North Hoy Kirkyard

Just a short drive took us to Houton for the ferry to Lyness in the middle part of the Island of Hoy.
This is a fairly small ferry (MV Hoy Head) which can carry about 18 cars.
Next was a drive around the South of Hoy including the district of South Walls which once was a separate island but is now linked by a causeway to Hoy. Nearby is the Longhope Lifeboat Museum. There were some very distant ancestors of mine that lived on farms in the South of Hoy. We had a look at the places as we drove along, and at some stopped to record in a photo.

Back to Lyness and the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum, which has genuinely fascinating exhibits and tells the story of how the quiet island of Hoy became a huge naval base in WWII (HMS Proserpine). Thousands of service people were housed there for the duration of the war. One of the massive oil storage tanks now houses exhibits and a video presentation. There are also exhibits telling of the importance of Scapa Flow in WWI, including the scuttling of the German Fleet. Of major interest too is the cafe, as this is one of the few places on Hoy where food can be purchased!

In the afternoon we drove North to our B&B. Part of the fun of staying there was being able to visit one of the houses where my paternal ancestors had lived. Our hosts told us that our room was in the original part of the house, which has been much extended, and that our door was the original front door of the cottage. My paternal grandfather was born in a farm in the North of Hoy and during my family history research over the last few years I had come to want to see the place and get a feel for the things he had seen. Sadly my grandfather died when my father was just ten and my father had never gone to Orkney nor had much contact with the few family members left there. Some of my grandfathers siblings had left Orkney round about the time he had, which was not uncommon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
One thing my father did do was to arrange for his fathers death at sea to be recorded in stone in the cemetery in North Hoy.

Today's blip is the view from the cemetery out over the Bay of Creekland and Burra Sound to Linksness and Garson on Hoy. Most of the stones you can see are the stones marking the resting places of my ancestors. It is a beautiful place, literally yards from the farm where my grandfather was born and it was good to be able to find all of the Memorial Inscriptions and the stones of my direct paternal family back through several generations. To see the houses where they lived and walk on the land where they lived and the beach where they had their boats was quite an experience.