Stromness

Flagstones and the Harbourfront

The main street is a single winding line of flagstones, hugging the shore so closely that the old stone houses turn their gable-ends to the water, many with their own piers and slipways. It is essentially the whole town: one paved thoroughfare running from the pierhead to the Point of Ness, with a tumbling network of lanes and alleyways branching off it. Some of them have names — Khyber Pass, Puffer's Close — that suggest the people naming lanes here were not short of imagination.

The Ferry Inn sits on the harbourfront at 10 John Street, and it is the sole surviving traditional pub in the town centre; pubsgalore lists nine local establishments as closed. It has been a must-visit for over thirty years and has won CAMRA's Northern Isles Pub of the Year more than once. The cellar is racked for up to ten local cask ales, with four handpulls on the bar and a speciality line in single malts, gins and rums. The kitchen keeps things fresh and local — Orkney seafood, beef, lamb and dairy, local breads and biscuits — and opens daily from half past twelve. Book in peak season.

A Landmark Hotel and Independent Shops

Up on Victoria Street, the Stromness Hotel is the town's most prominent building, a Victorian landmark overlooking the harbour. During the Second World War, with the naval anchorage at Scapa Flow to protect, it became the army headquarters for Orkney and Shetland.

For provisions, E. Flett the butcher trades in Orkney meat, Bayleaf Deli is the deli on the main street, and Argo's Bakery handles the bread and bakes. Stromness Books & Prints keeps an independent bookshop going on the flagstones, alongside studios, galleries, a vintage paper shop and a dive shop.

Explorers, Artists and Poets

The town is generous with its history for its size. A statue of Dr John Rae stands here — the Orcadian Arctic explorer who learned from Inuit hunters the fate of Franklin's lost 1845 expedition, reported that the men had resorted to cannibalism, and was shunned by the Victorian establishment for saying so. Login's Well, on the main street and recently reopened behind a glass door, once watered Captain Cook's Resolution and Discovery, the Hudson's Bay Company's ships, and Franklin's own Erebus and Terror before they sailed.

The poet George Mackay Brown lived his final years in a top-floor flat at Mayburn Court, across from Stromness Museum, and is buried west of town at Warbeth. Margaret Gardiner left her collection of twentieth-century British art to found the Pier Arts Centre in 1979; admission is free, Tuesday to Saturday.

The Coast and Granite Heights

The walking is coastal. The path to Warebeth runs 6.5km, about two and a half hours, past the Ness Battery and out to a beach named from the Scots word for seaweed, with views across Hoy Sound to Hoy and Graemsay and the chance of orca and feeding gannets near the Kirk Rocks. Brinkie's Brae, the granite hill behind the town, repays the climb with the whole harbour laid out below.

Ferries, Roads and Silence

There is no railway — Orkney never had one. NorthLink ferries cross to Scrabster on the mainland, and the A965 reaches Kirkwall in about twenty-five minutes. Brown's gravestone at Warbeth carries his own instruction: "Carve the runes, then be content with silence."