Inter-island ferries – Orkney Ferriesrun to 13 different Orkney islands including Hoy and Graemsay, Shapinsay, and Stronsay. Outrageously strange … a Schifferstadt gold hat, c 1600 BC. Photograph: Kurt Diehl/Trustees of the British Museum UHI Archaeology Institute at Orkney College runs a Master in Archaeological Practice, a Masters in Archaeological Studies and BA (Hons) degree courses in Archaeology, Scottish History and Archaeology, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, and Archaeology and Cultural Studies.

The Birsay Bay Tea Roomsserves up soup, sandwiches and excellent cake in a tearoom with a great view. Richard is a storyteller, in several senses of the word. He is spending a sabbatical working on a book about female figures from myth and legend, and it becomes increasingly clear that the line between these fictional women and his real wife is very much blurred. Projecting his fantasies onto her, she remains nameless throughout his narration, presented instead as an impossibly idolised vision that she could never live up to; her version of events constantly contradicting that which he presents to us. Whilst it could be argued that the writing is overly flowery at times, it ties in perfectly with Richard’s desire to embellish and beautify the truth into something greater or more pleasing. This isn't a plot-driven novel, so I would only recommend it for those looking to be transported to an eerie, ambiguous place, threaded with confusion, distance and illusion. He meets his role in the relationship by telling her other stories too, stories of enchantment, which, not at all surprisingly, are his academic speciality. There are stories of Melsuine, the sea-kings and the selkies, Merlin and Vivien. He tells stories and she listens and smiles and absorbs them. More interestingly, she herself then tells stories and he listens and obsesses and guards his castle jealously from the dragons of males who appear in her stories or who speak a word to her in life. Their life is surrounded and bounded by stories, by analyzing them, living inside them, thinking about their parallels and finding new variations.Maybe it was all a gap I needed to fill- brought up in the showcase of Suburbia, USA, with no perceivable “community” in the sense of family or a circle of friends, with two working parents who had, at least, voted with their feet to leave their families behind and start as fresh as you can in the safest, cleanest corner of the States I think you are likely to find, while their families stayed in far-flung southern and western corners of the country. I met these other families and knew them occasionally, but I think all I carried away with me, as part of me, of the one was horses and a daring cousin with red hair and all I carried away of the other was Catholicism, guilt, and Ireland. She insists that she was not wearing a purple sweater when they met, has never worn purple, in fact it was a green sweater. He remembers her entering his class soaked with rain, with leaves in her hair, not removing them, hardly seeming to notice. She has no memory of doing this. Her story, when she speaks for herself in the light of day, sometimes seems much more straightforward. Trying to impress him, dressing carefully for class and thinking for days beforehand of what she will say in class, hating the people who talk over her and ruin it all. It was the sea that called her, and though she was frightened by its power, though maybe she had lost love ones to the sea, she had to watch it. Her husband can only watch, entranced by her. He is proud of his bride, and there are times when she clings to him, times are happy together. Times when Richard cooks for them both, when they sit together by the fire, drinking whisky and telling each other stories, when they retire to bed together.

Follow the War Time Itinerary to find out more about Orkney’s role in the first and second World Wars This is a paid partnership with Destination Orkney. Take a look behind the scenes of my visit over on Orkney.com! Orkney might not be short on time, but if you are… Yes, it is such a pleasure to dwell on the tale alone, while she is in her bath, and not here to interject with her nonsense about not wearing purple. Orkney is also saturated with more recent military history: the massive natural harbour of Scapa Flow is of enormous strategic importance and was a centre of naval activities during the world wars. It has also become a renowned scuba diving destination in the decades since the scuttling of the German fleet there in 1919. When I asked myself, all I could remember at first were words, the incantation itself, creating itself, the characters implicit in whispering it to themselves and the audience, illustrating themselves for us, illustrating how they wish to be for us, or how they cannot help being:

