Trail of the Lion King

The plan for the Orkney holiday was to start with a couple of weeks spent on small islands. We began with Shapinsay, then Hoy, before moving back to the mainland and staying in Stenness for the final week.

Shapinsay is great. It’s a small island with around three hundred residents. We were staying in a former farmhouse with no neighbours other than sheep for a few hundred yards. We walked to the Bay of Sandgarth and up to a standing stone, Mor Stein.

The best walk on Shapinsay was along the coast and past Balfour Castle. There were seabirds swooping down, possibly in protection of their nests. The highland cattle took an interest in us as we passed them but didn’t approach. The only downside was a couple of locked gates that stopped us doing the circular route that we had planned, but it was no real hardship to retrace our steps along the shoreline.

For our second week we moved to Hoy. It’s much bigger than Shapinsay, but with a similar small population. I was working again by then so most of the good stuff took place after four in the afternoon. In a place where it doesn’t get dark until well after ten, that allowed sufficient time for most things that I’d want to do.

We called in at the Naval Cemetery where I noticed that some of the sailors were older than me when their ships went down. At the Lifeboat Museum in Lyness I chatted to a bloke who was friends with someone I’d worked with thirty years ago. At the Dwarfie Stane, the dog pissed up against another Neolithic tomb.

One evening we walked the six-mile round trip between Rackwick Bay and the Old Man of Hoy. It must be up there with some of the most scenic walks that I’ve done. Small birds hopped along the path in and out, with gulls nesting in the cliffs around the stack.

We also spent a day on Flotta, walking around the edge of the island. I worked there for seven years and spent the last six staying at the terminal. It was strange being back as so much of it didn’t match the memories that I had. The football pitch that we played on in the summer evenings was much smaller than I’d remembered. It was nowhere near the full-size that I’d thought it was, although it’s possible that it has since been reduced. Similarly, the post office where we bought cans and drank them at the counter with the postmaster had vanished altogether. Surely it really had existed?

The walk was good though and the dog made a decent effort at chasing a rabbit. Whilst he didn’t succeed in catching it, he got closer than we’d anticipated. Maybe all the walking is boosting his fitness.

Whilst the islands were all great to visit, if I wanted to watch some football the Orkney mainland was the only place where that would happen. I checked the fixtures for our final week and saw that I could get to games on the Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

The first one of those evenings had a fixture in Harray. I knew the village quite well, having picked up a colleague who lived there on the way to work for a year. I’d also been fishing on Harray loch, although I didn’t catch anything. It was a ten-minute drive from where we were staying at Stenness and I parked pitch side, next to the Community Centre.

From what I can see, the Orkney football clubs are divided into an A League and a B League, with six and seven clubs in each respectively. There’s also an eight-team league for reserve teams.

Outside of this structure, there are parish competitions and East v West games, where players represent the area that they are from, rather than a club. This fixture was in the E Frazier Electrical Limited B League. Hosts Harray went into the game in sixth place, with visitors Accies up in third.

I’d initially thought that the other cars might have contained people watching, but most were empty and likely belonged to the players. That meant that the game kicked off with just four spectators, including me. Three others turned up midway through the first half, perhaps they had gotten stuck behind a tractor.

Whilst we had a ref, the linos were recruited from the subs. One fella gave the impression that he was new to the game and when he ran the line, didn’t realise that he should stop at half-way. For a while we had the bizarre sight of two linesmen monitoring the same half of the pitch. He also delayed proceedings whenever he abandoned his flag to cross the adjacent road and search for the match ball in the long grass.

The swirling wind wasn’t conducive to a decent game, but both teams tried to keep the ball down. Accies scored twice in the first half, but the second half was more open with both sides missing chances and the goalies making some decent saves. In the end, the two goals were sufficient for Accies to take the points.

I hadn’t been expecting much added time, but, perhaps due to the frequent stoppages for ball retrieval and a short break to fill a hole discovered in the penalty area, we got nine minutes extra at the end. Fortunately, it stays light late up here in the summer.