Welcome to the best place in the UK...

Nigel Richardson heads to Orkney to discover just what’s so special about the Scottish islands with a Scandi feel

In a shop window in Stromness, Orkney’s second town, I spotted a second-hand bra for sale: “Never worn. Wrong size. £8.” A little further on was a narrow alleyway (it would be known as a twitten in Brighton) called Khyber Pass. Such eccentricities endear one to a place. But this windswept archipelago lying between the north-east tip of mainland Scotland and its fellow island group of Shetland is not just an endearing and enduring corner of these British Isles. It is officially “the UK’s best place to live”.

I say “officially”. In fact, Orkney earned top spot in one of those annual “quality of life surveys” designed to attract as much publicity for the sponsor (I’ll spare its blushes) as for the winner. Based on indices such as employment levels (high), crime rates (low), exam results (good) and the availability of pre-owned underwear (I made that up), it beat Richmondshire in North Yorkshire into second place and trounced the likes of Winchester. The survey is hardly definitive – they didn’t factor in wind chill for a start. But it pleased me no end as it provided the perfect pretext to visit a place I feel has been calling me all my life.

Perhaps my fascination with Orkney stems from an early-life confusion between the words arcadian (“relating to an idyllic country scene or way of

life”) and Orcadian (“relating to the Orkney Islands”). At any rate, as the Loganair flight from Edinburgh banked over the shimmering, diamond-shaped waters of Scapa Flow, I felt impatient to be down among the surrounding islands of the Orcadian archipelago – green and treeless, suspended between endless ocean and endless skies and profoundly connected to deep history.

The next day I was shown around Mainland, the largest and most populous of Orkney’s 20 inhabited islands (a further 50 are uninhabited), by an Orcadian called Lorna Brown. She laughed at mention of the survey naming Orkney the UK’s best place to live. “We quite often win awards for things like that,” she said. “It amuses us! We were once voted the most romantic place in Britain, but that can’t have been based on

Orcadian men.”

A native of Westray, y, an island of 600 people lying in the far northwest of the Orkney group, Lorna was required to “chant” while she was with me. “Chanting” is what

Orcadians call speaking intelligibly to outsiders (or “ferry-loupers”). She likened it to her “telephone voice”. So speak to me as if I were a fellow Orcadian, I said – and she reverted to a barely comprehensible dialect.

Even when chanting, however, some vowel sounds are immovably non-English. “I think the coos on Orkney don’t just look contented, they look smug – there’s so much grass,” she said at one point.

On traffic-free roads we were zipping through a landscape of sloping fields and dark heathery ridges. Scarecrows in hi-vis jackets fought a losing battle to keep the pesky greylag geese away. Hares – far more numerous than anywhere else I’ve been – galloped across the open greenery. And Lorna talked of her Orcadian affinities. “We’re lucky that we can be whoever we want to be, but we do feel very close to Scandinavia,” she said. “That’s what makes us feel a bit different.”

Orkney was settled by Norse people from the eighth century and remained part of a Scandinavian kingdom till 1468. Bergen in Norway is far closer than London – or indeed Manchester – in England. “We don’t like to speak ill of the Vikings,” said Lorna. “Someone asked me, ‘What became of them? Did they leave?’ ‘No, we’re still here’.” You feel them in the place names – Smoogro, Hobbister, Skaill – and above all in some spectacularly evocative archaeology.

Orkney’s Norse heritage constitutes one of the two anchor cables that fix it so firmly to the past, the other being the legacy of the neolithic age. The chambered tomb of Maeshowe is where these two strands plait together in the most extraordinary way. Maeshowe is one of the principal sites of the Unesco-designated Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, along with the shoreline village of Skara Brae and the stone circles known as the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar.

At the winter solstice, the sun sets over the hills of Hoy, sending a shaft of light that penetrates the entrance passageway of Maeshowe and illuminates the chamber within. On a bright spring day I stood outside the entrance and looked south-west to Hoy, imagining the advancing light. Then I followed its putative course into the tomb to discover the second remarkable thing about Maeshowe.

In the 12th century, when it had been abandoned for 3,000 years, Vikings broke in to use it as a shelter – and left behind graffiti on the sandstone blocks that constitute one of the biggest collections of Viking runes

‘We’re lucky that we can be whoever we want to be, but we do feel very close to Scandinavia’

in the world. The marks – generally of the “Thorfinn woz ere” variety – include a minuscule creature known as the “Maeshowe Dragon”, a motif repeated endlessly in the jewellery and tourist shops of Kirkwall, Orkney’s friendly, low-key capital.

You could say that the Vikings were the original ferry-loupers. But Orkney was never just a place that outsiders