North Ronaldsay

North Ronaldsay’s sheep live on the shore and eat mostly seaweed, kept off the island’s grass by a dry-stone dyke that runs right around the coast, built in the 1830s and still maintained by the Sheep Court, an elected body of islanders. Twice a year the flock is rounded up into stone pens along the shore for shearing, a job that still takes the whole community. At the north end, the island’s lighthouse is Britain’s tallest land-based lighthouse tower, a red-brick column completed in 1854 and just over 42 metres high; an older, shorter lighthouse from 1789 stands nearby, among the earliest built in Scotland. Burrian, an Iron Age broch — a round, thick-walled stone tower — was excavated in the 1870s, when diggers uncovered a carved Pictish stone now in the National Museum of Scotland.

The island sits on the migration route between Scandinavia and Africa, which makes it one of the best places in Britain to see rare birds pass through; the bird observatory near the pier, open all year, keeps records going back decades. Loganair flies in from Kirkwall in around 15 minutes, and Orkney Ferries sails roughly once a week, more often in summer. Around 60 people live on North Ronaldsay, whose lighthouse is visible from Start Point on Sanday.