First thing we sorted a tour on Orkney so things worked together a bit more, then we hit the road north. We called into Dunrobin Castle for a photo and kept driving. It had been raining almost from the start of our drive and not too far north of Dunrobin fog set in. In places it was very thick and it obscured the scenery which was unfortunate, that part of Scotland is said to be very picturesque. We will never know!
We got to the ferry terminal at Scrabster on the north coast around midday, checked-in and waited to load. We had lunch while we waited. It is a 90 min ride over to Orkney. We left port at about 1:10pm and the seas looked calm as we left. And they stayed that way for the entire journey. We drove off at about 3:50pm and headed into Kirkwell to drop our laundry off to get done.
While we were in town we had a look in and around the, St Magnus Cathedral, “ The Light in the North”. It was built in 1137 and is massive by any measure. It is 66m long x 27m wide, with a naive height of 25m and the tower is 50m high. Inside there are huge stone columns (about 1.5m in diameter) that run down either side of the naive, making it look narrower than it actually is. We were lucky to be there while a man practiced his music on the organ. You can’t see the organ pipes, they are contained/ hidden within a very ornately curved open topped wooden enclosure. There are many beautiful stained glass windows, many large and ornate wooden doors, and the inside walls have some of the very old tombstones from the surrounding graveyard mounted to them for preservation and display. It was very surprising to find a Cathedral, or for that matter any building, of this size on these small islands.
On the drive from the ferry to our accommodation three islands to the south, we passed the turn-offs to most of our explorations tomorrow and saw quite a few shipwrecks very close to the roads, it is going to be a very interesting day. And on that note the fog has just rolled in off the ocean. Our hotel is just metres from the water.
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