Orkney from the air

While the rain washes the snow away and the wind hurls dustbins down the back lane, I've been sorting last summer's holiday photos and dreaming back to long sunny days. The photos on Flickr are now caught up to the last holiday post I wrote here, up to the point where we left North Ronaldsay. I took photos from the plane, obviously, because I could; but I'm not satisfied with any of them. I could disregard the technical flaws, the sloping horizons and smudged window glass, but nothing catches the brilliance of what you see, the tiny perfect details of the islands.

We paused for a coffee at Kirkwall airport, and I played Kim's game, writing down what I could remember. So have one last photo of North Ronaldsay, a group of black guillemots:

and as for the view from the air, have some words: there, right on the edge of North Ronaldsay, was the broch that I'd never reached on foot; there were green fields edged with white beaches and blue, blue sea; there was a sailing boat in the bay at Stronsay; there were dolls' house farms (such a dishevelled cluster of buildings from the ground, such a neat pattern from the air); here a deeply incised cliff, there someone riding a horse into the sea.

By the time I had written my list, a man from Visit Orkney had arrived with a questionnaire about our trip, and we settled into a conversation about where we had been, what we had seen, where we could buy a bottle of Scapa for fjm's Raw Spirit project (the whisky for us, the bottle for fjm).