Today is the last day of our holiday in Orkney, so we have been taking it easy and getting ready for a 9:00 ferry tomorrow morning to take us back home. We will be staying overnight in Doune and expect to reach home in the early evening on Sunday.

The cottage we have been staying in was rebuilt as an Eco-cottage a few years ago (2008 if the visitors book is anything to go by). It is cosy and suitable for two, with just curtains separating the bedroom from the rest of the cottage, a wet room with a really good shower (and a window cleaner’s squeegee to dry the floor, which it does very well) a lounge and kitchen diner all in one. The roof is turfed, which as well as being good insulation dampens the sound of rain (pardon the pun!). Here are a couple of photos of the cottage and of the view.

So the key questions I ask myself at the end of a holiday are have I enjoyed it, would I recommend it to anybody else and would I come here again. The answer to all three is a very clear and resounding “yes”. Although we have seen most of the main sights (or do I mean sites?) here there is still more to explore. We have only touched on the joys of the other islands that make up Orkney and as far as bird watching goes, we have done little to go out of our way to find wildlife (except that Pearl was desperate to see a whale or two and some Dolphins – we didn’t see any!). We have concluded that this is not the best time of year to come to Orkney for the wildlife and that maybe when we come back it is more likely to be in June.

What else can I say about Orkney other than what I have already written? The people are exceptionally friendly. Without exception! There is no crime here – the owner of the cottage even told us that he doesn’t know where the keys for his house are and that he only knows where his car keys are because they are in the ignition! This comes from the island community nature and the fact that anything stolen will either be found here or there are very few ways to get things off the island. Even drivers don’t speed. I only recall one example of a speeding motorist in two weeks – and it wasn’t me!

So it is with sadness that our holiday comes to an end, but we have learnt and experienced so much. As there is a lot of travelling to do over the next couple of days and we then need to recover and prepare for work on Tuesday, this will probably be my last blog on our 2013 holiday.

It was the Icelandic people who started the practice of recording their history in ‘Sagas’, which are slightly fictionalised versions of real events, intended to be read to families who enjoyed hearing stories of their heroes and their ancestors. It was a stylised way of writing which includes the ancestry and relationships of each character as they are introduced into each story (or Saga). The set of Orkney Island Sagas was collected in the thirteenth century by an unknown Icelander. Of course up until this point the Orkney and Icelandic people spoke the same language and had much in common, with their Viking heritage; as the Orkney people had more to do with Scotland and the Icelanders to Norway, this bond was broken. The Orkneyinga Saga tells the stories of the Earls of Orkney who seemed to spend most of their time killing each other (although that might have simply been the highlights of the stories!). The Heritage Centre is built next to the remains of a round church which figures in the Saga; the church is surrounded by a very modern and neat cemetery, as all Orkney cemeteries are.

We spent the afternoon in Stromness, this time visiting the local museum, which has a special display right now about John Rae, the Arctic explorer from Orkney who discovered the North West Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific via the Arctic circle and the north of Canada. He was never given recognition in his own time due to Victorian attitudes to his practice of learning and adopting hunting and survival skills from the Inuit, as well as his controversial (but now proven) verdict on the failed Franklin expedition to locate the North West Passage. He was born 200 years ago this weekend.

Wednesday dawned fine and bright. Then it clouded over. There is a saying in Orkney that there is no such thing as bad weather … you just have to wait five minutes and it will change. This is equally true of sunny weather as it is of rain, so as the day went on, we alternated from lovely sunshine and blue skies to dark grey clouds floating over. Still, at least it didn’t rain.

We’ve seen quit a lot of Neolithic Orkney, so today we progressed 2,000 years, visiting the 3,000 year old remains of the Broch of Gurness. This amazing Iron Age village (comprising one high class dwelling surrounded by a number of smaller houses. The site has since been used by Orcadian Picts as late as the fifth century. It was discovered in 1959 accidentally when an artist lost a leg of his stool whilst sitting on the top of a mound of grass. The ruins look out over Eynhallow Sound to the island of Eynhallow (Holy Island) where there was once a monastery.

After lunch we moved on to explore a couple of the sandy beaches on the east side of the island, visiting St Peter’s Pool and Bay, but here spending more time on the un-named beach on the south side of the peninsular.

From there we moved to Newark Bay, which was recommended in one of the guide books, where we explored rocks, watched seals and enjoyed the sunshine.

The “mud” in the foreground of this picture is actually rock – presumably formed from mud?

Finally, back home at the cottage (photos still to follow) we enjoyed a beautiful sunset.

Today we took a trip to Hoy to experience the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre at Lyness.

Scapa Flow has got an amazing nautical heritage which began back in the days of the Vikings (and probably even earlier) although better known for the impact it had on naval warfare in both the first and second world wars. The Visitor Centre has more displays than you would hope to be able to read through; in our short visit as well as seeing the main exhibition we went to a disused oil tank (to put this in context, it was large enough to be a whispering gallery and had the acoustics to match) where films were running (projected onto a white painted patch on a side of the tank).

It would be wonderful to show some pictures of the views from the ferry as we went from mainland Orkney behind Flotta and to Hoy. However, we were in the passenger lounge below the car deck, with no windows (or even portholes!) so instead, here are a few pictures of the ferry!

To keep the theme of the day we are now settling down to watch David Lean’s film written by and starring Noel Coward, “In Which We Serve”!

So yesterday we went for a meal at The Foveran. I can’t say that it was very good. I can say that it was fantastic! North Ronaldsay (the northernmost of the Orkney Islands) has sheep that eat seaweed. Paul Roull takes the sheep and, as most of the flavour is in the fat, slow cooks them for six hours to render all the flavour off the fat and into the mutton itself. This is the best tasting sheep I have ever tasted and it literally just crumbled as you cut into it. So I can definitely recommend The Foveran as a place to eat if you are on Orkney. We are going back again on Thursday!

Today was a shopping day – but not in the traditional way. We wanted to get something permanent to remember Orkney by. So it was whilst we were at Hoxa Tapestry Gallery that I received a phone call from Pentland Ferries telling me that the ship on which we came to Orkney (MV Pentalina) would be in dry dock for emergency repairs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday this week. Saturday is our return journey! So from the car park I had to re-book passage with another ferry company (North Link Ferries) who luckily had reservations available, but it does mean that we have to be on a ferry at 09:00 rather than a more leisurely 11:50 on Saturday morning. The plus side is that we will be able to travel further home on Saturday, making the remainder of the journey on Sunday more relaxing.

Shopping continued … we bought a picture and then moved our shopping venue to Kirkwall for jewellery (although nothing was purchased).

Sorry, no pictures today; it’s been another grey and damp day and the scenic, moody pictures I took just don’t quite do it justice. The weather will brighten up again as the week progresses (I hope)!