The Old Man of Hoy and Maeshowe

Travel Date: 04 June 2012
(Slideshow of photos at the bottom)

Today was much less hassling trying to get around. Buses were back up to their full schedules as were the ferries between islands. I got up early enough to hop a bus back to Stromness from Kirkwall and then had 10 minutes to get onto the little passenger ferry, taking me out to the island of Hoy. It was another sunny day, though still chilly, that provided me with great views of Stromness as we pulled out of the harbor and into the tidally forceful Scapa Flow. There was a little story I read, I think at the Flattie Bar yesterday while in Stromness, that described life on the water: people living there were sailors and fishermen by trade so they were very comfortable being on the water, but the kids who had their own little boats (the Flatties of the pub's name) were warned to not sail past black buoys placed out near the mouth of the harbor because from there on out, the tides and currents were much to strong and would carry them away, out to sea.

Leaving Stromness Harbor

Today, though, the ferry easily navigates the tides and we pulled out into the channel between mainland Orkney and Hoy. Again, here was an entrance to the protected harbor where the WWI and WWII British Navy Fleets were stationed, so you can still see the old watch-houses and bunkers along the islands that were used to protect that channel entrance from any German threat. They are abandoned now, but still stand in silent guard.

WWI/WWI-era look-outs on the shore of the isle of Graemsay with mountainous Hoy in the background

Hoy is a beautiful island. It has the most topography of any of the Orkney Islands and was visibly sculpted by glaciers during the last Glacial Maximum. One of its more modern features, however, is the Old Man of Hoy, the United Kingdom's tallest seastack (450 feet high)! A seastack is a tower of rock separated from the rest of a cliff-lined coast. They form as wave action strikes a rocky promontory, and as the waves refract around the head of the point, they erode the neck from two sides. Eventually, the neck of the promontory totally erodes through and all that is left is a giant stack of rock out to sea: hence the name seastack.

Docking at the isle of Hoy

To get out to the Old Man of Hoy, you have a few options. You can prearrange a cab to pick you up at the ferry dock, you can sign up for a guided tour, you can bike out there, or you can hike the 6.5 miles from the docks, through glacially sculpted valleys, and then up to the site. I bought some new hiking boots when I was in Michigan for my sister's wedding and since I didn't want to pay for a bike rental or a cab, I decided to hike. The first mile and a half are all up a one-lane road leading away from the ferry dock, through sheep pastures, and through some moors. The road eventually turns, but hikers continue the next two and a half miles through the glacial valleys, which are protected as part of the Scottish National Bird Sanctuary. Because of this, though, I was warned by a local Orcadian that you kind of have to keep your eyes open for any divebombing Great Skua birds (called, Bonxies by the locals). They kind of soar around above you and if you get too close to their nests, they will squawk and dive toward you. I won't lie, I had a few stones in my hands just in case, and even shouted at a few that I thought were flying too close to me! There was a little reservoir up in the valley that most of the bonxies stuck to, and once I was past that, they were no longer a problem!

The lonely road out to the hiking path to Rackwick on the isle of Hoy

Watch out for the dive-bombing bonxies!

Further down the valley, tucked away in little stream valleys, are some of the last remaining wild Orcadian forest, that used to cover much of the islands. Over 5,000 years of constant settlement and agriculture, it's no wonder there is little left of these forests. But then the trail reconnects with the road which ends not much further in the little town (if you can call it that) of Rackwick.

Some of the original, most northerly native woodland in the British Isles

Rackwick is literally the end of the road, but it is a beautiful end of the road with a wide, sweeping beach with turquoise water, nestled between huge, enormous, sandstone cliffs. And I'm not talking 100-foot-high Sydney Coastal Walk cliffs, or even 200-foot-high Pictured Rocks cliffs, or even 400-foot-high Cliffs of Moher. These cliffs jut up 500-feet from the ocean far below (and they aren't even the tallest, which rise up over 1,000 feet!). So Rackwick is a beautiful end of the road, but not the end of the journey out to the Old Man of Hoy, which still requires a two and a quarter mile hike along cliffs and over coastal plateaus. But once you are there, it is such a treat! Standing 450-feet up from the ocean, far below, is this behemoth of stacked beds of sandstone, flanked to the south by similarly-high cliffs, and to the north by the massive 1,000 foot cliffs! Now, believe me when I say that the Cliffs of Moher are beautiful and stunning, but the fact that they are so accessible and overrun by tourists makes them a bit less wonderous, compared to these massive cliffs that only those willing enough to hike a few miles will ever get to.

