Somewhere over the rainbow

Today has been a day of rainbows.  We woke to lashing rain but it eased off.  There were frequent 2 minute showers between sunny breaks which gave us lots of rainbows, some that seemed to follow the car as we were driving.
 
The Mainland which we are on is quite a large Island of the Orkney group.  It has rolling hills, grey stone cottages and farmhouses with lots of ruins along the way.  There are both sheep and cattle grazing and I did manage to see some highland coos in one field.
 
We started with the Churchill barriers, built by Italian prisoners of war in WWII to stop the German navy advancing to the Scapa Flow.  We later visited the Italian chapel which was built by the prisoners in their camp on Lamb Holm.  It has the most beautiful painting inside.  We went searching for lighthouses and wound up in an abandoned WWII battery on a point near Hoxa.
 
A visit to the Fossil museum and buoyed by some hearty soup it was on to tackle the Neolithic and Viking sites.
 
This was at Broch of Gurness where we were greeted by an amazing rainbow.  It’s amazing to think of the size of the settlement that was there.  From there it was to the Brough of Birsay and luckily it was low tide so we could cross the causeway.  We hiked up to the lighthouse only to find it was a building site.  The light by that time was gorgeous.
 
From there it was a quick trip back to grab my tripod and head to the Ring of Brodgar for the sunset.  You can’t walk in the inner circle but no matter for the sunset.  I have put it up as an extra.