Travelling Hopefully - Kirkwall

 Kirkwall sits roughly in the middle of The Mainland which is the inaccurately named main island of the Orkneys. The day dawned bright and sunny to the confusion of the population and those of us who were so inclined wandered down the hill from our guest house in the outer suburbs to the centre of town. It took us about ten minutes.

Our missing comrade turned up at breakfast and pretended she had been there all along. We didn’t ask questions. The cathedral of St Magnus dominates the skyline not that it has a lot of competition. The cathedral is an impressive pile of red sandstone that dates back to 1137. St Magnus was a holy man who was murdered by an opponent. Once he was dead miracles started to occur (something Magnus might have appreciated when he was about to be killed). A relative of Magnus knocked up the cathedral in his honour. 

There was a flower show inside the cathedral which helped to explain the absence of flowers elsewhere. Left to our own devices the only non Australian on the tour and myself wandered around the narrow street sightseeing. Once we had seen the sight we had coffee. Then we went to a small but neatly organised museum which waxed lyrical about the Neolithic, Iron Age, Pictish and Viking past of the islands. Some of those bits may overlap. After the museum we had coffee.

Having immersed ourselves in the history of the islands (and coffee) we cast about for something to do. At this point our guide mustered about half of us for a gentle afternoon walk to a cairn. Cairns were an ancient way of gathering funeral goods together to make it easier for grave robbers to loot. Alert to their responsibilities grave robbers had dutifully looted this cairn leaving nothing but a stone lined hole in the ground. In order to visit this subterranean crime scene we left the town and climbed a hill. Then we climbed a bit more of the hill and after a brief pause to rest and complain about the damn hill climbing we climbed some more of the hill. The summit loomed ahead and our feeling of achievement grew. But before we could slap ourselves on the back our guide veered to the side and we began a long wearying trek around the hill instead.

We plodded through the heather our journey lightened by the hysterical shrieks of one of our number as every flying ant in the Orkneys targeted her for special attention. She became a seething mass of insect life her plaintive cries barely audible above the buzzing of insects. In this fashion we reached the cairn and descended a ladder into the bowels of the earth. And there we stopped. To access the chambers we would have had to crawl on our hands and knees through mud and water in pitch darkness. A quick vote was taken and nobody seemed keen on that idea so we emerged back into the world of light and life and left the darkness of the cairn to the doomed spirits condemned to haunt its walls.

On the way back I saw a fat caterpillar but nobody cared.