Old British Telephone booth at the Rackwick Hostel, looking down at the town and the massive sea cliffs

The Old Man of Hoy: 450 feet tall and the tallest sea-stack in the UK

Me with the sea cliffs north of the Old Man of Hoy

Puffins! This was the best shot I could get, even with my 18x zoom lens... But some birdwatchers there told me of better places closer to Glasgow I can go to get better photos

I stayed out at the cliffs for a little while, enjoying my packed lunch of cheese, jerky, an apple, biscuits, and crisps, watching the sea birds (mostly seagulls, but I did see some puffins, too! - just very, very far below me...) and chatting with a few of the other visitors who were from all over the place: Germany, southern England, California... They all had a few good stories and we each helped the others take photos. It did start to sprinkle, just a thin band of rain, but it was also time to head back to the ferry dock. I wanted to take a more rigorous route up above the massive cliffs to the north, but being alone, without a detailed map, and on a time constraint, I decided it would be better to go back the way I came and leave the high-cliff route for another time. Back toward the ferry dock, a lot of tourists were having an afternoon tea at a little cafe. It was nice, but definitely priced more for the retired clientele who have a little bit more pocket change than your average student day-hiker, but I bought an Irn-Bru and gave my feet a rest in the yard, watching a chicken hobble around.

I had to catch the first afternoon ferry back to Stromness in order to get the right bus out to Maeshowe, which I wasn't able to get in yesterday. We had to wait for the ferry a little bit but it gave me time to explore the exposed rocky shoreline during low tide, which was covered in barnacles, limpets, algae, and seaweed. The ferry came and brought us back to Stromness where I had a little extra time before the bus, so I bought a beer at the Ferry Inn and listened to one final jam session by the remaining musicians in town for the Orkney Folk Festival. But then it was bus time and back to Maeshowe.

Limpets stuck to the bedrock at Hoy Harbor during low tide. As water washes over them, it erodes little pockets around each limpet creating a pitted pattern on the rock.

Maeshowe is a fantastic Neolithic site, nearly 5,000 years old. You have to book a tour in advance, and in the summer there are extra "twilight" tours in the evenings, which aren't really twilight since the sun pretty much never sets. To get into Maeshowe, you have to stoop quite low and walk through a ten-meter passageway lined in massive, single blocks of stone. Once inside, you're able to stand up in a square chamber with what was once a corbelled ceiling (but is now a poorly constructed brick dome structure put in place in the early 1900s). Maeshowe is similar to other chambered tombs of the area in that opposite the door and on either side wall are two recessed and L-shaped chambers. In other tombs of this age, human bones have been found stored in these chambers, grouped by bone-type, rather than full skeletons. It is thought that Maeshowe served a similar purpose but very few bones have actually been found there. It may have also served a more ceremonial purpose, archaeologists think, suggested by the fact that the entrance to the tomb directly faces the setting sun on the Winter Solstice. Curiously, on the solstice, the sun sets behind the massive mountains of Hoy, and it is thought that they also served some spiritual purpose. Furthermore, the ceremonial significance of Maeshowe is suggested by its proximity to the Standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring and Ness of Brodgar, and the Barnhouse Village.

In the 12th century, multiple groups of Vikings were vying for control of Orkney and one group started off one morning in Stromness but got caught in a storm and took shelter in Maeshowe, leaving cryptic messages of the runic alphabet carved into some of the stones. They spoke of the treasures of the North and one claimed to be a master writer of runes who and carved his message using a very famous axe, used to slay Gauk - don't ask me the history of that; all I know is that the axe was well-known.

My favorite bit about Maeshowe, though, again were the slabs of rock. The entrance tunnel was lined and covered with ten-meter long single slabs of sandstone, and the lintel above each of the recesses off the main chamber, which were five meters by at least three meters, were each carved of a single slab of rock. How those people 5,000 years ago were able to move such large pieces of rock over large distances still baffles me as well as archaeologists, and as to how it was done is still anyone's guess.

In front of the entrance to Maeshowe. No photos are allowed inside, but it's pretty amazing

One last look over to the Ring of Brodgar

Upon leaving the tomb, I gave one last look around the landscape, taking a few more photos, before heading back to the visitors center to wait for the last bus into Kirkwall. I bought a few postcards and got some good music suggestions from the woman working the shop, and indulged myself into a wee tub of ice cream from the Orkney Creamery, which was delicious (I suggest the Toffee Swirl and the Orkney Original).

