flagstone streets, stone dykes, and light still up at eleven
Reserve a seven night Orkney trip in June
We reserve seven nights in an eleven room guesthouse on the Stromness harbour front, with five guided days among the chambered cairns and stone circles of Orkney Mainland, from $3,596 per person on two sharing. June is the one month this runs, because the sun is up for eighteen and a half hours and the sites are open ground you can walk back to at ten at night. The stonework is between 4,500 and 5,200 years old and nearly all of it stands inside a five mile square.
7 nights, from $3,596 per person. Two sharing.
People reserve a seven night Orkney trip here for one reason ahead of the others, and it is the light. Orkney sits at 59 degrees north, ten miles off the top of the Scottish mainland, and in the third week of June the sun stands above the horizon for about eighteen and a half hours over Kirkwall. It comes up a little before four in the morning and goes down after half past ten at night, and in between it never gets properly dark.
That changes what a week here buys you. The circles you walked with a guide at ten in the morning are unfenced, unstaffed open ground at half past nine in the evening, after the day traffic has gone, and you can still pick the ditch line out of the grass at eleven with no torch. It is the difference between looking at a monument and spending time at one.
Seven nights, one room, nothing packed in between. The base is a guesthouse of eleven rooms on the Stromness harbour front, gable end to the water like the rest of that street, with its own slip below the back door. Five of the seven days go out with a guide who works these sites for a living.
When it goes
Weekly starts through June
any week in one month: weekly starts through the month, and no other month works
What is reserved
A seven night Orkney trip in June
7 nights, from $3,596 per person. Two sharing. Send a booking request
Third Coast Dispatch receives the request and puts the reservation with whichever company actually runs that week. That company holds the rooms, employs the guide and sends you its own invoice on its own paperwork. This office owns no room, no vehicle, no vessel and no aircraft, and no money passes through it at any stage. A written figure against the dates you actually want takes us two to four working days, because a house here has eight or eleven rooms rather than eighty and the timed entries are confirmed one slot at a time.
Getting to Scotland is your own arrangement. We arrange no flight, and no flight forms any part of what is held here.
One twin or double room held for seven nights in Stromness with no move between houses, a seven seat vehicle and a guide for five of the days, two timed entries confirmed in advance, and three sea crossings carried on the tickets of the companies that run those routes.
The Neolithic ground here is not spread across a country; it sits inside a five mile square. From the Stones of Stenness you can see the Ring of Brodgar, and from the rise above both you can see the mound at Maeshowe, and all of it was built and used between roughly 3200 and 2500 BC by people farming the same fields. Skara Brae, eight houses sunk in their own midden above the Bay of Skaill, lay under sand until a storm in the winter of 1850 stripped it off, and the stone dressers, box beds and drains inside are the furniture itself rather than a copy of it. There is almost no timber in any of it, because there was almost no timber here then either, and that is the reason the interiors are still standing. On the west cliffs at Yesnaby the sandstone lies in flat sheets that break off in rectangles, which is the same rock the builders used and the reason a five thousand year old wall here still comes up to your shoulder. In the first half of June the Scottish primrose flowers along that cliff top, an inch tall, purple with a yellow centre, and it grows nowhere on earth except Orkney and the north edge of Caithness.
seven nights of bed and breakfast in an eleven room guesthouse on the Stromness harbour front, one twin or double held for the whole week; five full days out with an archaeologist guide in a vehicle seating seven; timed entry confirmed in advance at Maeshowe and at Skara Brae; entry to the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, Barnhouse, Unstan and Cuween Hill, all of which are open ground under the sky; the sea crossing between the Scottish mainland and Stromness in both directions, carried by the shipping company under its own licence and billed by that company on its own paperwork; the short crossings to Rousay and to Hoy on those same terms, held by the companies that run those routes; three evening meals at the guesthouse, on the table at seven, kitchen shut by half past eight; a set of 1:25,000 sheets for the walking days and a hand light for the low passages; and the move between the Stromness pier and the guesthouse door, which is four hundred yards and normally walked.
the round trip flight from the middle of the United States to Scotland, which is your own arrangement and runs $980 to $1,750 in June; onward surface travel from your arrival airport to the ferry port at the top of the mainland, $70 to $190 each way; four evening meals out in Stromness or Kirkwall, $25 to $55 a head; all lunches, $9 to $18 a head, and three of the sites have no cafe at all; drinks of any kind; a hire car for the two free days, $75 to $110 a day in June; passenger or vehicle fares on the island routes if you go out on a day of your own, $8 to $40; wet weather clothing, which you will use, and a walking pole for the Hoy moor, $20 to $60 bought in Kirkwall; laundry at the guesthouse, $12 a load; and anything touching insurance, on which this office does not advise.
Two of the passages here are entered on hands and knees, one of them eighteen feet long with no daylight at the far end, and if that closes your throat you will spend those hours outside in the wind. The Hoy day is four miles on peat with six hundred feet of climb, no shelter, no water and no way to cut it short once you are on the path. Nobody should book this expecting warmth: the air will not reach 60 degrees and the wind takes several degrees off whatever the thermometer reads. The evenings are quiet in a way some people find very long, with the last kitchen in Stromness shut by nine and the light still up outside until eleven.
