A Walker in the Suburbs

“It looks like someone stabbed the island with a knife,” said Stewart, our guide on this three-day tour of the Orkney Islands. He was referring to this collapsed sea cave known as a gloup. 

The gloup does look like a large earth wound, and the North Sea rushes in from the back end, making it gurgle and growl.  Though it was a warm day for these climes (closer to Norway than London), the temperature of the surrounding water is in the upper 50s. I wouldn’t want to fall in.

Stewart was born here, and his grandparents are Orkadians, so he knows the hidden jewels of this faraway place. Tomorrow, he’ll show us more of them.

Inverness is the capital of the Highlands, but the mountains mostly disappeared as we chugged up to the city by train last evening. 

There are a few hills, but for the most part Inverness is far less “highlandy” than some of the other places we’ve visited. It sits in the Great Glen, which runs from here to Fort William. It’s a natural travel route, a break in the hills, a passageway. 

Today we made our own passageway, touring the city center, exploring the islands in the River Ness (so shallow that if the monster migrated from the loch we would have seen him) and finding out where the Great Glen Way and the Caledonian Canal enter the city. 

If our steps left a wake like the boats we saw in the canal today, you’d see a lot of backtracking. 

Four days here, barely enough time to know the Trotternish from the Sleat, the Cuillins from the Quiraing. More time here than most places, but still not nearly enough.

Best to leave when you’ve plenty left to explore, I tell myself. But at this point, the cool rational part of me knows that return is unlikely. 

Skye is passing from an actual, physical place to a place I keep only in memory. But there too it will live large.

So often on this trip I’ve wished I could drink up the scenery. It’s that scrumptious. Taking a photograph doesn’t seem enough. I want to inhale it, to soak it up through my pores. 

And then there are places I want to photograph because they’re iconic. Eilean Donan Castle falls into this category. You see pictures of the place in guidebooks and on calendars. So today we drove there, not a short distance I might add. It was lovely, of course — it’s a castle in Scotland. 

But then we walked around to the nearby village of Dornie, and I saw the most enchanting garden, and well, that’s the place I wanted to inhale today. 

It’s hard to know where to start. Should I write about the heather on the hill? It’s in season here in Skye.

Or  the views views off Lealt Gorge with the Inner Hebrides in the distance?

Truth is, I’m seeing far too much during these long luscious days (it’s light till almost 10) to encapsulate it in a single post.  So I’ll end with what you see up top — the lighthouse at the end of the world. 

We’ve only been on this island a few hours but I can already appreciate the aptness of the appellation. A beautiful name for a beautiful place: Skye. 

Mountains rise from the mist. Heather decks the hills. A harbor curves gracefully outside our window. There’s an old-fashioned square-rigged schooner parked in the bay. Not sure why, but it seems to fit.

On the way over, dolphins swam by our ferry, leaping and diving, as if to welcome us. Three jumped from the water at once in perfect synchrony.

As the day winds down, a cloud moves over the hill that juts into the loch, creating a perfect replica of itself in shade on the mountainside.