Orkney to Ullapool in T199 RBS

I’ve been beetling about in a blue car. All in one day I left Orkney by ferry across the Pentland Firth, revisited Thurso (still no waves) and beautiful Brough Bay (still there) and had a quick walk along a beach called Farr. Driving west across the north coast of Scotland I found the town of Tongue and followed a footpath to its ruined Castle Varrich that sits on a hill looking down. Back on the road, moorland stretched for miles towards Ben Hope and Ben Loyal, with Loch Hope and Loch Loyal between. There wasn’t a building in sight and the road was narrow, passing yet another a loch where, be warned, you sink into peat if you try to swim. I wanted to linger at Sangobeg Beach, but had puffins to find before dark at Durness. I asked for directions to their cliff-side burrows, but the directions weren’t right, or I didn’t listen, and instead of puffins in burrows I found sheep in sand-dunes. At 10 pm and growing dark I gave up on puffins and settled for sheep, but to my delight, one of them was darker than usual and even had a broad white stripe running down its face, and wasn’t a sheep at all, but a badger. Then there was another one, which followed the first into a burrow. I couldn’t linger here either, as I had miles to go and promises to keep before morning, so I retraced my steps and drove on further before pitching a tent on a magnificent moor, with white cotton grass flowers all round. By three in the morning it was light again and, wide awake, I carried on driving via Inchnadamph. At long last a sign told me I’d arrived in Ullapool. And what good timing that was, as a bus from Inverness had also just arrived in Ullapool, a bus that had my mum on it!

Auld Lang Syne

I won’t forget the words of the art guard in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. ‘Och lassie, it’ll change yer life’, he beamed, when I told him I was off to Shetland for the Folk Festival. Thinking back to 2005, I’m not sure what he meant. Did he think the festival, or Shetland, would change my life? Or did something in him pick up on my family links to Shetland and Orkney, which I only discovered two years later? Well anyway, I like remembering that the journey I’m on began with a laugh at a comment I thought was fanciful. The Shetland Folk Festival did alter my course. The haunting Celtic tunes playing from fiddles, accordions, whistles, pipes and drums stayed with me so powerfully that three years later I found myself living in Scotland, attending Shetland’s ‘sister’ Orkney Folk Festival, and again following traditional tunes down cobbled streets into pubs, halls, hotels, churches, the magnificent St Magnus Cathedral and the Pickaquoy Centre, where a thousand people, mostly Orcadian, had come to hear The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra. It was one wonderful thing to have the principal piper walk through the audience as he ‘piped in’ the orchestra of more than 80 fiddles, double basses, cellos, accordions, flutes and percussion, and to have the principal conductor, whose own fiddling stems from Orcadian roots, conduct a moving repertoire of reels, slow airs and tone poems of local significance. But for the orchestra to play out, joined by the island’s Kirkwall City Pipe Band and Orkney’s top fiddle-playing children, in a hundred-fiddle-strong performance of Auld Lang Syne, for which the audience instinctively stood, crossed their arms and held hands to sing to the beat of drums, was truly quite another.

Don’t miss the Eynhallow

There’s only one ferry back from Egilsay to Rousay. I repeat, only one ferry. I was anxious about missing it so I got to the pier half an hour early and, as it was blowing a gale, sheltered in the waiting room reading The Little General and the Rousay Crofters. There was lots of time, but I kept checking the clock on my camera, just to be sure. When there was still a whole ten minutes to go, I got up to check the pier. And there – pulling away from it – was the Eynhallow. Well I ran down that pier with everything tumbling from my bag, my arm stretched high, thinking, ‘This–is–a–complete–disaster’. There’s just about nothing on Egilsay apart from a ruined church where my great great great great grandparents got married, wild spring flowers, a corncrake trail without any corncrakes on it yet, and a beautiful white-sand beach from which only the crazy have a quick swim. I ran down that pier. And I next took a breath when the ferry stalled and started coming back. ‘I thought you left at 5pm!’ I gasped. ‘It’s ten past five,’ he said, and right enough, my camera clock was ten minutes slow. The main thing was that the deck was coming down and I would soon be stepping onto the last ferry back to Rousay. The crew and captain invited me for tea in the bridge and, as it turns out, I was the only passenger onboard!

The ring around Rousay

The man I rented the bicycle from was astonished that it took me twelve hours to ride the ring-road around Rousay. ‘It should take no more than two!’ he said. Not if you feel compelled to stop and walk the paths to every hill loch you pass looking for Red-throated divers, visit every Neolithic chambered tomb along the island’s fascinating mile of ancient architecture, search for the land your family farmed in the 1800s, get talking to a man who turns out to be a distant relative and kickstarts the trail of meeting direct relatives in Orkney, realize you’ve forgotten your camera at a 5 000-year-old broch and ride all the way back to fetch it, buy a consolatory ice-cream from the only shop on the island, eat the ice-cream, climb the highest hill, watch a hen-harrier hunting, and have a picnic. ‘That,’ I said, ‘takes a good twelve hours to do.’

The fairest floo-er

Fancy using binoculars to find flowers. The Scottish Primrose is so tiny that its five petals, together, are smaller than my smallest fingernail. Seeing them is an occasion as the species is rare and confined to the north coast of Scotland and Orkney. A lass I met on Papa Westray showed me where they were, on an exposed sea-facing hill a short distance from the sea-cliffs. Once we’d seen one we could see several, though not easily with the naked eye, so we lay on the hill taking turns with my binoculars, exclaiming at the numbers of them hidden in the grass. Then a foreign man with a large hat appeared at our feet. I asked him if he wanted to see the flowers through my binoculars and he declined, saying he was looking for puffins, and puffins only. [Puffins don’t stray far from the sea-cliffs, and during the day they’re fishing.] ‘Don’t think you’ll find them up here,’ I said, ‘so mind the floo-ers’!