Off the very top of Scotland, Orkney, or the Orkney Islands, might soon see a hotel with a room count almost reaching 100 rooms.
According to the Orkneys’ main newspaper, The Orcadian, planning permission has been granted for a 92-bed (not rooms, seemingly) hotel in the capital, Kirkwall, on a site that now contains a building materials supplier.
The newspaper added plans for a hotel, pulled back during the COVID-19 pandemic, were validated by the Orkney Islands Council on Dec. 16.
Most hotels in Orkney have less than 10 rooms, with a very few having 30 or 40.
Orkney is very high up my list of want-to-visit travel destinations.
I would love to also visit Shetland, or the Shetland Islands, which is north of Orkney, or indeed either or both of Foula or Fair Isle, which sit between the two.
Orkney is a long way from London, some 550 miles by air as the crow flies.
By plane, it is a three- to four-hour journey from the moment the first plane takes off in London and the moment — following a connection in one of the Scottish airports — the plane lands in the Orcadian capital of Kirkwall, population some 10,000 or so.
By train and ferry, the trip takes more than 20 hours, with waiting time.
Kirkwall is 500 miles from Oslo, Norway.
The weather is not always cooperative, but the scenery, culture and wildlife, from what I read and see, is spectacular.
It is also where the late poet and novelist George Mackay Brown was born and lived. Brown, apparently, hardly ever left. If he did, it was usually to another part of Scotland.
His novels are a mix of daily life and Norse and Orcadian mythology, perhaps what we now call magico-realism, albeit a dialed-back magico-realism.
He was born in Orkney’s second and last town of any size, Stromness, and it is a place to which I would head.
According to CoStar, the largest hotel on Orkney is the 51-room Ayre Hotel, also in Kirkwall. It is an independent hotel in a 1900 building.
CoStar adds Stromness’ largest hotel, aptly named The Stromness Hotel, was built in 1901 and has 39 rooms.
Project Scotland adds some more flavor.
It states that “Kirkwall’s medieval burgage plot system has been repurposed to zone the [proposed hotel] site into linear strips.”
Burgage?
Well, website burgageplots.info says a “burgage plot is usually characterized as a long, narrow, walled plot, garden or yard, behind a building, the narrow frontage of which faces the street in a town or city with medieval origins. Burgage plots are seldom seen, hidden for centuries behind historic terraces of dense houses, shops and workshops, offices, taverns and inns.”
It seems, reading its prose, that this was once a common aspect of medieval towns in the United Kingdom, an aspect that maximized income for the lord of the manor, the chief property owner.
How many towns look today is largely due to this system, so it seems, but few burgage plots exist to this time. This is fascinating, and if anyone has more information, please send me a message.
I enjoyed reading the proposed hotel’s biodiversity enhancement form.
The project is an urban one in Orkneys’ only town of size (Stromness has a population of 2,500 or so) and on a brownfield site, which is to be encouraged, but that form has one section that requires an answer, and I paste it verbatim as I love it so much.
“Please provide photographs to give an overview of the habitats and features present on site, and, referring to the photographs, describe below the dominant habitat type and most recent land use. If the land use has recently changed, please also describe the previous known land use. List any species of note that use the site. (Example level of information: grass, grazed field, Brown hare and curlew; coastal heath, rough grazing for sheep, Arctic skua; heather moorland, unmanaged, short eared owl; livestock fodder crops, agricultural field, geese; unmanaged meadow, previously livestock grazing field until farm changed hands last year, unknown; urban brownfield site previously with flats on it (demolished 5 years ago) within existing settlement, none as it’s a concrete slab; etc.”
The answer, which is in the public domain, is “one mature sycamore tree that will be retained.”
I will make a point to visit the sycamore.
If I can recommend one of Mackay Brown’s novels, it would be “Beside the Ocean of Time,” which he was nominated for the Booker Prize.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of CoStar News or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.