Saturday, 16 May 2026

Orkney and North Coast - Day 3

We drove to the Yesnaby car park on the west coast and parked next to the wartime installations there. We then walked south down the coast, there are spectacular rocks and cliffs there.



There's an old millstone quarry on top of the cliff, you can still see some part-finished projects.

There are sea stacks just off the coast, the first one you come to is not quite detached from the mainland, there's still a slab of rock in place.


Just a bit further on is a true sea stack known as Yesnaby Castle. It's more spectacular, it also has a hole through the base.



Ropes attached to the stack show that it is used for rock climbing.

There's also a cave at the base of the cliff.

Further down the coast is yet another one, known as North Gaulton Castle. It's amazingly thin at the base.



We went on down the coast as far as a lookout post at the top of Black Crag, where we stopped for our lunch before retracing our steps back north again.


On the moorland next to the parking spot we'd read that you can find a rare plant there known as the Scottish Primrose (primula scotica). We actually found some.


After returning to the van we drove to a camp site we'd thought we'd booked into for the night, near the north of the mainland. But when we arrived there we found it was closed and under redevelopment! However it turned out that our booking was actually for a different site, in Stromness, and Scott just hadn't noticed this on the web site and email, since they're both run by Orkney Council.

Fortunately it was only about 20 minutes drive to the other one, at the Point of Ness just south of Stromness. We had a seafront pitch with good views of the port and the ships going in and out.


After setting up we had welcome showers in the modern facilities block.

Later for dinner we had red Thai prawn curry.



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