The Bicycle Adventure Club - Come Ride With Us!

Neolithic Scotland: The Northern Isles

June 15th to June 29th

Ride Coordinator: Jane Maxwell
Report by: Mary Odum

This June, nineteen bikers travelled way off the beaten path, courtesy of leader Jane Maxwell’s vision, to some of the first UNESCO World Heritage sites in northern Europe, on the subarctic Orkney and Shetland Islands. 

The trip began with a loop ride along Loch Ness in Inverness, followed by a bus ride to Scrabster, the terminal for the first of our three ferries. This first ferry was a short hop to Stromness on Orkney’s main island. We spent several days exploring the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, which includes five sites dated from 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. We had a guided tour of Maeshowe, a Neolithic chambered cairn and passage grave which was later looted and graffitied by Vikings. We visited the Standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, and Skara Brae, a cluster of eight houses comprising Northern Europe’s best preserved Neolithic village. Archaeological digs are still going on at the Ness of Brodgar, which is much larger and may be even older than the other four sites. Many of us also biked to Birsay, to explore a broch, a ruined earl’s castle, a new Orkney beer brewery, and a 200-year-old operational bere barley mill.

We then biked on to the town of Kirkwall, which featured a tour of the magnificent 12th century St. Magnus Cathedral. Here the group fanned out to also inspect the two northernmost whisky distilleries, Highland Park and Scapa, and Kirkjuvagr Orkney Gin distillery. Our visit here coincided with the 100th anniversary of the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow with a very interesting museum exhibit commemorating the event.

After exploring Kirkwall, we ventured out on bikes with the midnight sun, no headlights needed, to wheel our bikes onto a midnight overnight ferry to Shetland Island. The next morning we pedaled past a sign marking 60° North latitude on our way to Sumburgh Head, Shetland’s most southerly point and an important bird rookery for marine birds. Our  Sumburgh hotel was next to one of the best preserved archaeological sites on Shetland, Jarlshof, which displays a microcosm of remains dated from around 2500 BC layered up through the 17th century. Sumburgh Head was a wonderful place to celebrate summer solstice and the midnight sun, surrounded by a cacophony of seabird colony happy noises from guillemots, fulmars, puffins, razorbills, shags, kittiwakes, skuas, and gannets. My personal highlight here was an attack by a pair of Great Skuas with a fledging chick while we hiked on St. Ninian’s Isle, close enough that my roommate tried to climb under me. I should have left my bike helmet on for the hike….

Back in Lerwick, many of us visited Jamieson and Smith Shetland Wool Brokers, and listened to Ollie the Wool Gatherer’s impromptu talk on wool economics. We then took another overnight ferry down to Aberdeen, and finished the tour with four fine days biking back up to Inverness.  Much of the time on this tour we were on National Cycle Route 1 (NCR1) a well-signed and designed cycle route that runs from Dover into Shetland as part of the UK’s National Cycle Network. Who knew the biking was so good in Scotland!

Support for this trip was supplied by the very capable and amiable John Trotter of Iron Donkey, who went out of his way to meet our needs. Thanks again, Jane and John, for providing us with the opportunity to visit this transformative “thin place,” so thick in history and rich in beauty.