After reluctantly bidding a fond farewell to Kirsty and Dave at Orkney Island Memories B&B, who have been such fabulous hosts for 9 nights, I embarked upon the next stage of my Orkney Odyssey and boarded the ferry to Westray. When we were about 15 minutes from Westray, there was some amusement when a member of the crew came into the lounge and took a lifejacket! Must've been a false alarm though as he brought it back a couple of minutes later. Westray is on...

As the last couple of days have involved a lot of walking, and the forecast today was for heavy rain, I decided that my last day on Orkney Mainland would be easy going. So I decided to go Farming Today. By the time I arrived at Kirbuster Farm Museum, it had stopped raining. This fascinating museum set in original buildings contains a rare example of a traditional 'firehoose'. This has the original central hearth, backed by a small wall, complete with a peat fire...

Today I visited two of the smaller inhabited islands. Although the day had dawned wet, it was dry by the time I left after an early breakfast to enable me to catch the ferry. At the Tingwall Terminal I left The Minx in the car park and walked onto the ferry just as it started raining. The ferry first stopped at Rousay, where everyone else disembarked. 15 minutes later I walked onto the island of Egilsay in near horizontal rain and, I suspect, the ferry crew were...

In complete contrast to yesterday, the weather today was glorious - t-shirt and sun cream was the order of the day. My first stop was at the Orkneyinga Saga centre in Orphir. The saga was written in 1230 by an unknown Icelandic author and combined oral legends with fact to document the history of Orkney from their capture by a Norwegian king in the 9th century up to about 1200. Behind the centre are the remains of a cylindrical kirk (church) and the Earl's Bu, b...

This morning I took a ferry to the island of Rousay. This is known as The Egypt of The North - certainly not for the climate or abundance of sand, but because of the amount of prehistoric monuments that exist on the island. The ferry trip itself was a new experience for me. First, we had to reverse on, then as we were tightly packed, we sat in our vehicles for the 25 minute journey. It was a strange sensation sitting in The Minx feeling that we were moving while...