Heather moorland covers most of Hoy, Orkney’s second-largest island and easily its hilliest, rising to Ward Hill, the highest point in Orkney at 481 metres. Most visitors come for the Old Man of Hoy, a sandstone sea stack 137 metres tall on the west coast, first climbed in 1966 and still popular with climbers. The path out to it starts at Rackwick, a scattered bay-side township that was crofted and fished for generations until most families left by the mid-20th century; only a handful of people live there now. On the moor above, the Dwarfie Stane is a single block of sandstone hollowed into two small chambers around 3000 BC, thought to be the only rock-cut tomb of its kind in Britain.
Orkney Ferries runs a car ferry from Houton on the Mainland to Lyness, calling at Flotta on some crossings, and a passenger ferry crosses from Stromness to Moaness. Lyness itself was the shore base for the Royal Navy’s Scapa Flow fleet in both world wars; the Scapa Flow Museum now occupies the old pumphouse there and covers that story.
