, she committed suicide. Neither of Hoy’s parishes would give a Christian burial to a suicide, and so her lonely grave lies on a desolate moor, on the border between the two. Some years ago a Christian service was finally read over her.

Back on Mainland, we visit the remains of the Round Church at Orphir, which stand next to the ruins of a Viking drinking hall, the Earl’s Bu. The Viking-era church survived nearly intact until the mid-18th century, when much of its stone was pilfered for another church. Ironically, this replacement church no longer exists. The Bu was excavated by an archeologist who divined its location from clues in the Orkneyinga Saga. Adjacent is the small Orkneyinga Saga Museum, which gives a summary of that saga’s history of the Viking earls of Orkney. Along with Shetland to the north, the islands were a Norwegian possession until the mid-15th century, when they were used as collateral for the promised dowry of Princess Margaret when she married James III of Scotland. The dowry was never paid, and the two archipelagos were annexed to Scotland. There is a fringe group in Norway today that wants the country to pay the dowry and reclaim the two island chains.

Bistro 76 is surprisingly crowded this evening, and we share a long table with two women who studiously ignore us. When we mention this to Malcolm the next morning, he is puzzled, until we tell him that our tablemates were English. He laughs knowingly. Geordies are regarded as unsophisticated bumpkins by southerners—the next closest thing to Scots. Malcolm is anything but unsophisticated, but regional stereotypes and prejudices are as alive in the UK as they are in the US. To be fair, what seemed unfriendly to us was probably a matter of being polite to the reserved Londoners, similar to the way we would behave in a crowded elevator. Or maybe they just didn’t like our looks.

Sunday

In the morning we set out to see the Viking ruins on the Brough of Birsay, an island accessible only at low tide. Harry has a thing about Vikings—so do I, actually—and I sold him this trip on the strength of Orkney’s Nordic heritage. The ruins are interesting, but there isn’t really much showing above the ground. Harry is more taken by a nearby headland where he stands on low-lying rocks, nearly surrounded by the crashing sea. He is in a trance for some time.

Down the coast a way lies Orkney’s signature attraction, Skara Brae. This little Neolithic village lay covered by sand for thousands of years, until a storm revealed it in 1850. One of the oldest known settlements in Europe, it has given archeologists many important clues about Britain’s earliest civilizations. The roofless houses contain central hearths, box beds, dressers, and other furnishings, all made of thin slabs of stone. Outside the small museum at the entry is a complete replica of one of the houses, giving the visitor a good feeling for what life in Orkney might have been like 5,000 years ago.

In Kirkwall, we explore the medieval ruins of the Earl’s Palace and the Bishop’s Palace, across the street from the cathedral. The tower of the Bishop’s palace gives a fine view over the church.

We catch a late afternoon ferry for the northern isle of Westray. We have spent some time debating whether it will be worth the visit since we found out two days ago that the winter ferry schedule will leave us very little daylight for exploration. It’s possible to plan a full day’s trip to any of the outer islands, but we are running on a very tight itinerary. We land and check into our hotel in the village of Pierowall. The semicircular bay is as pretty as any in Orkney, but the town is very small, and the hotel is, shall we say, rustic. We run up the road to the gloomy ruin of Noltland Castle, finding the key to the keep hanging by the door of an adjacent farmhouse. A full moon rises over the bay as we poke through the castle in the gathering darkness.

The trip to Westray is made worthwhile by dinner and pints at the Cleaton House Hotel, two miles outside town. Food and drink are both excellent, and the innkeeper (another Malcolm) is friendly. He turns us on to some of the local music, including a band called Three Peace Sweet, who have made a song out of an English soldier’s wartime lament called Bloody Orkney:

All bloody clouds, all bloody rain
No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains
The Council's got no bloody brains
In bloody Orkney!

I make a mental note to stay at Cleaton House the next time I go to Westray.

Monday

We are back in Kirkwall in the morning, and have time for another business break at the internet café and a little shopping before catching the ferry to Rousay. We are mainly interested in Orcadian music and purchase CD’s by Three Peace Sweet, Flook, and the Wrigley Sisters. Harry also buys some locally made, rune-inspired jewelry for his marvelously tolerant wife.

