Thursday evening I came back to Edinburgh after a 5 day field trip to the Orkney Islands.
A little information about Orkney from Wikipedia:
"Orkney (Scottish Gaelic: Arcaibh) also known as the Orkney Islands, is an archipelago in northern Sctoland, 16 kilometres (10 mi) north of the coast of Caithness. Orkney comprises approximately 70 islands, of which 20 are inhabited. The largest island, known as the "Mainland" has an area of 523.25 square kilometres (202 sq mi) making it the sixth largest Scottish Island and the tenth-largest island in the British isles. The largest settlement and administrative centre is Kirkwall."
The students of Art, Space and Nature headed north towards the Orkney Islands on the 5th of October. We left Edinburgh at 09.35 and started our train journey towards Thurso. An 8 hour train journey did not sound like a great way to spend the day, but the scenery across the Scottish Higlands definitely made the journey better. The weather was great and the beautiful landscape of Scotland was just stunning. Beaches, miles of green fields, autumn colours on the trees, cows, sheep, deers, munros (Scottish mountains), sea and a few entertaining souls on the train made it a great start to our trip.
Here are a few pics from the train journey:
The last part of our journey was the ferry from Scrabster- Stromness where we were staying. We all survived the 1,5 hour over the sea, but beeing a person who is very sensitive to the waves, it wasn't a great experience.
After surviving the journey up to Stromness, we had 4 days ahead of us with a lot of adventures planned. We went the Pier Art Centre where we might be having an exhibition in February, we went on a bus journey to all the archeological sites across the mainland of Orkney, we drove around the Islands where we saw buildings from WW2, the Italian Chapel, a lot of beautiful landscapes, some more old ruins, the cliffs of Yesnaby and Kirkwall, we walked around Stromness which is a very very small seaside town, and we all went on different adventures looking for inspiration around the islands. Stromness is a small place which is a little creepy at times, but the scenery around on the "Mainland" is absolutely stunning. The pictures speak for themselves. Enjoy:
The weather on Orkney is very unstable and at times extreme, it changed every 5-10 minutes so you have to be prepared for everything when walking around there. It went from clear blue skies and sunshine to almost pitch black, rain and storm. I don't think this is a place I would choose to live myself, but we had a great trip and went home with some great memories and a huge amount of photos!
And now the fun will start by editing photos and research collected at the trip before we begin developing our projects. To be continued!
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