The Colours of Orkney

I’m so glad I packed my sunglasses. I have never worn them in Orkney before, but they are on my nose as I write. I am sitting reading in the sun in the garden over the wall from an amazingly calm blue sea and listening to the throb of the Northlink ferry’s engines in the harbour as it readies for its 4:30pm crossing to Scrabster.

I spent some of the morning in Kirkwall having coffee with a new acquaintance and on the bus run back to Stromness at lunchtime as I surveyed the panoply of fields I wondered if the Orcadians had more words to describe green than the rest of us. There was every shade of green imaginable from darkest richest green to the lime green of newly shorn fields. Then there was the yellow of buttercupped fields grazed by inky black cattle and anther cut field filled with hungry oyster catchers with their red legs and bills. I haven’t even mentioned the bright red poppies which flower in patches at the side of the road. You simply cannot beat the colours of an Orkney in the sun.