North Ronaldsay sheep

Lonely Planet Scotland's Highlands & Islands by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, country house hotel, demand response, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, rewilding

Orkney Ferries (www.orkneyferries.co.uk) runs from Kirkwall (passenger/car £8.35/19.70, 1½ hours), with a link to Eday. A bus meets the boat (book on 01857-600438). North Ronaldsay POP 70 North Ronaldsay is a real outpost surrounded by rolling seas and big skies. Delicious peace and quiet and the island’s excellent birdwatching lure visitors. There are enough semi-feral sheep to seize power, but a 13-mile drystone wall running around the island keeps them off the grass; they make do with seaweed, which gives their meat a distinctive flavour. North Ronaldsay Lighthouse LIGHTHOUSE (www.northronaldsay.co.uk; h10am-5pm May-Aug or by arrangement) At the northern end of the island, this lighthouse is over 100ft high and one of many built across Scotland by the Stevenson family.

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The choice is yours: for scenic splendour with hills to climb and memorable walks you might choose spectacular Skye, diverse Mull, accessible Arran or lonely Jura. Neolithic villages, standing stones, evocative prehistoric monuments? Head to far-flung Orkney, Shetland or the Outer Hebrides. Abbeys, castles or stately homes? Magical Iona, Bute, Coll, Barra or Westray. Beaches? Pick Harris or Tiree. Birdlife? Unst, the Uists, Fair Isle, Noss, North Ronaldsay or Staffa. Whisky? It’s got to be Islay. A convivial pub, local seafood and a warm welcome? Take your pick of any, then find yourself a snug cottage with a scent of the salty breeze and call it home for a day or three. Puffin on Staffa | MICHAEL FOLLAN - MGFOTOUK.COM / GETTY IMAGES © Glenbrittle, Isle of Skye | JUTAPORN CHONGCHAROENSIRI/SHUTTERSTOCK © Mainland cliffs, Shetland | DNAITA DELIMONT / GETTY IMAGES © Iona Abbey | DESIGN PICS / JOHN SHORT / GETTY IMAGES © Orkney & Shetland Orkney Kirkwall East Mainland to South Ronaldsay West & North Mainland Stromness Hoy Northern Islands Shetland Lerwick Bressay & Noss Scalloway South Mainland North Mainland The North Isles Orkney & Shetland Why Go?

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The largest Orkney island, Mainland, is linked by causeways to four southern islands; others are reached by air and ferry. AIR Loganair Inter-Isles Air Service (%01856-873457; www.loganair.co.uk) operates interisland flights from Kirkwall to Eday, Stronsay, Sanday, Westray, Papa Westray and North Ronaldsay. Fares are reasonable, with some special discounted tickets if you stay a night on the outer islands. You have to book by email or phone. BICYCLE Various locations on Mainland hire out bikes, including Cycle Orkney (%01856-875777; www.cycleorkney.com; Tankerness Lane, Kirkwall; per day/3 days/week £20/40/80; h9am-5.30pm Mon-Sat) and Orkney Cycle Hire.

Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

On Fridays a car ferry from Kirkwall makes the journey to Papa Westray. North Ronaldsay Pop 70 North Ronaldsay is a real outpost surrounded by rolling seas and big skies. Delicious peace and quiet and the island's excellent birdwatching lure visitors. There are enough semiferal sheep to seize power, but a 13-mile drystone wall running around the island keeps them off the grass; they make do with seaweed, which gives their meat a unique flavour. North Ronaldsay ToursTOURS (%01857-633257, 07703-112224; lighthouse or mill adult/child £6/4, combined £9/7) Phone ahead to book a tour of the North Ronaldsay Lighthouse, which will take you up the 176 steps to the top.

