Sailing Around the Top - Shetland to Outer Hebrides | Sailing Florence Around Britain – Ep.188

Over the last seven years we have circumnavigated the world on our 37-foot sailboat Florence. Now it is time for a change of tack. We are setting out to face the challenges of wind and tide as we attempt to circumnavigate our home country. Join us as we explore the coastline of the UK from picture-perfect seaside towns to the wild isles of Scotland. This is Sailing Around Britain. Everything we do up here is defined by the weather. The next leg of our journey will be to sail south past Orkney and Cape Wrath to the Outer Hebrides and it looks like there's about to be a good weather window for doing that. But today is the best weather we have had in the entire time that we've been in Shetland so we're going to make the most of it by sailing south to the small island of Moosa where there's a 2,000-year-old tower which we can explore. To cross the open sea to Orkney and the Outer Hebrides we will need a stronger wind to fill the sails and power us through the north Atlantic waves. But the light winds we have today are perfect for sailing short distances in the flat calm waters sheltered by the islands. Wow look at this. Apparently this is the best preserved brock in the world. Now I'm not sure how many brocks there are outside of Scotland so I'm not sure how much of a fact that is but it's 13 metres high and still has the original walls all the way up to the top. It's pretty stunning. This was built somewhere around 2,000 to 2,300 years ago. It's still standing today. A brock is a circular structure. It's actually double walled and the two dry stone walls actually support each other and that's why they can build it so high without loads of different buttresses coming out. And then in the middle there's not a lot of knowledge known about how it was inhabited in the middle. Lots of pictures show sort of wooden structures with different platforms for living in the middle but nobody really knows because obviously that bit has all rotted away. The artistic impressions you see of these brocks show them roofed over with a timber lattice work which was then turfed on top to provide a waterproof roof for the living area in the middle. They also show some of them have animals in the middle, some have animals within the walls but they would have been lived in by farmers at the time. It's not really a castle with warriors. It would have been well-off farmers who would have built these either as a status symbol or maybe for a little bit of protection from viking raids and the like. So this whole leads into the gap between the walls and it's very dark in here. The steps are really really small you can only fit half your foot on each one. So we're now between the walls and it's got this spiraling staircase around the outside and there's big slabs that bridge between the two walls at various different stages to make platforms for the stairway up. Nobody really knows how many brocks there used to be because they've been raided for the stones because they're an easy source of building materials but here they think this one survived because there is an abundance of stony beaches and rocky beaches that are more easy to access to use for building materials so for us to leave because there is a northeasterly wind forecast for the next couple of days which will give us an opportunity to sail downwind back to the Orkneys instead of the normal prevailing southwesterlies which would have us beating upwind. But it's not just the winds that we have to bear in mind when we're planning a passage like this also the tides they're especially important around here because the tide really whips around the bottom of Shetland and when we get to Orkney the tides there are even stronger. So we're planning to leave at 5 30 in the morning tomorrow which will give us tide with us around the tip of Shetland which have wind with tide should be a smooth passage and then when we get to Orkney we need to try and arrive there we're going to try to arrive there for about half past eight to nine o'clock in the evening which is when it's the best time of tide for us to enter those islands and in between we've got about a hundred miles to sail so a lot to plan but we think we've got our planning done right and we'll find out when we We're aiming for the port of Stromness in Orkney and the routing tool is suggesting that to make the most of the tidal currents we should sail a convoluted path through the islands it works for the model but if we're an hour or two earlier or later than it predicts we could be faced with over six knots of current against us so we have decided to sail around the north of the islands instead which although slightly further gives us less chance of being pushed backwards by the tide it's definitely not our average sailing breakfast this morning i didn't realize quite how good and inexpensive food in the uk was until we stopped living in the uk it's been such a luxury to be able to provision well everywhere we are even in like the more outer islands like this surprisingly the food stores are the same price as they are in the mainland so this morning we're treating ourselves to fresh berries on our breakfast and another massive change is that i'm making us a cup of tea whilst we're sailing using the electric kettle because of our masterful charging system it is working absolutely brilliantly and we just used to struggle for power when we were sailing on a passage like this on a cloudy day like this we would have been struggling to even run the instruments so the fact that i can boil a kettle is yeah massive change i'm still wedging it on the gimbal stove but it should hopefully save us a fair amount of gas oh thanks very much it's better