Hunda
Hunda is a small, uninhabited island lying in Scapa Flow, the vast natural harbour of Orkney, Scotland. It sits close to the eastern shore of the larger island of South Ronaldsay, separated from it by the narrow Weddel Sound. Though modest in size — roughly half a mile long — Hunda punches above its weight in terms of historical significance and atmospheric remoteness. It is one of those quietly compelling places in the Northern Isles that rewards those with the curiosity and means to seek it out, offering a sense of profound solitude against a backdrop of one of the most strategically important stretches of water in British naval history.
Scapa Flow itself is the defining context for understanding Hunda. The great anchorage, ringed by Orkney's Mainland, Hoy, South Ronaldsay, and a scatter of smaller islands, served as the principal base of the British Grand Fleet during the First World War, and it was here in June 1919 that the interned German High Seas Fleet was scuttled in the largest act of naval self-destruction in history. Hunda, by virtue of its position within Scapa Flow, would have been a familiar landmark to the crews of those warships. The wrecks of several German vessels still lie on the seabed in the surrounding waters, making the area a celebrated destination for wreck divers, with Hunda itself forming part of the visual panorama seen from dive boats heading out to the deeper anchorages.
The island's own history is quieter than the naval drama surrounding it, but no less interesting for that. Like many of Orkney's smaller islands, Hunda was once farmed, and traces of earlier habitation — the low remnants of stone structures, the subtle ridge-and-furrow patterns of old cultivation — can be picked out in the grass. The island was used at various times for grazing livestock, a common fate for the smaller Orcadian holms and islands that proved too marginal for permanent settlement but too productive to leave entirely unused. The name Hunda itself is Norse in origin, as is virtually every place name across Orkney, a legacy of the Viking colonisation that began in the ninth century and left an indelible mark on the islands' culture and language.
In person, Hunda presents the typical character of an Orcadian outlier island: low and grassy, its shoreline fringed with rounded stones and patches of seaweed-draped rock. The vegetation is the close-cropped maritime turf common to islands where grazing has historically taken place and where salt wind keeps growth low and horizontal. Seabirds — gulls, terns in season, perhaps the occasional skua — are the island's most conspicuous residents. The sounds are those of Orkney at large: the slap of water against rock, wind humming across open ground, the calls of birds. Looking outward from Hunda, the view across Scapa Flow is commanding, taking in the hills of Hoy to the west, the lower profile of Mainland to the north, and the broader island of South Ronaldsay forming the immediate eastern backdrop.
Access to Hunda is entirely by water, as there is no bridge or causeway connecting it to South Ronaldsay, unlike the famous Churchill Barriers that link several other Orkney islands. Reaching it requires a small boat, and most visitors who make landfall do so via private arrangement or as part of a wildlife and island boat tour operating out of Burwick or St Margaret's Hope on South Ronaldsay. The island is not a formal visitor attraction and has no facilities whatsoever, so anyone landing should be self-sufficient. The best time to visit, as with most of Orkney's smaller islands, is late spring through early summer, when the days are extraordinarily long, the seabird activity is at its most dramatic, and the weather, while never guaranteed, is at its most hospitable.
The waters immediately around Hunda and throughout the broader Scapa Flow area are of special interest to divers, and Hunda forms a useful orientation point for navigating between dive sites. The area around Weddel Sound between Hunda and South Ronaldsay sees tidal flow that, combined with the island's position, creates local current patterns worth understanding for any boater or paddler in the vicinity. Kayakers with experience of tidal waters sometimes circumnavigate these smaller Scapa islands as part of longer sea kayaking routes around South Ronaldsay. For the historically minded, simply floating on Scapa Flow anywhere near Hunda, watching the calm grey water and the distant hills, carries an almost uncanny sense of the layered past — from the Norse seafarers who first named these islands to the dreadnoughts that once swung at anchor in their shadow.