Yesterday at ten to two in the morning I arrived home from an overnighter in Orkney, staying at the Ayre hotel.  At this time of year the sun doesn't fully set and so I was able to go for an evening stroll at 11pm and the sky looked pretty light.  It never got darker than twilight even in the small hours - I kept waking up just to look outside.  It reminded me of the line in that song in the Wicker Man "would you have a wondrous sight?  The midday sun at midnight".

The next day my friend took me around the island (the mainland) which is jaw droppingly lovely.  There's little respite for the eyes - every bit you look at is gorgeous and cries out to be photographed and even the same bit looks different after a short while as the light changes.  There's nowhere to give the eyes a rest from the full-on loveliness :)

There's a lot of sky up there and I'm not really used to panoramic skylines in London so I was gawping a bit.  And while my mouth was wide open I managed to catch a few midges and wish I'd brought the midge net that I'd bought for the Plantlore course!

The place is teeming with neolithic delights and we drove first to the standing stones of Stenness and then on to the Ring of Brogar (also written as Brodgar and pronounced with the d in either case) which is an impressive ring of stones with an amazing view from all angles.  Plenty of wildlife too - sheep wander around more or less as they please, a few cows and loads of birds.  Very rich plant life as well, all recorded by my cheap camera - they have a teeny tiny orchid that I think is common on Orkney but rare everywhere else.  It has multiple flowers - like a load of miniature orchids on one stalk and it's very pretty.

Then we went to the Skara Brae settlement which is a neolithic village that you can walk around (it's protected by a perimeter pathway but you can get up pretty close) - it reminded me of the Teletubbies' burrow!  And, just like Teletubby land, apparently there aren't any foxes in Orkney and so the rabbits and hares have free run of the place and we saw a couple of rabbit holes nearby.  The sound - let alone the visuals - of the sea is very impressive and not for the first time in the last week I've wished I had some sort of minidisc recorder to capture the sounds around me.

The Skara Brae visitors' centre is excellent and builds up a good picture of evidence to try and demonstrate why archaeologists have come to the conclusions about the place that they have.

There was an exhibit talking about the types of food that would probably have been eaten and one mentioned was "bere bannock" (bere is pronounced 'bear').  Apparently the Agronomy Institute for Northern Temperate Crop Research has been revisiting bere, which is a type of barley has always been grown on Orkney, and examining its nutritional value along with the British Nutrition Foundation.  They've got some "niche products" in bere beer and bere loaves along with the (modern) bannocks - so now I might have to look out for those.

We also had a quick look around Skaill House which is a mixture of ancient (OK, 1600s I think!) and modern because of the quirky people who have lived there over the years.  The view from their front door - nae bad :-)

It's been quite a week for me gadding about the country - firstly to Cumbria and then two days later to Orkney.  It's nice to sit still and type this though, hehe.