Ward Hill & Dwarfie Stane
1 ND205987 From the bothy, return past toilets to the car park and follow the road out to a junction. From the Outdoor Centre hostel, follow the road out to the same junction. Follow this road on north until it bends right over Rackwick Burn.
2 HY202000 Just over the burn go left on a clear, firm-bedded path. At once it recrosses the burn and heads up-valley to its left, passing the tiny, scattered trees of the most northerly ancient woodland. The path recrosses the burn at a wooden footbridge, and slants uphill. As it levels off, turn up right through deep vegetation, on a sloping terrace below the steep west end of Ward Hill. As the terrace levels off, turn up left, with the hill slope above now a bit less steep. Now free of the obstructing plant life, head straight up to three small cairns at the end of the Ward Hill ridgeline.
3 HY216011 Turn east along the stony moorland plateau, rising to another cairn. Continue north-east along the main ridgeline of Ward Hill. A cairn has a wind-eroded rock slab beside it. Then comes Ward Hill summit cairn, with a wallenclosed trig point alongside it. Continue ahead, north, for 150 metres, to the tall cylinder cairn overlooking Hoy village and Stromness.
4 HY228024
Return to the main cairn. Head down south-east, past a smaller cairn, to find the ridge shoulder descending towards the lower outlier called Haist. After a steepish descent, pass across the saddle, with pinnacled decomposing cliffs falling to your left, to the small cairn of Haist.
5 HY237019 Descend the gentle moorland ridge east of south, to its end at the 250m contour. For least steep slopes, descend south-west, towards the Burn of the Nowt Bield. As the slope eases, slant down left to reach the moorland road below. Turn left along the road, rising gently for 800m, to its high point with a car park.
6 HY242008 A small path turns off to the right. It crosses the valley floor on duckboards and rises to the Dwarfie Stane. It's considered to be a tomb for a not very large, but presumably very important, standard human, carved out of a single sandstone lump (see page 121). Crouch in the tombway pretending to be a dead person of the early Bronze Age, then return to the road. Continue north along it, to reach the B9047 above the Bay of Quoys. Turn left, at once forking right in a lesser road. (At low tide you could also use the Bay of Quoys foreshore.) Follow the road to a T-junction and turn right to the Moaness Pier.