The Ousdale Broch is the last in my informal Caithness stones ‘n’ gorse trilogy, after the Hill O’ Many Stanes and Badbae Clearance Village, and is the most impressive of the three. There is a clearly signed, free car park just off the A9. Brochs were built between 400 BCE and 100 CE and are …
Badbae Clearance Village (that first word is pronounced Bad Bay) lies twenty miles south of the Hill O’ Many Stanes, and was another brown sign I had clocked on my way up to Orkney and earmarked for exploration on the way down. I assumed by the ‘Clearance’ part of the name that this was a …
Writing in 1780, the Reverend Charles Cordiner “Observed a very singular collection, all well-shaped thick flagstones, standing erect. The place is called by the apposite name of the Hill of Many Stones”. In this the Reverend Cordiner was not wrong. It is a hill. And it has many stones. Actually, that makes it sound considerably …
John O’Groats is a village on Britain’s northeastern tip, and is one end of the longest distance between inhabited points on the British mainland, the other being Land’s End in Cornwall. I detoured here enroute to Orkney on the off chance there might be some brown signs to bag, but it turns out the whole …
At just 6 feet 9 inches long, or just a nudge over two metres, Ebenezer Place is the shortest street in the world, and is accredited as such by the Guinness Book of Records. That is not much longer than the brown sign that drew my attention to it as I drove through Wick. When …
