A Walk to the Knowes of Trotty

With my vision restored - or, let's be honest, when it comes to seeing distances,  not so much restored as established,  it seemed a good idea to start going out again, and not just into supermarkets  where I could cry out joyfully at being able to read the signs above the aisles, but really out. So we dug out our old Orkney walks book and started plotting where to go. 

This got us nowhere, as we both had different ideas about what we should do and how far we should try to walk, and when we looked through the book we had actually done rather more of the walks on Orkney mainland than we had previously thought. And then we checked when the book was published, and discovered it was 2004, and we knew at least one of the walks is now impossible since a local landowner has cut off access to some of his land ( and yes that is illegal in Scotland where you have the 'right to roam', but there's only so much arguing folk can do with gates secured with barbed wire), and we wondered how much else had changed .... so the upshot was we took ourselves off to the Tourist Information Office and splashed out the princely sum of £6.99 on a new book of Orkney walks. Now obviously a lot of these books repeat one another, but there were some in the new book that we hadn't seen before and the Knowes of Trotty was one of them, and it didn't look too long or too difficult so we decided on that. 

The Knowes are a set of bronze age burial mounds, positioned in two rows over in West Mainland. Apparently it's the largest bronze age burial site in Scotland, and the bronze age bit makes them quite interesting to me as generally bronze age archaeology doesn't get a look in in Orkney as the neolithic stuff grabs all the headlines, and most of the funding. These were partly excavated in the 19th century and four very thin gold discs were discovered in a burial cist, along with a large number of amber beads and some bones. The discs and beads are ,naturally enough(!) now in the National Museum of Scotland, probably mouldering away in a drawer somewhere. Some more excavation was done in 2005 but without turning up anything of significance.

It's quite rough walking once you're off the farm track and I have to say I hate that. I can walk for a long time on a metalled road, but rough tracks I don't like. This is partly because they all tend to be angled so that it's impossible to put your feet flat down on the ground. It's also because the ground is uneven but covered in vegetation and therefore a pit for the unwary. The OH scoffs at this, but then he hasn't had two broken ankles. I am therefore a real moaning minny when we're out on walks and really its a tribute to his patience and good nature that when I suggest going for a proper walk, that he agrees so readily. 

There's not  a huge amount to see when you get there, except for a few mounds (well the clue is in the name really) but the views over to Hoy and sections of West Mainland are lovely. We saw lots of wild flowers. some of which we could even identify, saw and heard gaggles of geese, and went for a couple of hours without seeing either a house or another human being. That's quite special. 

The walking seemed even harder than usual and when we got home I discovered why. My boots were literally rotting away. In fact there was daylight visible between the sole and the upper on one of them, and the other wasn't in a much better state. So they went into the bin and I screwed up my face at the thought of having to pay out for a new pair until I remembered quite how long it was since I had bought these and decided they didn't really owe me a penny. Not sure when I'll have a  chance to replace them; I suppose walks will need to be restricted to roads until I can do that though. 

Meanwhile there are pictures. If anyone knows the name of wither the blue or the white flowers below, please feel free to let me know in the comments. It's why I took the pictures really, so that I could ask people what they were. 

The starting point

Funghi

Flora

More flora

And more funghi

Some of the heather was in bloom. It's beautiful but gosh the roots are tough and difficult to walk over

Bog cotton

The fearless leader of the expedition

Orkney's best go at a babbling brook

Not the best photo of geese in flight that you'll ever see but I was just amazed to capture them at all given that I couldn't really see the camera screen.

Towards the end - a view towards the hills of Hoy.