Kirkwall in the Sun
Data from Orkney’s 2019 economic review unless otherwise marked
June is Orkney’s driest month, averaging 51.6mm of rain over the past 19 years. (This is only slightly less than Edinburgh’s wettest month, January, which rains 64.1mm on average. October through January average around 120mm of rain on the islands. I imagine being in Kirkwall in the winter goes something like this: you walk out at noon, it’s pitch black, and a fish swims by your ear.) This means June is the perfect time to visit, and tourists come in droves to see the neolithic monuments and cute houses. Joke’s on them, because the rest of this week it’s going to rain and I didn’t see any of them out with their cameras, fanny packs, and packed lunches.
I also got about a hundred pictures of cows, which I split off into their own post.
The Orkney economic review calls wind a “key feature of the climate”. I agree. Even though it wasn’t raining, I had to wear my hood just to keep the wind from giving me a headache. It blows around your ears and plays with your hair. In 2013, Orkney was exceeding its energy demand with renewable energy, most of this from wind. There’s one wind turbine for every thirty people on the islands. The presence of wind energy makes itself unforgettably felt at Orbital’s industrial campus.
It’s truly massive. It’s right behind the main office, and you can walk right up to it. You’ll probably get vertigo if you do, though. The blades make a deafening whoosh every time they pass the tower of the turbine. Standing below it and looking up into the blades activated my primal fear of massive birds of prey, and I moved away quickly before the blades could fall down on my head.
I read a paper once that suggested that winglets could reduce the noise of a wind turbine (and increase the efficiency), but they don’t really seem to be doing that much here. Or maybe it would be worse without them? One shudders at the thought.
There’s also a little turbine on the campus, which whips around with startling alacrity. I’ll take my phone out tomorrow and get a measurement of its rotational speed. The bearings in it are old and whiny. (They should contact SKF, we use their mugs at work.)
Macros
Since it was sunny while I was eating lunch, I decided to put in my macro tubes and try to photograph some of the teeny tiny wildflowers around the benches.
Some flowers had short, stocky stems, which made them easy to photograph. Some had longer, more pliable stems, and these flowers danced so agressively in the wind that it’s a miracle that the camera managed to pick anything up at all.
There was also a big, rusty chain sitting in the corner, and I got some photos of that. I love the texture of the rust.
Other Sights
I finished my lunch and had a little walk around. Besides the wind turbine, there are some other signs of life. The ferry docks right behind the offices, and so various shipping containers are piled around.
Orbital also has a little bit of litter lying around from previous projects. The big red turbine blade predates their rebranding.
The path home
After passing the cows, you pass through an industrial park (Jewson’s, some odds and ends, cattle processing facilities, etc etc) and come to a little bike path.
Kirkwall supports bicyclists.
They even painted one on the ground!
Then you get into a cute little park area, with some copses of trees and a small mud flat.
Grok the cruise ship.
I was also pleased to see that Orbital’s tidal turbine made it onto an infographic somewhere. Also, hydrogen? I’ve spoken to a couple of researchers who are interested in hydrogen. They get a lot more funding from the government than they get hope from their research.
Demographics
22,270 people live in Orkney. Old people are overrepresented compared to the national average, and people my age (the age of mobility) are severely underrepresented. Yearly deaths outnumber births, but this deficit is just about made up for by the migration to the islands, and the population grows by about a hundred people a year. This trickle of growth is heavily outweighed by tourism, Orkney’s main industry after agriculture: in a given year, over 200,000 individual visitors will stay at least one night. Over half of these come in on cruise ships; they land just about every day during the summer months and release a thousand people at a time onto a city of 7,500. This explains my extreme difficulty in finding a house for the summer!
All of these tourists are going to the same couple of sites: St Magnus Cathedral, Skara Brae (a neolithic archaelogical site), the Italian Chapel (painted by an Italian prisoner of war during WWII), the Orkney Museum. I can’t really complain, though. I’m just as much a tourist as they are, and when the time comes for me to visit those places, I’ll take pictures along with the rest… and post them here.
Boats
Boats are pretty big in Kirkwall. Sailing is a lot of fun when you have so much wind.
I like the lighthouse picture the best, partly because it reminds of a watercolor that someone I love made me. Partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips under the birches.
Reclaimed land
According to Fiona, the sea used to come up to the level of the cathedral. They drained huge sections of it, reclaiming the land bit by bit. This left some large circular ponds, which became a public garden. (No research was done for this section — read it like Genesis, not Wikipedia.)
There was actually a person out using the park: jogging with his dog!
Across the pond, there’s a funny shaped little house.
Orkney is flat and green, while Stromness is hilly and rocky. Both of them are windy. I think that the wind was keeping people inside today.
The best part of the park is the view from the cathedral. Standing across the pond puts it right behind a big oil canister.
Birds
I got one bird on the wing, which I’d been trying to do since yesterday. This made me very happy!
Then I turned a corner and there were swans.
And they had cygnets!!!!!!! I almost cried.
Right near the swans was a pretty group of wildflowers. It was the perfect end to the walk.
Home
There was still a bit of sunlight, so I charged my watch. (It still doesn’t work.)
Until next time!