shewhomust | Under Brinkie's Brae

Stromness is long and narrow, squeezed between the natural harbour of Hamnavoe and the hill - Brinkie's Brae. Much as I love it, I wouldn't call it a pretty town, though there are some pleasing perspectives as the long main street straggles along, none of which I managed to photograph. The picture I like best is atypical, because most of the houses are a drab shade of brown, and the crow stepped gables are uncommon too. But all of this side of the street backs onto the sea.

On the other side, narrow lanes snake up the hillside, and one of the steepest and narrowest of these is Khyber Pass (the internet doesn't seem to know whether there is a proper imperial rationale for this name, or whether it is entirely a joke). For the almost-week we spent in Stromness, we lived in Khyber Pass Cottage.

Walking down from Franklin Road, the new road which (thankfully) takes most of the traffic out of the town, the landmark is a gooseberry bush growing above the retaining wall, by a footpath cutting (past the garden of ther cottage, in fact) between two lanes. The next front door you come to is Khyber Pass Cottage. Go in, and the bathroom is on your left, bedroom on your right. In front of you is a spiral staircase, which you climb, a little warily at first but with growing confidence, to emerge into a single open room, sitting room to one side, kitchen to the other. The kitchen has a back door which - because the hill rises from the front to the back of the house, as well as side to side - opens onto the garden: a pocket-handkerchief of lawn, a bench, a clump of rhubarb.

Four rooms, wrapped snug as a snail in its shell around that central spiral, but it felt very spacious for two. Downstairs is enclosed: the windows face onto the high wall across the narrow Khyber Pass, but upstairs feels light and airy. "Do you have a view?" someone asked us. "Can you see down to the harbour?" I had to think about that: there's a view across grey-tiled roofs, but you can't see anything beyond them - unless the Hamnavoe, the big ferry, is in port, towering about the rooftops (and then you can hear the ship's announcements, too).

I didn't want to leave - but it was time to move on to North Ronaldsay.

ETA: Orquil on Flickr has a better photo of Stromness: