Orkney - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 347

church on the main road to Burwick, this B&B has bags
of character - reclaimed maple-wood flooring, Gothic
windows. They also offer guests themed culinary ev enin gs,
specializing in Japanese food ( W missingbell.com). £90
Skerries Bistro Banks T 01856 831605, W skerries

bistro.co.uk. Fabulous 180-degree view over the Pentland
Firth and Skerries, with local fish and king scallops as big as
steaks (mains around £15), plus delicious home-made
puddings and cakes. April-Oct daily 11am-10pm.

Hoy
Hoy , Orkney's second-largest island, rises sharply out of the sea to the southwest of
the Mainland. The least typical Orkney island, but certainly the most dramatic, it
has north and west sides made up of great glacial valleys and mountainous moorland
rising to over 1500ft, dropping into the sea off red sandstone cliffs, and forming the
landmark sea stack known as the Old Man of Hoy . The northern half of Hoy is virtually
uninhabited, with just the tiny village of Hoy opposite Stromness, and the cluster of
houses at Rackwick nestling dramatically in a bay between the cliffs. Meanwhile, most
of Hoy's four hundred or so residents live on the gentler, more fertile land in the
southeast, in and around the villages of Lyness and Longhope . This part of the island is
littered with buildings dating from the two world wars, when Scapa Flow served as the
main base for the Royal Navy (see p.351).

7

North Hoy
Much of North Hoy is magnificent landscape is made up of rough grasses and heather,
which harbour a cluster of arctic plants (and a lot of midges) as well as a healthy
population of mountain hares and birdlife. Facilities are minimal, however, with the
nearest shop in Longhope (see p.352), and both Hoy and Rackwick absolutely tiny,
with very little in the way of transport. If you're walking to Rackwick from Hoy,
take the well-marked footpath past Sandy Loch and along the large open valley of
Berriedale (1hr 30min).

Dwarfie Stane
Halfway along the road from Hoy to Rackwick, duckboards head across the heather to
the Dwarfie Stane , Orkney's most unusual chambered tomb, cut from a solid block of
sandstone and dating back to 3000 BC. The tomb is decorated with copious Victorian
graffiti, the most interesting of which is on the northern exterior, where Major
Mouncey, a former British spy in Persia and a confirmed eccentric who dressed in
Persian garb, carved his name backwards in Latin and also carved in Persian the words
“I have sat two nights and so learnt patience”.

Rackwick
RACKWICK is an old crofting and fishing village squeezed between towering
sandstone cliffs on the west coast. In an area once quite extensively cultivated,
Rackwick went into a steady decline in the middle of the twentieth century: its
school closed in 1953 and the last fishing boat put to sea in 1963. Electricity finally
arrived in 1980 but these days only a few of the houses are inhabited all year round
(the rest serve as holiday homes), though the savage isolation of the place has
provided inspiration for a number of artists and writers, including Orkney's George
Mackay Brown, who wrote “When Rackwick weeps, its grief is long and forlorn and
utterly desolate”. A small farm building beside the hostel has a tiny museum with a
brief rundown of Rackwick's rough history, but for a deeper insight into how folk
used to live in these parts, head over to the Craa Nest , the oldest crofthouse in the
village, just up the path to the Old Man; last occupied in 1940, the place still has its
box beds, barn and kiln intact. A short stroll away is the sandy beach, backed by