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Tranquilly located, with a cosy eating area overlooking the sea, it shines presenting classic Orcadian ingredients – the steak with haggis and whisky sauce is feted throughout, while North Ronaldsay lamb comes in four different, deliciously tender cuts. Lynnfield HotelBRITISH££ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %01856-872505; www.lynnfield.co.uk; Holm Rd; dinner mains £16-23; hnoon-1.45pm & 6-8.30pm; W) This sizeable hotel restaurant by the Highland Park distillery offers well-presented, rich cuisine that's long been a local favourite. The menu changes, but expect quality meat and fish, including North Ronaldsay lamb, all tasty and heavy on the butter and sauces. ShoreGASTROPUB££ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %01856-872200; www.theshore.co.uk; 6 Shore St; bar meals £9-10, restaurant mains £10-15; hfood noon-2pm & 6-8.30pm Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm & 6-8.30pm Sat & Sun; W) This popular harbourside eatery offers high-standard bar meals with a bit of local seafood added into the mix in the evening fare in the restaurant section.

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There are two kitchens, zippy wi-fi (when it works), a big lounge/eating area and views over grassy fields to the sea beyond. It’s just over a mile north of the ferry. You can also camp here (£8/4 per adult/child). 8Getting There & Away Air There are two or three daily Loganair flights to North Ronaldsay (£18, 20 minutes) from Kirkwall. The £21 return offer (you must stay overnight) is great value. Some of the Kirkwall flights go via Westray (£17, two minutes, the world's shortest scheduled flight) or North Ronaldsay (£17, 10 minutes). Boat A passenger-only Orkney Ferries ferry runs from Pierowall on Westray to Papa Westray (£4.15, 25 minutes, three to six daily in summer); the crossing is free if you've come straight from the Kirkwall–Westray ferry.

Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Orkney Ferries (www.orkneyferries.co.uk) runs from Kirkwall (passenger/car £8.35/19.70, 1½ hours), with a link to Eday. A bus meets the boat (book on 01857-600438). North Ronaldsay POP 70 North Ronaldsay is a real outpost surrounded by rolling seas and big skies. Delicious peace and quiet and the island’s excellent birdwatching lure visitors. There are enough semi-feral sheep to seize power, but a 13-mile drystone wall running around the island keeps them off the grass; they make do with seaweed, which gives their meat a distinctive flavour. North Ronaldsay LighthouseLIGHTHOUSE (www.northronaldsay.co.uk; h10am-5pm May-Aug or by arrangement) At the northern end of the island, this lighthouse is over 100ft high and one of many built across Scotland by the Stevenson family.

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The choice is yours: for scenic splendour with hills to climb and memorable walks you might choose spectacular Skye, diverse Mull, accessible Arran or lonely Jura. Neolithic villages, standing stones, evocative prehistoric monuments? Head to far-flung Orkney, Shetland or the Outer Hebrides. Abbeys, castles or stately homes? Magical Iona, Bute, Coll, Barra or Westray. Beaches? Pick Harris or Tiree. Birdlife? Unst, the Uists, Fair Isle, Noss, North Ronaldsay or Staffa. Whisky? It’s got to be Islay. A convivial pub, local seafood and a warm welcome? Take your pick of any, then find yourself a snug cottage with a scent of the salty breeze and call it home for a day or three. Mainland cliffs, Shetland | DNAITA DELIMONT/GETTY IMAGES © Iona Abbey | DESIGN PICS/JOHN SHORT/GETTY IMAGES © Southern Highlands & Islands Loch Lomond & The Trossachs Loch Lomond Crianlarich & Tyndrum Arrochar The Trossachs South Argyll Cowal Bute Inveraray Crinan Canal Kilmartin Glen Kintyre Islay Jura Colonsay Arran Brodick & Around Corrie to Lochranza Lochranza West Coast South Coast Lamlash Oban, Mull, Iona & Tiree Oban Around Oban Mull Iona Tiree Coll North Argyll Loch Awe Connel & Taynuilt Southern Highlands & Islands Why Go?