Back in Kirkwall, I ran into some girls who were out at the Old Man of Hoy when I was there that day, and we chatted a while over some coffees and snacks in a little craft shop/coffee house, Judith Glue. The girls were fun to chat with, but they had already eaten dinner and I needed some substantial food before 9pm, so I said goodbye to them and headed out to see my final fish and chips of the trip. I caught the shop just before they closed and took my food out to the harbor to eat. It wasn't quite 10pm yet and I realized that I did want to purchase something to remember Orkney by, and I went back to Judith Glue (which stays open until 10pm!) and purchased a few prints done by a local artist and a bottle of Dark Island, brewed by the Orkney Brewery - as suggested by a man at the pub where I got dinner the night before - and headed back to my hostel where I watched the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace and wrote my postcards. That night, as part of the Jubilee, beacons, or torches or bonfires, were being lit around the UK and the world in commonwealth countries. Stromness had their own beacon and I was tipped that Kirkwall would be having their own as well on top of a radio-antennae hill visible from the hostel's kitchen window. I kept getting up to see if I could see the fire, but it was either too small or they didn't have one, so I stayed in, repacking my bags, and finally dozing off to sleep.

My legs were sore, feet were covered in blisters, and my brain hurt from trying to piece together all the Orcadian history I had taken in over the past few days. But I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and I would soon be saying goodbye to this beautiful but chilly island paradise of northern Scotland.

Vikings: Gardar and Brattahlid

The next two days in Greenland were more simple than the previous days, yet at the end of the day we were still exhausted!

We were greeted in the breakfast cafeteria by Jacky, our go-to-guy who runs the Narsarsuaq Museum, boat tours, camps around the fjord, and other properties in the surrounding towns. A stockier guy from the French Alps, Jacky meant business, and I really got the feeling that a group of geologists were not at the top of his list. He always seemed rushed and very frank. Nice guy, though. So Jacky came into the cafeteria and asked why we weren't ready yet. He was chartered to boat us across the fjord to the town of Qassiarsuk and then pick us up later in the day. He was very hurried, however, to get to the town of Igaliku where all of the Greenlandic Government Ministers were having a planning retreat. Sometime during the night, the heaters in the Ministers' cabins broke and they were left in the cold. We were planning the next day to go to Igaliku, so we asked Jacky if it would be better if we did our Igaliku day first and the Qassiarsuk day second. Clearly is was alright by him and he hurried us to get our stuff.

The boat ride across the fjord did not take very long as Jacky was determined to get there as soon as possible. He dropped us off at a little dock and then drove off to put his boat in deeper water. The weather was chilly, but not terribly cold and we started off on our 3km trek across an isthmus between two fjords. The countryside here was beautiful and drastically different than other places we'd hiked so far in that you could tell farming was the main operation - sheep farming, to be specific - and while it was at times smelly, the hike was not difficult.

Our transportation unit for the next few days

Just an iceberg. No biggie

Climbing up from the boat to the dock

Probably the biggest sheep farm in the area

Igaliku

Igaliku is more famously known as Gardar, a Viking establishment settled in AD 985. Gardar is where the first Epicopal Bishop set up shop in Greenland in AD 1124. The town is literally built up around and built using the Gardar ruins, which include barns for cows (which seems to be a must-have for the Vikings), a cathedral, the Bishop's residence, storage warehouses, and the legal and ceremonial courts. The Vikings settled this area during the time of the Medieval Warm Period, a time when the climate in these reaches of the Arctic were warmer than they currently are. This allowed the Vikings to use the land for crop-farming. However, the Norse left the region in AD 1450 as the climate began cooling during the "Little Ice Age." When the Vikings left, Inuit Greenlanders settled the area and used it as home-base for fishing and sea-mammal hunting. The Norse took over the area again in the late 1700s and crop-farming was relocated to other areas in Greenland and sheep-breeding and farming became the predominant trade...which is why our walk was a little smelly....

Sheep and cemetery on the way to Igaliku

Igaliku

Viking ruins at Gardar

The Bishop's Tomb at Gardar

Footprint ruins of the Cathedral at Gardar

Paul, Dylan, and Jeremy at the Gardar ruins

Gardar

Igaliku

Eating lunch on the ruins at Gardar

After a brief lunch on the ruins, shared with the sheep who seem to have free reign of the town, we started a short hike around the end of the fjord to collect some sediment from a stream emptying into it. Sheep were kind of everywhere. If polar bears were wise, they'd not even worry about hunting seals through sea ice and come here. We found a series of old beach deposits that were at one time right at sea level but are now well above sea level. This happens naturally as the ice sheet recedes and the land kind rebounds from being pressured down from the weight of the ice.

We were on a deadline to get back to the hotel's cafeteria by 7:45, after which they closed. We got sidetracked a bit taking samples, during which time the weather kicked up and we experienced our second Greenlandic snowstorm. This one did not let up, and an hour later our gloves were soaked and we realized we were going to be late for our rendezvous back at the boat docks. Jacky was not going to be happy. So with backpacks full of bags of sediment and rocks, we started hoofing it back the 3km to the boat docks. It was absolutely the most tired I felt the entire time we were in Greenland, but as luck would have it, Jacky and two women and a dog came driving down the road from Igaliku and offered us a ride back to the boat. Again, he didn't really seem very happy to help us, but his women-friends were very nice and chatted with us as we bumped our way back down the road. We made it back to the cafeteria with few minutes to spare, and luckily, the kitchen was still open! We all showered and went to bed exhausted.

