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shewhomust
Each time we visit Orkney, we try to land on an island we've never been to before: this time it was Shapinsay, a small flat island, tucked into the arms of Orkney's Mainland. From our B & B at Hilton Farmhouse we had a fine view back to Kirkwall.
The harbour and the village are at the south-west corner, dominated by Balfour Castle, the perfect Scottish baronial castle, all spikes and pepperpot towers, and of course pure Victorian. The Balfours had apparently owned land on Shapinsay for generations, but it was the David Balfour for whom the castle was built who stated making improvements ("You've maybe come across the name David Balfour before," said our guide. "There's our David Balfour, but there's also the Edinburgh banking family..." She didn't mention the hero of Kidnapped, but it seems Stevenson was a friend of "our" David Balfour). He drained the agricultural land of the island, and divided it into regular plots crossed by straight roads; he built, in addition to the castle, the home farm, the gas works and the mill. He built a new, planned village on the site of the old village, Shoreside, and persuaded the Post Office to rename it Balfour. (We were also told that when he realised that the roofs of the village blocked the view of the castle from his yacht in the harbour, he had the offending buildings reduced to a single story).
The tower in the foreground of the photo is the dishan, built - I am not making this up - as a saltwater shower, with a dovecot on the top. If you were staying at the castle and wanted a shower, you told the servants who went up the tower and poured the water, heated if required, down on your from above. And presumably the reasoning goes that once you are building a tower, you might as well put a dovecot on top. This is, after all, the village with a public convenience which is washed clean by the tide.
Monday was warm and sunny, and we wpent the day walking. There's a well-equipped hide on the Bird Reserve at Mill Dam, with a view down over the wetlands below, but we actually saw more birds from closer as we walked along the road. In the course of the day we saw sparrows, oyster catchers, lapwings, curlews, mallard, geese, various gulls, pheasant and two peacocks. And the fields were alive with rabbits.
One of the reasons I love Orkney is that people are generally very welcoming to visitors: when they emerge from the farm to ask "Do you need help? Are you lost?", they don't mean "Get off my land!" they really do want to know if you need help. We took advice about whether the path continued round the cliffs (it didn't) and picked our way round the foot of the cliff, primroses growing above us and thrift below. Later, as we sat on the doorstep of the church in the only available shade, two more ladies came out to ask us if we wanted to see round the church (we didn't, thank you, we were just having a drink of water).
The beaches were fascinating, though tricky underfoot, steeply sloping pebble beaches, and I took many photographs. We walked as far as the Second World War gun emplacements, great complex concrete structures, and then back down the road. It seemed odd, on what is not a large island, to be leaving so many sights unseen, but we felt we had gone as far as we wanted to, and returned to the farmhouse where we finally cracked the previous Saturday's crossword!
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Date: 2008-09-10 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-10 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-10 09:51 pm (UTC)Not having seen a drop since March, that, too, makes me wish that these last two or three months of the deadly nine months of summer would END.
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Date: 2008-09-11 08:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 09:18 am (UTC)How do you feel about Shetland?
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Date: 2008-09-11 09:40 am (UTC)Aw, thank you! [Though trip planning is never a chore.]
How do you feel about Shetland?
Shetland also sounds good. I imagine it as being more like the Falklands than the Orkneys are, but I suspect that's only because of the "land" in the name.
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Date: 2008-09-11 10:13 am (UTC)No, I suspect that's right; and it's partly why I asked. There will ultimately be Shetland photos, but I took so many pictures that it's taking me forever to sort them.