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Scotland Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

agricultural Revolution, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, European colonialism, Ford Model T, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Piper Alpha, place-making, retail therapy, smart cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

There’s also a passenger-only ferry from Pierowall to Papa Westray (£3.55, 25 minutes, three to six daily in summer); the crossing is free if you travel direct from the Rapness ferry. From October to April the boat sails by arrangement; phone 01857-677216. NORTH RONALDSAY Three miles long and almost completely flat, North Ronaldsay is a real outpost surrounded by rolling seas and big skies. The delicious peace and quiet and excellent birdwatching – fulmars, oystercatchers and terns are particularly numerous – lures visitors here; the island is home to cormorant and seal colonies and is an important stopover for migratory birds. There are enough old-style sheep here to seize power, but a 13-mile drystone wall right around the flat island keeps them off the grass; they make do with seaweed, which gives their meat a unique flavour.

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(Click here ) Bosta A beautiful and remote cove filled with white sand beside an Iron Age house (Click here ) Durness A series of pristine sandy coves and duney headlands surround this northwestern village (Click here ) Scousburgh Sands Shetland’s finest beach is a top spot for birdwatching as well as a bracing walk (Click here ) Orkney’s Northern Islands Most of these islands, especially Sanday, Westray and North Ronaldsay, have spectacular stretches of white sand with seabirds galore and seals lazing on the rocks (Click here ) Good Food Scotland’s chefs have an enviable range of quality meat, game, seafood and vegetables at their disposal. The country has shaken off its once dismal culinary reputation as the land of deep-fried Mars Bars, and now boasts countless regional specialities, farmers markets, artisan cheese makers, smokeries and microbreweries.

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Getting Around The Orkney Transport Guide, a detailed schedule of all bus, ferry and air services around and to/from Orkney, is available free from tourist offices. The largest island, Mainland, is joined by road-bearing causeways to Burray and South Ronaldsay. The other islands can be reached by air and ferry services. AIR Loganair ( 01856-872494; www.loganair.co.uk) operates interisland flights from Kirkwall to North Ronaldsay, Westray, Papa Westray, Stronsay, Sanday and Eday. See each island’s entry in this chapter for details. BICYCLE Various locations on Mainland hire bikes, including Cycle Orkney ( 01856-875777; www.cycleorkney.com; Tankerness Lane, Kirkwall; per day £15; Mon-Sat; ) and Orkney Cycle Hire ( 01856-850255; www.orkneycyclehire.co.uk; 54 Dundas St, Stromness; per day £7.50-10) .

pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Indeed, the rise in hand spinning has created more room in the market for colored fleeces. Sheep have been largely bred for whiteness to make dyeing wool easier, and renewed interest in coloration is a relatively recent phenomenon.[*] * * * — At the Rare Breeds Parade, held in the ring that serves as the Cattlemart’s auction stage the rest of the year, sheep were displayed whose breeds had been preserved from extinction. In the 1830s, when islands in Scotland were cleared of their traditional sheep, and larger sheep breeds like Cheviots and Leicesters were brought in, some of the native species disappeared entirely. But on North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island in the Orkney archipelago, which lies off the north coast of Scotland, a drystone wall was constructed around the circumference, above the high-water line.

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I felt I was within a system of mutual and collective care, and it allowed me to relax. I knelt by a little North Ronaldsay lamb eating hay from a metal basket that looked like a shopping cart. The ewe, his mother, was at her tallest up to my knee. People who walked by them paused, it seemed to me, responding to the tug of their sweetness. Cat, who taught me how to use a Turkish spindle the day before, came over to admire them too. The lamb used his tender little nose to get at the hay, sidling up next to his mother so their fleeces were abreast. I spent the morning speaking to women with flocks of sheep, each of whom seemed to have come into her flock by some accident of fate.

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But on North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island in the Orkney archipelago, which lies off the north coast of Scotland, a drystone wall was constructed around the circumference, above the high-water line. The wall, which became known as a “sheep dike,” was completed in 1832, and it confined the local sheep to the beach. There, local sheep adapted to a diet of seaweed. And there they remain for all but a few months each year, when the ewes and lambs are brought inland to graze. These little sheep—the top of the back of one of the sheep reached just to a woman’s knee—resemble the fossil remains of sheep from the Iron Age, and indeed dental traces of seaweed have been found on these four-thousand-year-old sheep. Another little group of survivors who muddled through the mid-century on the Orkney Islands were the Shetland sheep, as shaggy and small as Shetland ponies.

pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

But what these North Atlantic sheep lack in heft, they more than make up for in hardiness and stubborn adaptability. They can, for the most part, fend for themselves, without the cosseting their modern kin require. They can also survive, even thrive, on a very rough diet. Those native to North Ronaldsay, the northernmost of the Orkney Islands, have adapted to eat seaweed almost exclusively, picking their way over the slippery rocks near the seashore and shunning lusher, greener fare.22 These hardier sheep would have been approved of by Vikings, whose Old Norse, short-tailed breeds they resemble. Viking sheep too would have been around the size of a large dog – half the size of more popular modern breeds – grazed on rough heather moorland, rather than grassy pasture, and would have lived semi-wild, only coming into close contact with their owners once or twice a year.

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(This was certainly the case in 1657, when a tax list was drawn up that included all the sheep in Norway, some 329,000.) Their wool is crucially different too. Not only did their coats come in a variety of colours – black and brown as well as white – but their fleeces were made up of two layers, a wiry outer one covering a soft, highly insulating underwool. This isn’t common in the most widely farmed sheep today. Another oddity of the wool of the Old Norse sheep was its high lanolin content, which makes it more water-repellent: an excellent quality for making sails.23 Because of the small scale of sheep farming, procuring sufficient quantities to supply a large vessel with sails would have required sustained and coordinated efforts from several households.

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The Bishop of Winchester, for example, had 29,000 sheep on his estates in the early fourteenth century; Henry Lacy, the Earl of Lincoln, owned 13,400. Although it has been argued that the primary purpose of sheep in the Middle Ages was their milk – used to make cheese – surviving price lists show how crucial their wool was to their value. Sheep that produced particularly fine fleeces would cost 10d each, enough to pay a skilled tradesman for a few days’ work; a coarser specimen was worth only 6d. Merchants, who dealt with the wool once it had parted ways with the sheep, would have thought about wool in measurements of sacks and sarplers.

Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Hefty platefuls of local beef and seafood make satisfying lunch and dinner meals; there’s also a shop. Loganair offers cheap flights to Papa Westray (15 minutes) from Kirkwall via Westray. Orkney Ferries links Kirkwall with Papa Westray (return per person/car £14.30/32.60, 1½ hours, two daily) and Westray. North Ronaldsay pop 50 Even in the Orkneys, North Ronaldsay is a byword for isolation. There are enough sheep here to seize power, but a 13-mile drystone wall across the flat island keeps them off the crops; they make do on seaweed, which gives their meat a unique flavour. The island falls in the path of migratory birds, which bring fanatical birders who spot whole chapters of What Bird Is That?

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There are dorm rooms as well as twins and doubles with private bathrooms; dinner, which can feature the unique local mutton, is also available (from £10). The attached cafe (meals £4-10; lunch & dinner) does good meals for all, and life-affirming coffee in the cold. Loganair flies from Kirkwall to North Ronaldsay. Orkney Ferries operates a service from Kirkwall (return per person/car £14.30/32.60, 2¾ hours, one on Friday only, plus Tuesday May to September). Return to beginning of chapter SHETLAND ISLANDS Adrift in the North Sea, and close enough to Norway geographically and historically to make nationality an ambiguous concept here, the Shetlands are Britain’s northernmost outpost.

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Eating Shakespeare pilgrimages clearly work up an appetite: there’s certainly no shortage of good restaurants. Sheep St is clustered with refined but relaxed eating options, mostly aimed at theatregoers. Vintner Wine Bar ( 01789-297259; 5 Sheep St; mains £7-13; 9.30am-10pm Mon-Fri, to 9.30pm Sun) This quirky space is full of beams, exposed brick, tucked-away spaces and low ceilings to bang your head on. There’s a relaxed atmosphere and a tasty menu of burgers, grills and pastas, with some good vegetarian options. Coconut Lagoon ( 01789-293546; 21 Sheep St; mains £7.50-13; noon-2.30pm & 5-11pm Tue-Sun) Fusing culinary influences as diverse as Dutch, Portuguese and South Indian, this elegantly decorated restaurant has the tastiest curry around.