Vehicles and bicycles

Make sure you try the beers from the Orkney Breweryand Swannays Brewery and of course, thewhisky from Highland ParkDistillery and Scapa Distillery. The great power of the novel is its lyricism, which gives the bleak and inhospitable landscape an air of enchantment Orkney is pronounced ‘Orc-nee’ and the name is thought to come from the Norse name Orkneyjar –‘Seal Islands’ or from the Pictish name –‘Boar Island’. Orkney is also known as Arcaibh in Gaelic, but the Gaelic language is not traditionally spoken in Orkney – any sign of the Gaels in Orkney were most likely driven out by the Vikings. Richard is a sixty years old English professor, a specialist of the strange women to be found in fairy and folk tales. He marries one of his student, a woman forty years younger than him, who requests that their honeymoon be spent by the sea, on a small island in Orkney, near where she was born. He is so captivated by his young bride that he agrees, and off they go, to stay in a small cottage by the shore. As he works on a book about myths and legends, he looks out the window at his young wife, who can stare at the sea for hours but never puts as much as a toe in the water.

This could have been the tale of a lecherous old man, obsessed with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Because Richard is not just mesmerized, he is well and truly obsessed by the silver-haired young creature he married. But it's more a tale of someone under a spell they can't shake off... If there is a single flaw in this novel, it is that it needs an anchor; it can seem to get a little lost in its own heaving seas. Sometimes, it is the wife that plays this role. Richard often simply reports his own speech 'Perhaps in a while, I said' - but hers usually gets speech marks, and provides a refreshing interruption to Richard's increasingly turbulent narrative with gentle humour or basic everyday comments. While Richard obsessively romanticises her, her actions resist this; she can't cook, tries to eat horrible childhood sweets, and tells him 'I'm sorry I didn't stay in the picture' when she moves outside the sight of the window he's been watching her from. She also relates the two long stories about the selkies and finfolk that form the core of a narrative. Ironically, despite her associations with the sea, her presence is grounding, and perhaps this is at the heart of the story after all. Perhaps it is Richard who is the forsaken merman rather than she the hapless selkie; perhaps he has left her for the sea and his ideas of the sea-creature that she is, rather than recognising her as an earthly human woman, and not his to own. Telling the Sea - this is a children's book that has stayed in my mind for many many years, mostly for its compelling descriptions of an obsession with the sea, very similar to that of Richard's wife... More so than the landscape, water and the sea permeate every aspect of this story. Oceanic imagery pervades his wife's dreams, as well as his own view of his wife - he recalls her drenched in water over and over. Storytelling is also woven into the fabric of the novel - their relationship is never as alive as when they tell each other tales, of sea nymphs and selkies and bewitchments (each containing a grain of truth for their own circumstances). That’s why, I think, no matter how much I’ve tried to make it go away by making fun of it, the most transcendent place I have ever been is the top of Glastonbury Tor on a deserted, misty grey day. That’s why one of my most wonderful memories is, at fourteen, “accidentally” letting my horse go in a field in Kildare and galloping until I was covered in mud and he was prancing, pleased with himself, snorting at the top of a rise in a valley while the tiny dots that were the rest of our group tried to catch up. (I can still see with the eyes I did then, vision blurry with wind and moisture and light.) That’s why, in despair, in Paris, I went to Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and sat there for hours, lit more candles than I probably remember, and began to heal.An English professor specialising in transformation myths marries one of his former students and they go on honeymoon to an island in the Orkney archipelago. The destination is her choice and she is fascinated by the sea. It is not a healthy fascination, she has nightmares about drowning and a tendency to put herself at risk. She often talks about her missing father, who may have drowned and may have come from the island. And it changed with the story: as Richard’s love grew obsessive the skies darkened, the days shortened, and the weather closed in. They also drink a lot of whisky over the course of the book. Particularly towards the end of it. And there’s at least one brushed past “whisky hangover” that follows an even sequence presented to us—at the time—at face value.