Mainland
Mainland is the largest island of the Orkney archipelago, located off the northern tip of Scotland, and it serves as the cultural, administrative, and geographic heart of the island group. At coordinates 59.00000, -3.10000, this point falls in the southern part of Mainland near the town of Kirkwall, the island's capital and the administrative centre of Orkney. Mainland is one of the most archaeologically rich places in the entire British Isles, containing a density of Neolithic monuments that led to the designation of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. The island stretches roughly 30 miles from east to west and covers about 202 square miles, making it the sixth-largest island in the United Kingdom. It is home to the majority of Orkney's population of around 22,000 people and offers a remarkable blend of prehistoric wonder, Viking heritage, wartime history, and raw natural beauty.
The human story of Mainland stretches back at least 5,000 years, and in some respects the island reads like an open-air museum of prehistoric civilization. The settlement of Skara Brae, preserved beneath coastal sand dunes on the western shore of the Bay of Skaill, is one of the best-preserved Neolithic villages in all of Europe, its stone-furnished rooms offering an almost unsettling intimacy with people who lived around 3100 to 2500 BCE. The Ring of Brodgar, a great stone circle of up to 60 original standing stones set within a landscaped henge, and the Stones of Stenness, one of the oldest henges in Britain dating to around 3100 BCE, stand together on a narrow isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray in the western part of Mainland. The Maeshowe chambered cairn, precisely aligned so that the winter solstice sun illuminates its central chamber, demonstrates a level of astronomical knowledge and architectural ambition that continues to astonish researchers. During the 12th century, Norse crusaders sheltered in Maeshowe and left behind the largest collection of runic inscriptions found anywhere in the world, carved into its walls — a strange and poignant layering of civilizations.
The Norse dimension of Mainland's history is just as vivid as its prehistoric one. The Vikings settled Orkney from around the 9th century onwards, and the islands remained under Norse rule until 1468, when they were pledged to Scotland as part of a marriage dowry for Margaret of Denmark and never redeemed. This heritage is deeply embedded in the landscape: place names across Mainland are overwhelmingly of Old Norse origin, and the dialect spoken by Orcadians retains Norse elements to this day. St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, begun in 1137 and built from warm red and yellow sandstone, is perhaps the finest Romanesque cathedral in Scotland and was founded in memory of Earl Magnus Erlendsson, murdered on the island of Egilsay and later canonized. The cathedral remains in use as a Church of Scotland parish church and dominates the skyline of Kirkwall with a powerful, ancient presence.
The physical character of Mainland is defined by sweeping, open landscapes of moorland, farmland, and dramatic coastline. Unlike much of the Scottish Highlands, Orkney's terrain is largely treeless — the result of centuries of exposure to fierce Atlantic winds — which gives the island an enormous sense of sky. The light here is celebrated by artists and visitors alike: Orkney sits at a latitude where summer nights barely get dark, the sky shifting through long pastel twilights, while winter brings short, intense days with rapid changes in weather and breathtaking auroral displays. The coastline alternates between sheer sandstone cliffs, smooth sandy bays, and rocky shores laced with seaweed, and the surrounding sea is often a vivid, almost improbable shade of turquoise green in good weather. The interior is characterized by gently rolling farmland separated by dry-stone walls, with livestock — particularly the distinctive North Ronaldsay sheep when they venture from their outer island — and the ever-present calls of curlews, lapwings, and Arctic terns forming the soundscape of the countryside.
Mainland is surrounded by the rest of the Orkney archipelago, with around 70 islands making up the group, of which about 20 are inhabited. The island of Hoy, visible to the south and west, contains the famous sea stack known as the Old Man of Hoy, a 137-metre pinnacle of rock beloved by climbers. To the northwest lies the remote Brough of Birsay, a tidal island with Pictish and Norse ruins accessible on foot at low tide. Scapa Flow, the great natural harbour that lies to the south of Mainland, played a momentous role in both World Wars: it served as the main base of the British Home Fleet in the First World War and was the site where the interned German Imperial Fleet was scuttled in 1919 — an event that remains one of the most dramatic acts of mass scuttling in naval history. Today, those wrecks draw divers from around the world.
Getting to Mainland is straightforward by Scottish standards. Regular ferry services operated by NorthLink Ferries run from Scrabster, near Thurso, to Stromness on the western coast of Mainland, and from Aberdeen to Kirkwall on longer overnight sailings. Loganair operates daily flights from Inverness, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow to Kirkwall Airport, which sits just a mile or so east of the town centre. Once on the island, a car is essentially necessary to explore the more remote corners — public bus services connect the main settlements but are infrequent outside Kirkwall. The island is visited year-round, though summer (June to August) brings the longest days and the most benevolent weather, as well as the St Magnus International Festival, a celebrated arts festival held each June. Autumn and winter offer the compensation of potential Northern Lights sightings, dramatic storm-watching from safe vantage points, and a sense of the island at its most elemental and uncrowded.
One of the more quietly remarkable aspects of Mainland is that so much of its extraordinary heritage is freely accessible and sits within farmland or open countryside with minimal fencing or interpretation — visitors can stand within the Ring of Brodgar at any hour, and the stone-filled silence of the place in the early morning or late evening, with curlews calling and the lochs shining below, is genuinely moving. The Italian Chapel on the nearby Lamb Holm causeway — just off Mainland proper — is another extraordinary survival: built by Italian prisoners of war using two Nissen huts and scavenged materials, it remains decorated inside with remarkable trompe-l'oeil paintings and continues to draw visitors as a testament to faith and creativity in extreme circumstances. Orkney has also produced a remarkable number of artists, writers, and musicians relative to its size, most famously the poet and novelist George Mackay Brown, whose work is inseparable from the landscape and mythology of these islands and whose presence still seems to permeate Kirkwall's narrow flagstone streets.