We had a tasty breakfast, but no tattie scones (I must learn how to make them). We struck up a conversation with the other folks having breakfast — a lovely German couple. They were so relieved to hear that we have occasional trouble with the Scottish accents. They thought that their English wasn’t as good as they hoped. We assured them this wasn’t the case. After, we exchanged e-mails.
We were on the road by 10:00 and took a lovely winding drive north along the ocean. Beautiful countryside — grazing fields right to the land’s edge — with plenty of sheep and cows munching.
The weather is still cooperating with us. We had sunshine and wind for most of the drive. There had been a wind warning, apparently. There were a few short stretches with a bit of rain, but that’s it.
In Helmsdale, we visited the Timespan Museum, where we saw artifacts from life in this area in the early 1800s. Herring was big business here in those days, and herring gutting was woman’s work. A skilled woman could gut 50 herring per minute!
We stopped for tea and ginger cake in the museum café, then continued on to Camster, via a long, straight, and very narrow road with frequent sheep obstacles. After 10 miles, pulling off into the provided lay-bys when we saw oncoming cars, we arrived at the Grey Cairns of Camster — two 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial cairns.
One cairn is round, the other is long and more or less rectangular. The entries have gates to keep the sheep out, but you can actually go into the cairns and look around. We peeked into some of the entryways, and there was only one that didn’t require crawling through mud on hands and knees. Fred went in.
After a short very low passageway, it opened up to a circular central room. A glass skylight provided enough light to see. There was what looked like a doorway on one side, framed by two standing stones but blocked by a massive boulder. Archaeologists think this once led to another burial chamber, but it’s unknown why it was sealed.
There were wooden walkways to the cairns, so we only got a minimal amount of sheep poop on our shoes.
We continued on to Scrabster and took the ferry to Stromness on Orkney Island. The crossing was a little rough at first, which made Ruth queasy, but fortunately no dinner was lost. When we say “a little rough”, bear in mind that this is the North Sea. The seats in the dining room were actually chained down. People were lurching about, bumping into things. At one point a plastic bottle of water went flying across the table and into Fred’s lap.
It was dark when we arrived, so finding the Lindisfarne B&B was a challenge. We had planned on letting the GPS guide us, but it didn’t have a clue, and we didn’t have a backup map. We drove for a while, then turned around and went to a grocery store to ask directions. Their directions led us to a B&B all right, however not the one we wanted.
But we didn’t know it wasn’t the right one, so we flounced in through the unlocked front door with a cheery “Halloo!” and chatted with an elderly couple who were in the sitting room watching TV. Eventually we realized that it wasn’t even the right place, and we all had a laugh about it. They gave us directions, followed by “you can’t miss it,” but miss it we did. Then a quick u-turn on a dark street, a left turn down a gravel road, and there it was.
We’ll be here for three days, so we’re happy to find that we have a nice big room, a proper bathroom with non-challenging plumbing, and a comfy common sitting room. As well, our host Deborah is very friendly and accommodating.
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