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| Sanday
means ‘isle of sand’ in Old Norse and the
name is certainly appropriate for the island is low
and strung with beaches from one end to the other. |
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Sty Wick |
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| The
best-preserved Neolithic tomb is Quoyness, which sits
near the edge of some low cliffs on the east coast of
the promontory known as Els Ness. We parked the car
at a quarry and walked along the beach and the edge
of the cliffs until we reached the cairn. |
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Sty Wick looking towards
Quoyness |
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| The
Quoyness cairn is visible as a bump at the end of the
promontory. |
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View towards the tomb
of Quoyness (the blip on the horizon) |
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Quoyness |
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| Quoyness
is a Maes Howe type of tomb, which means that the interior
has a corbel-vaulted roof and there are a number of
side cells opening from hatches in the walls. The chamber
has an inner and an outer casing of stone—the
tops of the inner wall have been reconstructed in recent
times. |
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Quoyness, showing the
entrance to the North cell & the corbelled side
walls |
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| It
was a somewhat ‘low’ day, as you can tell
from the photos and generally drizzly (there has to
be a day like that at some point) so we did not do much
in the way of hiking for the rest of our day on Sanday.
But every so often the showers would stop for a while
and we could do a little exploring. It really is a special
place. |
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Bay of Lopness, wreckage
of a WWI German destroyer |
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Sanday Farmstead |
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Pony |
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Stove Farm |
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