than normal even though we have chosen to sail around the north of orkney so that the timings of the tides are not so critical we are still conscious that we need to arrive off a strong nest before the tide turns against us there and before it gets dark so we let florence have a little more sail area than usual and kept her flying along at over seven knots for most of the day usually we reef down and sail at six to six and a half knots to reduce strain and wear and tear it would have been a glamour sail with a wind and sea state if it was not for the fact that it rained most of the way this is the main island of orkney and one of the amazing things about orkney is how much evidence there is that people were living on these islands in neolithic times so this site here is called the standing stones of stone nest and this dates back they believe five thousand years so that's way older than stonehenge and even the great pyramids this site was an ancient ceremonial ground just like stonehenge but this site only has four of the original 11 or 12 stones of the circle still remaining but this whole strip of land that this site sits on was thought to be of great significance during those times and so just behind me is another stone circle which is much more intact and this is the bigger ring of brodga there would have originally been 60 of these huge stones stood up in this ring i think about 30 odd of them survive but just thinking about the amount of effort it would have taken back in neolithic times to raise these stones even to quarry them and transport them here with no metal tools whatsoever there's also a massive ditch surrounding this whole circle which probably would have taken as much effort to dig itself as well because it didn't have the same metal tools only using bone antlers to hack away at the soil and dig out the ditch the archaeologists have estimated that would have taken about 80 000 man hours just to dig the ditch a crazy amount of effort for something which doesn't really seem to have a practical purpose although we're only making the one stop here in orkney with florence i've been fortunate enough that john and claire who followed us on the track i saw where we were and they've lent us their car for the day so we're able to actually get out and get more of a sense of what the island's like and it's much more intensively farmed here than shetland shetland was much more open moorland with sheep roaming across it here is much more regimented into fields with lots of farming going on this is my first time driving an electric car it's lovely but it feels really surreal driving this brand new modern electric vehicle up to 5 000 year old neolithic sites so we've come to scarab ray which is a very well preserved neolithic village this was covered by a sand dune until 1850 when a storm washed away the grass on top of the sand dunes and revealed this village all of the houses and all of the stone furniture are not a replica this isn't a model that's being put here this is the original village which is 5 000 years old so along with the standing stones this village here in scarab ray is a world heritage site and you can obviously read lots of facts about it online but the really striking thing about coming here for me that gives it some sense of time is that this bay that is here right here behind me didn't exist when people were living here this actually used to be a lock and then the land stretched a lot further out but has been eroded by the sea over time of the four days we spent in orkney that was the only day it didn't rain for most of the day and with the wind from the northeast again we set off to sail past the infamous cape wrath the name cape wrath sounds frightening and at the wrong state of wind and tide it certainly can be but the name actually comes from the viking norse and simply means turning point with 120 miles to sail to our chosen anchorage in the outer hebrides we set off in the evening to sail overnight we approached cape wrath at dawn and had timed it to have the wind and tide with us as florence made the turn south we could just make out the cape through the misty rain once around cape wrath we sailed into the protected waters between the islands of our were going to go to the shant islands i'm not sure how you pronounce that for those islands you can just offshore here but as we approached the wind was due to die but hadn't died yet so the waves were still pretty big and we didn't think it was going to be very shouted over there so we came over to here which was our backup anchorage just six miles away beautiful little spot for florence and we're just having a great time hiking around these beautiful little freshwater lakes but then i think tomorrow we're probably going to head out there because it's going to be very calm conditions and explore there and then further across behind me you can see the isle of sky and the coolins which we're hoping at some point over the next couple of weeks to go and hike up but it's just a beautiful calm protected area in behind the outer hebrides beautiful for sailing beautiful for exploring and we're really excited to have a look around here so pretty chilly but it's good to have a swim in fresh water next time we'll take florence out to the magical shant islands and then sail out through the sound of paris to the spectacular west coast of the outer hebrides for extra updates in between these bi-weekly videos and to find out what we're up to in real time head over to patreon and join the crew of course don't forget to subscribe to make sure that you don't miss the next episode here on youtube continuing our voyage on florence would not be possible without the support of our patrons thank you to all of you and especially to our star patrons