Orkney: Five days with a saint
In the far north, Scotland goes a bit Nordic. Head to Orkney to embrace saints, sagas and seascapes urges
(and Times walking correspondent Christopher Somerville.)
Christopher Somerville.
I HAVE LOVED ORKNEY since I first went there in 1988 for its famed Folk Festival. Of the three wild days and sleepless nights of the festival itself I remember very little – it was that sort of caper. But what stuck like a burr in the mind was the whiteness of the beaches and the greenness of these islands, which sail in the turbulent seas some ten miles off the north coast of Scotland. I also treasured the fantastic array of prehistoric monuments, from great circles of standing stones and neolithic chambered tombs to 5000-year-old houses, standing tall in the low-rolling landscape. And the irrepressible good humour and courtesy of the Orcadians themselves.
I’ve been back to Orkney on several occasions, and each time the same thought has occurred: why isn’t there a long-distance walk that connects up some of these fabulous treasures?
Well, now there is – the rugged and beautiful St Magnus Way, completed last year, which travels through lonely backcountry under enormous skies filled with wind and weather.
It dances along the coasts and across the gentle hills of Orkney Mainland, chief island of the archipelago, for 55 miles to St Magnus’ cathedral at Kirkwall, capital town of the islands.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of St Magnus Erlendsson, martyr and icon, to Orcadians. They love their patron saint. They labelled their cathedral, their community centre and their arts festival after him; they name their houses and their sons, their dogs, their rams and bulls in his honour. Scenes from his life, painted by children, hang in island schools and churches.
In Orkney’s rich heritage and culture, there is no question about it: Magnus lives.
The St Magnus Way is divided into five relatively easy, day-long stages. Put together, they trace the route along which Magnus’s followers carried his body, after his martyrdom in 1117 AD, to its eventual resting place.
The route is detailed in the ancient Orkneyinga Saga, so its authenticity is pretty well established. The start of Stage One sets the scene: a windy headland a little north of the capital town of Kirkwall, where stands the mighty base of the Broch of Gurness, a circular Pictish defensive tower built some 2,000 years ago. It was here, or hereabouts, that the body of St Magnus was brought ashore after his murder on the island of Egilsay. Magnus had been axed in the head on the orders of his jealous cousin Haakon, with whom he jointly ruled Orkney.
From here the St Magnus Way runs west along the coast to Christchurch at Birsay, where the saint’s body was first buried. That’s where the first day’s stage ends, after an up-and-down walk along
the coast, past the stone stubs of several brochs, with magnificent sea views out to the islands of Rousay and Eynhallow.
At Birsay the Earl’s Palace frowns at all comers, a grim fortress built in the 1570s by the wicked and ruthless Robert Stewart. This Earl of Orkney, illegitimate son of King James V of Scotland, was a high-handed and brutal ruler of the Orkney isles, and there is a baleful feeling to the stark ruins of his stronghold. Beyond the palace, I stroll out across a causeway at low tide to the Brough of Birsay, a fascinating jumble of Norse and Pictish buildings on a tidal island. Standing on the cliffs among pink thrift flowers, looking seaward for dolphins and on down the coast of wave-battered rocks, I could happily take root and stay here forever.
In 1137 the body of St Magnus was exhumed from its Birsay grave and carried away eastwards for reburial at Kirkwall. For Stage Two the Way follows the route of that ancient funerary procession, turning inland past standing stones and ancient burial mounds on the shores of the Loch of Boardhouse, and on by way of Twatt, Greeny and Cloke. A signposted detour set me climbing the boggy slopes of Greeny Hill, a squelchy slog rewarded with a fine southward view from the 460-ft summit over the winding lane to Dounby.
Stage Three leads along serpentine lanes that thrash about intriguingly. They wriggle though sloping cattle pastures to the shores of the enormous freshwater Loch of Harray, with views to the lumpy hills of the island of Hoy far beyond in the south-west. Then it’s back inland between lonely Orkney farmsteads, their fields stone-walled and neatly rectangular. I pass the pretty little Loch of Wasdale to reach the sea at Finstown by way of
“Even in Kirkwall, the islands’ trim and busy capital and largest town, with a population of nearly 6000, the world beyond the water rumour.” soon begins to feel like a vaguely doubtful BILL BRYSON , WRITER
a track through Binscarth Woods. The woodland, with its jumble of sycamores, ash, beech and hawthorn, is a pleasing rarity in Orkney, where salt winds forbid almost all tree growth.
Finstown has a good craft centre on the shores of the Bay of Firth. This is the place to stock up on picnic goodies at Baikies Stores before heading off south on Stage Four. Near the start, I bend and crawl with my head torch into the 5000-year-old stone tomb in Cuween Hill, where the bones of 24 dogs were discovered buried along with the remains of eight humans. It was nice to think, sitting in the profound darkness of the tomb, that even back then man was inseparable from his best friend. Back on the Way, my boots get a good plastering on a rugged day of peat-cutters’ tracks, trudging across heathery moorland carved into sharp-sided ramparts by centuries of handcutting the peat for burning on the fire.
The track bends past Keelylang Hill and past Tuskerbister (wonderful Orcadian names), then by way of South Rusky Hill and Ward Hill, to reach the Stromness road on the outskirts of Orphir. A narrow lane leads south to the coast at Bu of Orphir. Here I find the foundations of a 12thcentury Norse earl’s Bu (manor house and drinking hall), the apse of a circular church of roughly the same date, and a Viking Centre nearby whose modest displays told the story of the murders, fights and dramas that took place at the Bu.
The last day, Stage Five, starts in pelting rain along the main Kirkwall road, before heading off down a lane by the side of tidal Waulkmill Bay. The Way hummocks up and down along the cliffs, in part through trackless heather, with the giant natural anchorage of Scapa Flow opening to the south. I admire the sands of St Ola’s Bay, steaming with the outflowing water from Scapa Distillery on the cliffs. There’s a brief final slog north before I enter the neat, stone-built town of Kirkwall.
This small city, its spine a straggling, paved main street, is centred on the monumental 12th-century Cathedral of St Magnus, a weather-battered hulk of red and yellow sandstone whose narrow, dark interior soars in Romanesque arches. Before entering the cathedral I find my way to the narrow lane called St Olaf’s Wynd. A simple stone archway is all that’s left of the tiny St Olaf’s Kirk, where St Magnus’s body was buried in 1137. It was only another temporary resting place; work on the cathedral began the same year, and a shrine of fitting splendour was soon built there to contain the relics of the saint.
Inside the cathedral I find moving naif paintings of St Magnus’s martyrdom near the pillar which now contains his bones and shattered skull. Easing my sore feet in a seat nearby in the dusky rose-pink light, I think back over the walk, and of its charms. I think of stone tombs and standing stones, of the squelch of boots on peaty moorland; of bursts of rain and beams of sun; the piping of oystercatchers and curlew beside the Loch of Harray.
Above all, I’m left with a tremendous sense of the lonely beauty of Orkney; and a warm feeling for the martyred Earl whose memory is still so fondly kept in these far-flung islands.
“Still, Orkney is the best place. Happy are they who never leave it.” EDWI N MUI R , O RCADIAN POET