There are a few different ferries from Scotland to the Orkneys; we took the hour-long one from Gills Bay to South Ronaldsay. From there it was a short drive across the Churchill Barriers to our B&B on Mainland. While planning our trip to the Orkneys, I found myself repeatedly tripped up by the fact that the main island is called ‘Mainland’. I hardly think of Great Britain as being big enough to be a mainland, let alone this charming little place.
For our first couple nights we stayed at Highland Park House, near Kirkwall, the Orkneys’ largest town. While not as adorable as Stromness (the town on the other end of the island), Kirkwall proved a good base with some decent food and drink options, as well as good rainy-day activities (many of which we never got around to, as we had amazing weather luck for the entire trip).
The first and best meal of our entire trip was at the Lynnfield Restaurant, which serves the kind of creative, fancy dishes that read like they might be all concept and no taste, but this was not the case; everything we ate here was delicious.
The Orkneys are mostly treeless, but we didn’t find this as strikingly odd as we expected to. Mainland is mostly gently-rolling hills just above sea level, with the higher hills over on neighboring Hoy. To remind us that it was spring, we were treated to daffodils and frolicking lambs almost everywhere we went. We filled our days with hiking and visits to various old ruiny things (more on these in a later post), and spent our evenings sampling local beers and food, and marveling at how lucky we had gotten with the weather yet again.
On our second evening, we wandered around downtown Kirkwall. Helgi’s proved a nice place for a couple local ales. Their menu looked interesting as well, but we had reservations in the hulking, fading glory of the dining room at the Kirkwall Hotel (where the food was much more pleasant than the setting or the poor service would suggest).
After two years in Scotland, we’ve been on so many distillery tours that we could probably start making our own whisky. Still, we decided that Scotland’s northernmost distillery, Highland Park, was worth a visit.
Its adorable exterior was hard to resist, plus we were interested to see the malting process. Most distilleries don’t malt their own barley on-site anymore, but Highland Park is one of the few that does.
Up next: hiking, birds, and ancient things in the Orkneys