Cubbie Roo’s Castle was built about 1145 by the Norse landowner Kolbein Hruga, named in the Orkneyinga Saga, and its low walls and surrounding ditch still stand on a knoll above the shore — one of Scotland’s oldest surviving stone castles. Beside it, St Mary’s Chapel is a small Romanesque chapel from the same century, built by Kolbein’s family and restored in the late 1800s. The writer Edwin Muir spent part of his childhood at the Bu, a farm below the castle, before his family eventually moved on to the Orkney Mainland and then Glasgow; he became one of the best-known Scottish poets of the 20th century and, with his wife Willa, the first to translate Kafka into English.
Only around eight people live on Wyre today. Orkney Ferries sails to Wyre from Tingwall, on the same crossing that serves Rousay and Egilsay.
