Day 8 – Standing Stones and Stonemade Settlements
Check Skara Brae, so onwards to other sights. First of all the two distilleries nearby, meaning in Kirkwall. Highland Park lies still atop the hill when entering Kirkwall, with a beautiful view over the city. Scapa in comparison lies outside the city proper on the plains in a district called, well, Scapa. As different as the location, so is the presentation. Highland Park is well known and has fans of its nordic branded bottlings all over the world. As such you’ll find gorgeous Brick buildings, an inner yard polished to a shine, nice olden style signage and a lovely welcoming reception. Indirect lighting, pretty shelves filled with Merchandise and Whisky, and a fine-tuned offering of tours for every taste. Starting with a mainstream visitor tour for 12 pounds up to the Highland Park Experts of 250 and more. Already on entering you could feel the international character, not least because of the four or more different languages spoken all around (by tourists). Everything was a bit too shiny for my taste. I had already previously visited Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie and similar “Mainstream” distilleries, so I saved myself some time at HP.
Scapa on the other side was more like Clynelish, down to business, clear and direct. The reception was in a simple warehouse yard, Lighting was by way of windows and shelves had Whisky and Whisky products (like soap, sweets and similar). No T-Shirts, hats or other paraphernalia. But since I don’t like the taste of Scapa that much I skipped a tour here as well. Lastly in Kirkwall I also found the Orkney distillery, but they make Gin, not Whisky.
Usually I’m not such a big fan of city tours, but since I was hungry by now and Kirkwall offered the closest goal for some late lunch, I stopped there. I found my lunch in the form of Afternoon Tea at “The Strynd Tea room”. I let the pictures speak.
Afterwards it was time for history again: The Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. After Skara Brae they are probbly the most famous monuments on Orkney, since they lie along the way from Kirkwall to Sakra Brae. At these mythical sites I wanted to fly my drone for the first time. After a lot of struggle to get the app and the device updated to the latest firmware version (of course the Software requested an update at this very moment, not three days before I started my journey and had checked the last time), I had to give up and admit defeat. I was left with manual flight only which excludes video streaming to the phone and puts restrictions on distance and height of the drone for safety reasons. And then, of course, people arrived. Two Tour busses from one of the cruise ships that occasionally anchor at Kirkwall came by and disgorged a flood of Tourists from all over the place. So another half hour wait until lift-off. A few normal ground level pictures here, the aerial view comes later. While driving around the island I also had to cross some of the artificial land bridges that were built during World War II. Very interesting to see what was left in the water.
Overall these stops already took so much time that I had to skip two other potential trip destinations. The Brough of Birsay, an island with a tide-dependent land bridge, and the Old Man of Hoy. But for the latter I should have counted a whole day in any case. Maybe another time.