The car park we're at is mainly for the Black Water falls which are nearby, so in the morning we took a walk over to see them.
We then hit the road home. We stopped for a nice cooked breakfast at Tesco in Inverness, then drove down the A9 home, arriving in the early afternoon.
We had researched the possibility of going to Cape Wrath, which is a ferry ride and a one hour minibus trip from the main road. Ideally we had wanted to do it today but were told the ferry wasn't going to be running because of the strength of the wind. However we booked for tomorrow, Sunday, and made our way towards Durness near the ferry.
We parked in a spot that had electric hook-up but no other facilities, for £10 per night. The owner spoke to us and said he'd be round to collect the money in the evening.
From there we went for a walk down the coast. It was very windy, but very lovely walking down the cliffs, dunes and beaches.
Further down the coast we could see the minibuses for our prospective trip tomorrow on the other side of the Kyle of Durness.
The walk went as far as the ferry pier. On the notice board at the pier there was a message written saying there would be no ferry till Tuesday because of the weather. We emailed regarding our booking and got a reply saying that unfortunately our trip tomorrow was cancelled.
We completed our circular walk back to the van, and decided there wasn't much point waiting around. We cancelled our booking on the site and drove a few hours homeward.
We stopped at the car park at Silver Bridge near Garve. A few others had the same idea, it was a good spot with its own toilets.
We had pizza for dinner.
We left Bettyhill and drove on west. We'd booked into Bayview campsite at Talmine Bay, which is a few miles off the NC500.
We were too early to check in, but we wanted to do a coastal walk first so parked at Talmine Pier.
We walked north up the coast, past a few nice coves and a decorated cairn.
We found some more Scottish Primrose.
We got to a rocky beach with an old fishing boat winch, where we stopped for some lunch.
From there we walked on a quiet road to Midield beach, a sandy beach with some remote houses dotted around.
From there the route went inland past more habitation, before climbing up over a hill then back down to Talmine Bay.
We then checked in to the camp site, it's a small one in a great spot overlooking the bay.
Later we went for a stroll on the beach, there's an old wrecked wooden ship there.
For dinner we had ricotta and spinach pasta with bacon and tomato sauce.
After another unsuccessful look for puffins, we left and drove west along the NC500 to Bettyhill. Scott had been there on a geography school trip back in the 1970s and it was interesting to see the field centre was still there.
We checked out our proposed wild camping spot for later and it seemed ok. So we drove on a few minutes further and parked for our walk.
This was a circular walk from Invernaver up over a hill to Torrisdale beach, then back down the River Naver to the start. From the top of the hill we started to see the beach, then walked towards it over sand dunes.
The beach was quite spectacular, with lots of clean sand and interesting rocky outcrops. It was quite windy so we sheltered by the rocks for our lunch.
We walked back along the beach and river. There were lots of mounds on the land there, some of which were supposed to be burial mounds but there was no obvious evidence of that.
As we walked past the buildings at Invernaver there were a couple of peacocks.
We went back to Bettyhill and parked up for the night. Just down from the parking space is a tiny cove.
To start with we were parked on our own, but over the course of the evening a few more vans joined us. We had tuna pasta for dinner.
We planned to do a walk on the island of Burray today. We left the site in Kirkwall and drove south, over the Churchill Barriers via Lamb Holm and Glimps Holm. We parked in Burray village and walked up to the top of the hill overlooking Scapa Flow and down the other side.
There were quite strange walls round the fields there, made out of compressed bales of old tyres.
There were wartime buildings there, part of the Scapa Flow defences from WW2.
The plan was to walk across the causeway to Hunda island, and walk round it as it is a good place for seabirds. Unfortunately there were problems with access, it seems there has been a change of ownership of the farm recently and it's obvious that walkers aren't very welcome. Where there should have been a gate is now a barbed wire fence, with no obvious way to the causeway at all.
We gave up on that part of the walk, and returned to Burray where we went to the harbour to have our lunch.
Looking more closely at the descriptions of other walks in the area, it became clear that other areas in this part of Orkney have their own access issues, and we realised we were running out of new walks to do.
So we decided to book a ferry back to the Scottish mainland today. The only one available was from Stromness in the evening so we booked that.
We had time to go and visit the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm island. This was built by Italian POWs in WW2, and is basically a Nissen hut which has been decorated with the materials they had around at the time, mostly concrete and paint. It's very well done though, and extremely attractive.
We drove back to Stromness. It was raining, so we just waited in the van until it was time for the ferry.
Once on board the sun came out, and we had great views of the island of Hoy and the Old Man of Hoy on the way back to Scrabster.
Once back we headed east to Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of the British Mainland. You can park overnight there for a £10 donation.
There's a lighthouse, and cliffs that have seabirds nesting, including puffins, but we didn't see any.
We had sausage, mash and beans for dinner.
