If you’ve read either of my previous blogs about our trip to Orkney, you might recall that I mentioned that we got up to far too much to squeeze it all into a few blog posts. One of the things which didn’t quite make it into the first posts was our visit to RSPB Marwick Head, which was the very last place we visited on the final day of our trip. I tend to leave some things out of bigger posts like trip round ups, to stop the post becoming enormously long and boring! But it also means that when the weather gets bad in Winter, I’ve still got a few places up my sleeve to share with you. The walks that I hold back aren’t cut out of the earlier posts because they weren’t enjoyable, but rather, because I think I’ve got enough to say about them that they deserve a blog all of their own.
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If you visit Orkney, the dramatic cliffs on the west coast of the Mainland are the place to head if you like to get your walking boots on and search out the best views. In the north-western corner of the island, between Yesnaby and Birsay, you will find RSPB Marwick Head. As soon as I came across the photo of the view towards the Kitchener memorial in our Pocket Mountains guide, I added Marwick Head to my ‘must visit’ list.
Unfortunately, there were also many other things on my ‘must visit’ list, so we didn’t get a chance to drive across to Marwick Head until the very last day of our visit. This was in the middle of the heatwave that we had at the start of September, and while Orkney didn’t experience anything like the temperatures on the British mainland, it was still reaching 26 degrees celsius – enough to make me worry about the dogs overheating. Therefore, we sadly decided not to do the full two hour walk from the Pocket Mountains guide, instead just doing a short walk from the car park to the Kitchener memorial and back at the end of the day when it had cooled down a bit.
There’s a small car park at Marwick Bay, with an honesty box for donations to the RSPB. We always pop some money into the honesty box at places like this – they’re otherwise free to visit, so it’s still a big saving on going shopping or out for lunch! From the car park it was a relatively short but steep walk up onto the cliffs to get to the view point – I recommend not looking over the edge if you don’t have a head for heights.
Up at the top there’s a fence, beyond which you can see the sea bird colony and the Kitchener memorial. Please don’t climb over the fence, it’s there for a reason! During a good year, up to 25,000 birds nest on the cliffs here and you can see gulls and skuas in abundance, as well as a range of wading birds in the lagoon below. The wildlife here isn’t limited to birds: you can also find the Great Yellow Bumblebee here, which in the UK is only found in the very north of Scotland.
Perched atop the cliffs is a stone tower, which is a memorial to Lord Kitchener (of the ‘Your Country Needs YOU’ posters) and the crew of the HMS Hampshire. In 1916, the ship and its crew (including Lord Kitchener) set out from Scapa Flow on a diplomatic mission to Russia, to convince the Tsar to increase Russia’s contributions to the war effort.
The weather was wild and stormy and the two destroyers accompanying the ship soon turned back, but the HMS Hampshire continued on, ultimately hitting a mine off the coast from Marwick Head. The mine had been laid by a German submarine only a week earlier, and the ship sank in just fifteen minutes. Of the more than 700 men aboard the ship, only 12 survived. Kitchener and his staff were among those lost, and the 48 foot high memorial to the ship and its crew was raised in 1926.
This was a lovely walk to end our trip: views, history and wildlife. Navigation is straightforward and we had no worries about getting lost, and the walk is short enough that there’s always plenty of time to stop and ‘enjoy the view’. The day after our visit I saw that a number of minke whales had been spotted off the coast here, so if you’re into whale watching, make sure to bring your binoculars and a snack to settle down for a few hours!
Dog friendly rating – 2/5. There are exposed cliff edges all the way up to the memorial, and due to the nature reserve status of the bay, it’s strongly recommended that dogs are kept on leads at all times. I certainly did not enjoy being yanked towards the cliff edge multiple times as millions of rabbits popped up and sprinted in that direction, so that’s another thing to bear in mind if your dog has high prey drive. On the plus side, there were no stiles which needed to be navigated on the walk we did – although I don’t know if there might have been some later on along the Pocket Mountains route.
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