Orkney Mainland Day 1

We made it to Kirkwall Mainland Orkney today. The plane from Inverness was delayed for an hour and we thought: Good Golly, will we never get to Orkney?

The car hire staff picked us up, and once we signed the paperwork, we were on our way. Blue took to left hand driving as if he were a pro and before we knew it we were on Wideford Hill walking to Wideford Cairn.

The photos are deceptive; the wind was fierce making the day much cooler that it should have been.

This cairn was built above ground with three concentric circles. Archaeology shows that it was never covered with earth. The original entrance shown at the lowest level is secured now with a gate.

Blue climbed down into the cairn through the entry hatch in the roof created in the 1880s by the first archaelogist. The space was quite tight, and after getting down there he decided not to get on hands and knees and crawl into the burial cists.

Across the valley you can see Cuween Cairn - its the green lollipop shaped spot in the middle hill of black heather.

This is the Cuween Cairn entrance which faces Wideford Cairn across the valley. We did crawl into this one and it was worth the wet muddy knees on our jeans.

There are four burial chambers in this cairn with entrances at the ground floor. We could see these by the flashlights we carried in; and thank goodness for cameras with flash! The drystone walls are testament to master craftsmanship. To place these in time, the two cairns we visited today predate the pyramids in Egypt.

Above the cairn modern people have built their own stone towers from rock in what looks like a quarried area. It was a cool site; however the wind would have blown us away had we not hunkered down behind a few of them to take photos. I added some stones to the top of a couple of them, a nod to the human desire to create monuments.

Next we drove to the Stones of Stenness. It is hard to get a photo to represent the mass, the presence, the time and age of these stones. Erected 5,400 years ago, these are older by 1,000 years than any of the circles we've seen yet in our travels.

When I stepped into the circle I was met with winds strong enough to blow me backward; I thought perhaps the spirits of the place were trying to communicate a message to me as there was no shelter there from the wind. 

After this we walked to Barnhouse, a recently discovered community just off the Stones of Stenness. What is there now is a reconstruction as all the archaeology was reburied after its analysis. This is how the people of the area and in the time of the Stones of Stenness built their homes and gathering halls.

Orkney is described as the "land between the sea and sky" and this view across Mainland to the Isle of Hoy represents this exactly.

We took a slow circuitous route back to Kirkwall and checked into the hotel. We will be back to Stenness tomorrow to take in the Ring of Brodgar, another stone circle at the same site.