Up bright and early and a careful drive along the potentially icy and slippery roads up to Gills Bay ferry terminal was the order of the day. A delightful pre-sunrise scene awaited us and everything went smoothly as we boarded the Pentland Ferry bound for St Margaret's Hope on Orkney.
Thankfully, the weather conditions were favourable with a breeze and minimal swell as we crossed the notorious Pentland Firth. Pleased to spot an inquisitive grey seal en route and also a chance to see many workers headed across to Orkney as it was a Monday morning. A cool commute for some.
Arriving on Orkney we drove up to our accommodation in Kirkwall and started to have a think about what we'll do this week. Our self contained air BnB is nice and close to the main areas of Kirkwall and will be a great base for the week. We're a bit sad but there are a lot of things that are not open, including the Highland Park distillery, although they have an outlet in town that I'll visit. The same can be said for most of the dairy/farm sorts of experiences that we'd hoped to find. Maybe Ireland :)
We spent the afternoon exploring the main streets of Kirkwall. A surprisingly big town given what we've been exploring in north of Scotland. Plenty of jewelry shops and women's clothing shops to check out. We also went for a visit to St Magnus Cathedral...a very significant structure and quite different to many other places that we've visited. The stonework is a mixture of stone types, with red sandstone that shows quite a bit of weathering including honeycomb stuff on the entranceway. There is also quite a bit of evidence of pitting, apparently because there have been lots of pilgrims who travel the St Edmunds way/visit Orkney who believe that by scraping some of the stone from the cathedral and ingesting it, that they will be cured of all sorts of illnesses.
The story of Magnus is that he was a norse Christian who was involved in a power struggle with his brother who arranged for him to be murdered (martyred) by of all people, his cook. When confronted, Magnus said that he did not wish to be killed as a commoner by having his throat slit, so instead the cook hacked into his skull, splitting it. His remains were then hidden on the Broch at Birsay and then in a chapel there, before being brought to the cathedral here in Kirkwall. His location within the cathedral was kept a secret for fear of being taken until relatively recently, during refurbishments, human bones were found hidden high up in a pillar near the choir stalls. X-ray examination of the remains showed that the skull indeed showed the person has a massive skull fracture so without disturbing the remains further it has been deduced that this is Magnus. Mad story!
The many other stones/internments within the cathedral have quite different looking symbology on them, especially the 1600s ones with skull and crossbones in a really distinctive way. Weird. There are also some other instances of "graffiti" from the middle ages when superstition around witchcraft abounded. We spoke to a guy who pointed out a really faint symbol of hexagonal flower like shape scratched into the stone above a papacy cleft in the wall where it was thought demons could access the cathedral. If he hadn't shown it to us we'd have missed it.
Quiet night in and we'll see what tomorrow holds!