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.
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