Our sampling stream

The fjord with some buildings from the town in the lower right

More sheep

Snow storms over the fjord

Snow over Igaliku

Igaliku before the snows

Igaliku during the storm

We took our time the next morning, knowing that we really did not have much left to do. Jacky was nowhere to be found, but we had arranged to meet him around mid-day. So in the morning our group split up to get two more samples from the immediate Narsarsuaq vicinity. Jeremy and Paul hiked up to the glacier to get some sand while Dylan and I climbed a little ridge to get some rock. Dylan and I were finished first, so we went back into town to arrange our boat ride to Quassiarsuk with Jacky. He still was not around, but we left a message with a Danish backpacker who was also waiting on Jacky. We figured we would then go to the grocery store to find some boxes we could use to ship all of our samples back. The funny thing about buildings (and I assume people, too) in the Arctic is that they look so unassuming from the outside because they are weathered and worn but when you go inside, it is like you never left the modernized world! The grocery store had your typical Greenlandic fare, but also had kiwi fruit, green peppers, zucchini, and apples and oranges - not to mention the DJ Hero video game system and wine from all over the world!

Ruins of an old US Army base in Narsarsuaq. It was rumored that during the Korean War, injured soldiers were brought here to recuperate rather than in the US to keep negative sentiment toward the war low.

The outside of the Narsarsuaq grocery store.

The inside of the grocery store. Not too unusual.

We finally found Jacky and threw our bags in the back of his van and braced ourselves for the short, but death-defying, drive down to his boats at the harbor. Imagine going 60 mph in a 20 zone and taking sharp corners! The boat ride was quick and we made plans for Jacky to pick us up further down the fjord later in the day. Jacky was excited when he saw us because he had a story. Just a few hours earlier that day in Igaliku, the town we were in the day before, people came across a polar bear sleeping down on a rock sticking out into the fjord. It was suspected that the bear was living in the area, feeding off of sheep...sheep in the farms we were walking through to get our samples. The bear, though docile when it was found, endangered the local people and their livestock, and so it was shot and killed since it could not be relocated. I asked Jacky if this happened often and what they do with the animal. He said it was extremely rare in Igaliku but not unheard of and that a professional butcher was already en route to Igaliku to cut up the animal and parts of it were shipped to all of the smaller coastal town nearby. So even though we didn't get to see the polar bear, had we kept to our original plan and sampled in Igaliku the day after Qassiarsuk, we would have seen it! Instead, I like to think that while we were collecting the samples, the bear was hunting us through the snow storm!

Qassiarsuk is a very small town whose main source of business is sheep farming...so it smelled terrible! Other than sheep farming, Qassiarsuk is also famous for being the site of Erik the Red's original settlement, Brattahlid. Right in town there is an extensive Viking ruins complex as well as the site of the first church built in North America.

Monument to Erik the Red in Qassiarsuk

Statue of Erik the Red watching over Qassiarsuk

Walking around the ruins at Brattahlid

A modern art exhibit attached to the rocks at Brattahlid representing various Norse symbols and patterns of building foundations at the ruins.

Looking down over the Brattahlid ruins

Brattahlid

Just across the street from the Brattahlid ruins is a reconstruction of a traditional Greenlandic hut. We had lunch there and drank our near-beers (1/2% alcohol), using the rocks of the building as bottle openers! Also nearby is the site of Thjolhilde's Church, the first church built in North America. An archeological dig nearby found the remains of some of the first Christians. Nearby, there is a reconstruction of what the church would have looked like next to a reconstruction of Erik the Red's house.

The foundations of Tjoldhilde's Church in Qassiarsuk

A reconstruction of Tjoldhilde's church

Reconstruction of Erik the Red's house

The walk from Qassiarsuk down the fjord was beautiful and we made it to our destination in a few hours and Jacky came to pick us up. The tide was out and there were no docks so we used a little rock jetty that got us out into about two feet of water. Jacky was not pleased that he had to put his boat into such shallow water, but we made it and were soon back at the cafeteria in time for dinner.

As we got back to Narsarsuaq, we saw a C130 land and a bunch of NATO men exiting. As it turns out, their plane was destined for a different city in Greenland, but due to the eruption of the Grimsvold volcano in Iceland, the plane was rerouted. The eruption also affected our return plans to Kangerlussuaq and threatened to strand us for another few weeks.