Rain Trips and Clips

Rain  in the title is obvious.  Trips, well, Cathy was stopped on a path to photograph a feature and as I went around her  by stepping off the path into the vegetation I learned that she was on a foot bridge and I no longer was.  Camera is fine, so am I.  Clothes are wet.  Clips-- since the rain drove us in, Cathy is catching up with her travel journal, clipping and pasting relevant artefacts (as spelled over here) she has collected.

Here are a few of today's pictures.

Fresh from our discovery of the Culween Cairn yesterday, today we followed small roads and paths that lead to various features on the road maps such as cairns, ruins and tumuli.  I presume the latter are tombs. And there are lots of said features all over the place.  Not necessarily visible, not necessarily accessible.  We didn't find any that we could crawl through, but still had a nice day.  This tumulus was on a farm.  Cathy had a blast taking pictures of the very large cattle that are at my back as I shot this.  As she came the 50 yards back to the car, the moo-moos followed, saying "take more pictures of us, we're beautiful".

 

Beautiful moo-moos.

 

This was the only "listed' historic site on our agenda, called the Broch of Gurness.  A broch is a fortress, in this case for a 2,000 year old farming settlement.   The Vikings subsequently used it periodically, until the Seahawks blew them out of the water. 

 

Nearby is Orkney's longest continuous sandy beach.  Cathy wanted to collect shells the beach is known for, so we were out in the rain for half an hour doing just that.  I  don't know if this old building is a croft, although we have seen more than our share of dilapidated crofts around here. 

 

Someone had made this sandcastle and adorned it with shells and pebbles found along the shoreline.

 

This is where I stepped off the bridge.  This structure, 20' tall is a dovecote (doocot in local dialect) from the 1600s.  There is a small entrance we could have crawled in, but hearing the pigeons inside flapping away we were concerned about the tops of our heads and the bottoms of our shoes.

 

Stromness Town Hall.  Apparently by the nature of the following structure, they hold their municipal government in higher esteem that we're used.  Maybe they pay tithes rather than taxes? 

 

Stromness was pouring down as we went up the main street searching for a particular CD our BnB hostess has played for us.  Mid afternoon, high tourist season, attractive street adjacent to the water, large ferry just arrived.  The place was still deserted.  A couple shops were open.  I bought some olives but found no CDs.  Found no appealing  pubs to duck into out of the rain, checked the dinner menu at the Stromness Hotel and decided PBJ will suffice tonight rather than $100 tab.  The fish and chips shop was dark and empty.  Otherwise a cute town.