The isthmus between the two lochs
Two lochs lie side by side in the middle of Mainland, Harray fresh and Stenness brackish where the tide reaches its south end, and the strip of land between them narrows to a few hundred feet. Almost everything Neolithic on this island is on that strip or within sight of it.
At the south end stand the Stones of Stenness: four uprights left of a ring that probably held twelve, the tallest a little over nineteen feet and barely a foot thick, raised around 3100 BC. Two hundred yards away are the foundations of Barnhouse, about fifteen houses with the hearth set in the middle of the floor, and you can step into them at any hour without a gate or a ticket.
A mile and a quarter north along the isthmus is the Ring of Brodgar, twenty seven stones upright out of perhaps sixty, set in a circle three hundred and forty feet across. The ditch around them was cut into sandstone bedrock, thirty feet wide and up to ten feet deep in places, using antler picks. The path around the ring is matted to keep feet off the heather and takes twenty minutes to walk with stops.
Between the two circles is the field where the excavation ran. Those trenches only ever came off their covers in high summer and lie under geotextile and gravel the rest of the year, so in June you are looking at grass inside a fence. The guide will show you where the walls run underneath it, and that is all there is to see there.
Going into Maeshowe
Entry is on a timed slot, walked to from a building half a mile off, with no bags carried inside and a small number of people in the chamber at once. This is one of the two entries held in advance for you, and it is why the week cannot be shifted by a day at short notice.
The passage is thirty six feet long and roughly four and a half feet high. You go in bent at the waist, one behind another, and twenty seconds of that is longer than it sounds on paper. The chamber at the end is about fifteen feet square, the walls corbelled inward overhead, with a single dressed slab standing in each corner, several tons apiece, set there around 2800 BC.
Cut into those walls are about thirty runic inscriptions, made in the twelfth century by Norsemen who broke in through the roof and sat out the weather inside. It is the largest set of runes anywhere outside Scandinavia. One of them says treasure was carried out of the mound. Another is a man's name and his flat claim that he cut his letters higher up the wall than anyone else managed.
The alignment is midwinter. For about three weeks either side of the shortest day the setting sun runs down the passage onto the back wall. In June you see none of that, and the guide will say so rather than talk around it.
Light in June, and what it does to a day
Air temperature runs 55 to 59 degrees by day and falls to about 45 overnight. The sea off the west cliffs is around 48 degrees and does not go above 55 at any point in the year. June is the driest month of the Orkney year at roughly two inches of rain, which says more about the other eleven months than about this one.
Wind is the constant and there is next to nothing on Mainland to break it. The hedges are stone dykes. The one mercy in that is midges: the thing that ruins a June evening on the west of the Highlands is mostly held flat here, and you would only want cover on a still night in beside the lochs.
Twelve hours of daylight back, grass still brown, several of the small island boats not yet on the summer timetable.
Fulmars settled on the ledges at Marwick Head, sea about 44 degrees, wind still hard out of the north.
The Scottish primrose opens on the Yesnaby cliff top in the last week, an inch tall and easy to walk straight past.
Eighteen and a half hours between sunrise and sunset, two inches of rain, light enough at eleven at night to read a map outdoors.
Cloud thickens, the Brodgar path carries several times the foot traffic, and Kirkwall fills on weekday mornings when the big ships are in.
Sea at its warmest for the year at about 55 degrees, which still shortens a swim to a few minutes; heather turns on the Hoy hills.
Daylight drops back under thirteen hours and the north isles timetable thins from the middle of the month.
Dark by half past three, gales roughly one day in three, and the only weeks when the sun reaches the back wall of Maeshowe.
Boats, and who holds the passage
Three sea crossings sit inside the week and not one of them belongs to this office. Each is carried by the company holding that route under its own licence, on its own ticket, and that company bills for the passage itself. We own no vessel and we sell no sailing.
The crossing between the Scottish mainland and Stromness takes about ninety minutes and runs under the north west cliffs of Hoy on the way in. St John's Head stands 1,128 feet straight out of the water, and the Old Man, a sandstone stack four hundred and forty nine feet high standing off the cliff on its own plinth, is in view for roughly ten minutes on the approach. If the cloud is down you will see neither, and nobody will pretend otherwise.
Rousay is twenty five minutes from Tingwall. Midhowe cairn is a hundred feet of stalled chamber standing inside a stone shed built over it, twelve compartments divided by upright slabs, and the remains of twenty five people were lifted out of it. The walk down from the road is half a mile with two hundred feet of drop, which you climb again at the end of the afternoon.
Hoy is another twenty five minutes, Stromness to Moaness. From Rackwick the path to the Old Man is two miles each way with six hundred feet of climb in the first mile and a quarter, on peat that holds water for days after rain. Great skuas nest on that moor, and in the second half of June they come in at head height at anybody crossing it. Hold a walking pole up above you and they turn off. The guide carries spares.
Tell us the week you want and how many rooms. This office reads it at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302 in Lee's Summit, MO 64063, and answers the telephone on +1 (816) 525-2846 through the working day; write to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com for a week not yet booked, or to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com if something in a reservation already made has to change. Third Coast Dispatch is the name Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC works under, a Missouri company, and most travellers leaving from the Kansas City area ask about June eight or nine months ahead.
Ask the office to hold a departure
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.