Rousay is very close to Mainland, but is sparsely populated. The attraction here is a four-mile stretch containing several unusual tombs and a ruined Iron Age broch—a circular stone tower peculiar to northern Scotland. Taversoe Tuick is a rare two-storied cairn, with chambers one atop the other, each with its own entrance. A modern ladder connects the two rooms from the inside now. Blackhammar Cairn is a good example of a stalled cairn, its long interior chamber divided into several spaces by doorways formed of upright stone slabs.

To reach the Midhowe site, we must walk down a long hill, across stone-walled pastureland. We are startled to find the field jumping with rabbits, which scatter like cockroaches as we approach. They are so numerous, you can squint at them in the distance and almost imagine them as vast herds of bison.

Even in its ruinous state, the Midhowe Cairn is stunning. It’s a huge stalled cairn, perhaps a hundred feet long, and is nicknamed “the great ship of death”. Unfortunately, it has been reduced to a height of a few feet, leaving the chamber open. A large, hangar-like building has been built around it, and catwalks provide the visitor with an overhead view. The overall impression is very odd; I’ve never seen a site like this.

Nearby is the Midhowe Broch. The shattered central tower is surrounded by the remnants of a variety of domestic buildings. It mirrors the Broch of Gurness across the water on mainland, one of Historic Scotland’s best-maintained and interpreted sites. Unfortunately, Harry will not get a chance to see it.

It’s late in the afternoon, and it has begun to rain, so we cut short our visit at Midhowe and trudge back up the long hill to the car. We check in at the tiny Taversoe Hotel, where its new proprietors are busy building an addition. At the moment, there are exactly two rooms, and Harry and I each get one—an October perk. Tourism is problematic on Rousay; it is close enough to Mainland that most visitors make daytrips, and there are few services on the island. The Taversoe’s pub is officially closed on Monday (although our hosts are happy to pour us a beer), so we spend the evening at the Pier Restaurant, back by the ferry landing. We note that it’s up for sale.

Tuesday

We start the day by driving the ring road around Rousay. All of Orkney is pretty much treeless and stark, but Rousay seems especially so, perhaps because there is so little population.

Back on Mainland, we stop briefly in Kirkwall for last-minute souvenirs before heading down to St. Margaret’s Hope to catch our ferry. We have just enough time to see the Italian Chapel on the way. It’s a touching place, a house of worship built from a Nissen hut (that’s a Quonset hut to us Yanks) by Italian prisoners of war, whose labor was being used to build the Churchill Barriers during World War II. It’s a thing of beauty made from virtually nothing, with a false façade and a trompe-l’oeil interior. The Italian architect who supervised the original construction returned in 1960 to do some restoration, and a number of surviving POW’s returned a few years ago, on the chapel’s 50th anniversary, speaking movingly of the kindness of the Orcadians and the place Orkney held in their hearts.

Had we two more hours, I would take Harry down to the privately owned Tomb of the Eagles at the southern tip of South Ronaldsay. There he would hold a 5,000-year-old skull in his hands, view a Bronze Age settlement, and walk along the cliffs to the spectacularly situated tomb, as I did on my earlier visit. Again, we don’t have the time. Despite my best effort, I have once more given Orkney short shrift. But I have fallen in love with the place, and know I will be back soon. Having spent two visits dashing madly about Orkney’s myriad attractions, I hope to spend some time settling into the slower rhythm of island life.

We arrive in St. Margaret’s Hope just in time to find out that our ferry has been canceled. The wind is blowing from the south, with enough force to make docking at Gill’s Bay impossible. We quickly find a phone and call Northlink in Stromness. They tell us they are still running. We have plenty of time to catch the next trip, so we stop at the airport outside Kirkwall on the way, just to cover the possibilities. Harry has to catch a flight out of Inverness early tomorrow morning. He finds a flight headed there late in the afternoon and books it—he can cancel if the ferry actually runs. We arrive in Stromness just in time to find out that the Northlink ferry is canceled, too. A helpful woman at the tourist information desk helps Harry book a B&B close to the airport in Inverness. I take him back to Kirkwall and see him off. He will get no dinner tonight, but he will catch his flight home.

