Last Updated on May 14, 2026
The sky started changing somewhere around Caithness. By the time we drove aboard the ferry at Gills Bay, it felt enormous, and Orkney hadn’t even come into view yet. It’s that kind of place. It doesn’t announce itself. It settles in quietly, through open skies, ancient stones, and the constant nearness of the sea.
My Glaswegian friend Finlay McLean and I had driven north from Glasgow along Scotland’s east coast, pausing at a palace and a collection of castles along the way. By the time the road flattened out through Caithness, the skies were already feeling bigger. At Gills Bay, near John o’ Groats, we drove the car aboard the MV Alfred, one of the Pentland Ferries, gulls arcing overhead as we headed out across the Firth.
Finlay, who had visited Orkney several times, understood the islands in a way I could only begin to.
“We’re so used to towering buildings,” he said, as we scanned the Pentland Firth for seals or pods of dolphins. “In Orkney, you look up at the sky. The sea. The land. It’s remote — you’re very aware you’re in a different landscape, living life at a slower pace.”
That may be part of why Orkney is such a desirable destination. It offers something hard to find: space and a sense of deep time. Its sea cliffs teem with hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds in summer, its fields hold some of Western Europe’s most remarkable prehistoric sites, and its wide skies make the rest of the world feel very far away.
Scapa Flow: Orkney’s Wartime Stronghold
We disembarked in the quiet village of St. Margaret’s Hope, Orkney’s third largest settlement. Situated on a sheltered bay on the island of South Ronaldsay, the village played a significant role during both World Wars due to its proximity to the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.
Scapa Flow is a vast, sheltered body of water enclosed by the Orkney Mainland to the north, the island of South Ronaldsay to the southeast, Hoy to the southwest, and several smaller islands in between.
During the First World War, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet made it their principal base. It was here, in 1919, that German naval officers scuttled 52 of their own warships rather than surrender them to the British. It was the largest shipping loss in a single day in naval history.
Twenty years later, Scapa Flow was at the center of war again. In October 1939, a German U-boat slipped through the defenses and sank the British battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor, killing 835 men. Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, ordered the construction of permanent barriers to seal the eastern approaches.
The Churchill Barriers, massive concrete and rock structures, were built between 1940 and 1944, largely by Italian prisoners of war. They linked four islands to the Orkney Mainland, creating the causeways we were now driving across, the only road link to and from South Ronaldsay.
As we drove north across the barriers, island to island — South Ronaldsay, Burray, Glimps Holm — the water stretched away on both sides, grey and wide. Even to this day, the ghostly hulks of rusted warships lie beached in the shingle.
We didn’t have time to visit the Scapa Flow Museum in Lyness, but for anyone with a deeper interest in naval history, it would be well worth a stop.
The Italian Chapel: Love and War in Orkney
The Italian prisoners of war who helped build the barriers also created something remarkable: the Italian Chapel. In 1943, they began work on a chapel on Lamb Holm for their camp. They used old Nissen huts and whatever scraps they could find. From the stark materials of war, they created a place of beauty and reflection.
Painted to look like the churches they’d grown up with in Italy, the chapel features an ornate façade and an interior decorated in the trompe l’oeil style, with such remarkable realism that it resembles carved stonework.
Woven into the chapel’s history is a love story.
Prisoner of war Giuseppe Palumbi fell in love with an Orcadian woman. When the war ended and the prisoners were sent home, he returned to his family in Italy, but he left his heart — or at least a delicate, wrought iron version of it — embedded in the chapel floor.
Palumbi was not the only wartime visitor to leave part of his heart in Orkney.
“On one of my visits,” Finlay said as we explored the chapel, “I ran into a German man whose grandfather had been on one of the scuttled warships. He fell in love with an Orcadian lass, married her, and spent 25 years here.”
I imagine Orkney claimed him too.
Betty’s Reading Room: A Cottage for Book Lovers
After this sweep of wartime history, Betty’s Reading Room offered a quieter kind of remembrance.
The small cottage, one of the outbuildings of an old farm at Tingwall pier, was created in memory of Betty Proctor, a schoolteacher who loved to read. After she passed away, two of her friends decided the best way to honor her life was to share her love of reading with others.
They filled the cottage with books and comfortable sofas, then opened it to anyone who loves to read.
Kirkwall: Orkney’s Historic Capital
After lingering among the books and sofas at Betty’s Reading Room, we drove to Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital and largest town, ending the day.
Kirkwall is built beside a natural harbor, with narrow streets and compact buildings that hint at centuries of island life. Its roots reach back to the 11th century, and its long history is still easy to feel as you walk through town. Rising above it all is St. Magnus Cathedral, founded in 1137, an impressive red-and-yellow sandstone landmark that took about 300 years to complete.
I enjoyed strolling through the town before we checked into the Castaway Guesthouse, which was clean, comfortable, and well situated for exploring.
That evening, we left the car behind and enjoyed the sea breeze as we walked to the Kirkwall Hotel for dinner at the Harbour View Restaurant.
Skara Brae: Orkney’s Neolithic Village
The following morning, we set out to explore the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Western Europe.
First and most spectacular was Skara Brae, a stone-built Neolithic village and UNESCO World Heritage Site, hidden for centuries beneath the sand until 1850, when a great storm swept over the island, revealing the remains of ancient dwellings.
Who lived here, I wondered, and why did they leave? We may never know for sure, but this site was already ancient when the Egyptian pyramids were being built.
We followed the path around the stone houses and a structure thought to have been a workshop, all linked by narrow passages. It must have been a tight-knit community.
Skaill House, adjacent to Skara Brae, is a 17th-century mansion that was later home to William Graham Watt, the 7th Laird of Breckness, who unearthed the village in 1850. I loved the dining room with its fine porcelain, and the drawing room with its stunning views of both the Bay and Loch of Skaill.
Looking out at the water, I could imagine Viking longships once landing on the shore.
Prehistoric Stone Circles: Orkney’s Ancient Heart
The Standing Stones of Stenness may be the oldest stone circle in the British Isles, dating back to around 3,000 BC. Four uprights remain, up to six meters high, from a circle that once had twelve.
“These stones have stood here through world wars and countless upheavals of humanity,” Finlay said. “They’re a constant reminder that we’re just passing through.”
About a mile away, the Ring of Brodgar rose from a narrow strip of land between two lochs, a near-perfect circle of standing stones and the third largest in the British Isles. Of the original 60 stones, 36 survive today, including 27 still standing. The ring dates to around 2,500 BC.
No one knows for certain what it was for. Archaeologists have suggested ceremonies, even lunar observations, but there is little evidence. What remains is a near-perfect circle of stones, set in one of the most extraordinary prehistoric landscapes in the world.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get tickets for Maeshowe, a 5,000-year-old chambered tomb so precisely constructed that its entrance aligns with the setting sun at the winter solstice.
After a stroll through the pretty maritime town of Stromness, with its flagstone-paved streets lined with old stone houses, we dined at the Sands Hotel in Burray before making our way to Bankburn House, a historic bed and breakfast on the outskirts of St. Margaret’s Hope. A practical choice for the early morning ferry.
We had come for the prehistoric sites and found so much more. The wartime history, the wide skies, the quiet pull of the place. Orkney was just one stop on a longer tour of Scotland, but it became the place where the journey slowed, the sky widened, and the sea was never far from anything.
