A Trip to the Orkneys

ON my father’s side, my family comes from Dundee, and from a port district of Edinburgh called Leith.

And so, after visiting my Scottish relatives once more, in 2018, I decided to do a tour of some of the more Norse parts of Scotland: starting, of course, with the Orkneys.

Wearing a tartan skirt, I took the ferry from Scrabster, in the far north of the Scottish mainland, to Stromness. Scrabster is a small ferry port, with services to Stromness in the Orkneys. Ferry services also run between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, and between the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and Aberdeen, in addition to local ferries between the various islands of the Orkneys and the Shetlands. I was surprised that so many people catch ferries in these parts, and that the ferries go everywhere; you’d think most people would fly these days.

It’s probably the tourist trade that keeps the ferries going. For the trip was scenic. The ferry sailed slowly past amazing crimson cliffs of a mineral called Old Red Sandstone (ORS), which dates back to the age of fishes and amphibians, well before the dinosaur age. The Orkneys are made up almost entirely of the ORS; which means that they are as ancient as Australia and look pretty…