Amazing place

This is a brilliant sort of holiday if you are a dog.

It is pretty jolly good for people, but probably best of all if you are a dog.

They have bounced and dashed about and woofed at things and stopped short at alarming cliff edges and collapsed to snore under the table.

They are very muddy.

Orkney is muddy.

It is considerably muddier than I remember it.

I thought perhaps I had been fanciful in my memories, but then the chap we visited last night explained that they had a monumentally wet and dreary summer last year. The kai, which is the Orkney plural of cow, were brought indoors in September. This is very early and expensive.

We had a lovely night last night. We visited a chap who had been a neighbour when I lived here, and spent a very cheerful night catching up on the islanders’ adventures over the last twenty years. One or two people have died, although not very many, and things have changed on the island in all sorts of ways.

There is internet and mobile phone signal, and even a boat which will take you to the mainland in the evening. You can stay out until ten o’clock and still get a boat home to Shapinsay. This was absolutely unimaginable in my time, and a massive improvement, paid for by the island windmill.

We didn’t have windmills then either.

It was lovely to talk to him, and his kindly wife. He remembered Number Two Daughter trying to walk along the ridge pole of the barn roof, and I remembered how very much I had liked him when we lived here. They were open and friendly and warm and tolerant, and did not in the least seem to feel angry about new people moving on to the island.

Mark had been warned about this by a chap on the boat, who was himself a recent immigrant. In the end we thought probably he was imagining this because nobody liked him, and so he was pretending to himself that it was because he was English instead of because he was an idiot. I do not remember the islanders being unkind or horrible to anybody, so it seems perfectly possible.

We talked sadly about the castle, which was bought as a birthday present for his wife, by a chap who has got far too much money and does not want to live in it. This is a rubbish thing to do, because people once came to Shapinsay to look around the castle, and now that they can’t, they don’t come any more. Our friend told us that it had sold for the same price as a flat in London, which is where the new owner actually lives.

I wished I could have afforded to buy him out.

I hope all the expensive wallpaper peels off whilst he is being a socialite in London and neglecting his beautiful castle here.

Of course we drank more than we should have done, and so it was a jolly good job that we did not have very far to go back to our little campsite at the end of the island.

It was a windy, camper-van-rocking sort of night, which is not unusual in Orkney, but when we woke up this morning it was calmer. Once we had finished gazing contentedly out of the window at the sea and the sky, we drove to the far end of the island to walk on the cliffs and to visit Castle Bloody.

Castle Bloody is a remarkably evocative name for what is actually a small pile of stones covered in lichen. It is on top of an interesting stone-built hole, which might be a burial mound, although it is not really possible to guess from the outside. Mark had a bit of a look and we thought that probably the midsummer sunrise would shine into the entrance, but it is still January and so it is hard to be sure.

We walked for miles, along the cliff tops. Orkney has never thought of any health and safety advice, but we thought it was best to keep a long way from the edges all the same, since there was clear evidence that occasionally the edge bits fall off and plummet into the icy waters below. We did not like that idea at all, especially if we were standing on one at the time.

The waves roared and smashed themselves against the cliffs, and the arctic terns dried their wings on the precipices, and there was a rainbow and a freezing wind.

We picked our way cautiously, because there were plenty of places where a small slip could have resulted in a bumpy and deeply unpleasant end, but you will be pleased to hear that we managed to avoid this fate. Instead I showed Mark the quarry where Number Two Daughter had her first driving lessons, aged six, because she was the only one in her class who could not drive.

After that we picked our way carefully back to the camper van, across heathery peatlands, avoiding black pools that made us think of the sort of film where dead things creep out and grab unwary ankles.

I have become pink-faced with the wind.

We went down to the village shop for milk, which is also the post office. The shop has moved across the road since my day, but the pigeon holes for letters posted on the island are still there. There are four possible destinations marked on the pigeon holes. A letter might go to somewhere on Shapinsay, or somewhere on Orkney, or Sooth by first class, or Sooth by second class.

In my day the letters came across on the boat at around lunchtime, and the lady in the post office steamed them open if they looked interesting.

Today’s post office lady did not look as though she would do anything so rascally, and told Mark cheerfully that everybody was very interested in our camper van.

It did not occur to Mark that the expected response was to tell her absolutely everything about who we were and where we had come from, because he has never lived here, so he just smiled politely and thanked her. He is very English sometimes.

We are sailing for Kirkwall tomorrow, and I do not want to leave. We have been poking around a little old ruin today which had been the blacksmith’s. The enormous forge bellows were still there, and we longed to build it back into a pretty little house and come and live here.

Mark could build some new bellows and be a blacksmith again.

Of course we can’t do that.

We can’t live here, at the end of the world where the skies and waters meet, because we have to earn a living and pay school fees.

We longed for it all the same.

This is an amazing place.