Back in Stromness—I’ve driven through Kirkwall four times today—I call Doris and Malcolm at the Orca and take a room for another night. Malcolm joins me for a beer at the Stromness Hotel. The bartender is the woman from the tourist desk. I’m perfectly happy. There’s nowhere I have to be tomorrow. It’s October in Orkney.

Information

Scottish Tourist Board (www.visitscotland.com) can help you with trip planning throughout Scotland.
Historic Scotland (www.historic-scotland.gov.uk) is a government agency that maintains and operates hundreds of sites of historic interest in Scotland.
Orkney Tourist Board (www.visitorkney.com) has information on things to see and do on all of the islands, and listings of hotels, B&B’s, and self-catering (weekly rental) cottages.
Orkneyjar (www.orkneyjar.com) is a marvelous website dealing with the archeology, history, and folklore of Orkney. This is a good place to whet your appetite.

Transportation

Ferries can be canceled in rough weather; planes can be grounded in heavy fog. A buffer day on your return trip is probably a good idea.

British Airways (www.britishairways.com) flies nonstop to Heathrow, with connections to any point in the UK. Getting to Orkney will entail another change in Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Aberdeen.
IcelandAir (www.icelandair.com) flies to London and Glasgow, with a change in Keflavik. A two- or three-day layover in Reykjavik is always fun. It’s easier to do on the return trip, as the changes are in the late afternoon, instead of early morning.
LoganAir (www.loganair.co.uk) handles flights within Scotland. If you fly British Airways, your connections can be made through BA.
Northlink (www.northlinkferries.co.uk) provides service between Scrabster, on the Scottish mainland, and Stromness, as well as connections to Aberdeen and Shetland. The new Scrabster pier was completed in 2003, and the new vessel, the Hamnavoe, is comfortable and well appointed.
Pentland Ferries (www.pentlandferries.com) runs the shorter (and cheaper) route between Gill’s Bay and St. Margaret’s Hope, on smaller and less luxurious vessels.
Orkney Ferries (www.orkneyferries.co.uk) operates all of the interisland routes in Orkney.

Lodging

A wide variety of lodging options is listed on the Scotland and Orkney Tourist Board sites listed above. B&B’s and small hotels can usually be booked for about £25 or so (about $40) per person. This may or may not include private bath (listed as en suite). Of course, more luxurious accommodations range upward considerably in price. Most hotels have good restaurants and public bars. Mentioned in the article:

Orca Hotel (www.orcahotel.com). Neat, comfortable guest house with excellent Bistro 76 in the cellar. Listening to Malcolm’s theories about the Dwarfie Stane is worth the price.
Stromness Hotel (www.stromnesshotel.com). One of a number of fine hotels in Stromness and Kirkwall. Rooms about $45-75 pp. Very nice lounge bar.
Cleaton House (www.cleatonhouse.co.uk), Westray. Cleaton House has changed hands since this was written, and I can no longer personally recommend it. But it's still there!
Kettletoft Hotel, Sanday. See Orkney Tourist Board listings. Clean, simple rooms, village pub. Mr. Tattie Heid, alas, is long gone.
Waterside House (www.waterside.uk.net), Ullapool. Comfortable waterfront B&B with views over the harbor and Loch Broom.

Other

CAMRA (www.camra.org.uk). The Campaign for Real Ale, British traditional beer drinkers’ lobbying organization.
Orkney Brewery (www.orkneybrewery.co.uk). Makers of The Red MacGregor, Orkney Dark Island, and the ever-popular Skullsplitter, named for the Viking Earl Thorfinn Skullsplitter.
Highland Park (www.highlandpark.co.uk), Kirkwall. The northernmost distillery in Scotland, at least until Blackwood commences operation in Shetland. Visitor center, tours.

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