We must never lose the treasured Orkneys

When, last summer, a group of Orcadians declared they’d like to leave the UK and join Norway, it became clear just how little most of us in the south understand Orkney. Friends who know I go there often ask me where it is (somewhere near the Hebrides?), how many Orkney islands there are, and whether they are mountainous or flat.

As Peter Marshall explains at the start of this astonishing tour de force, the 70-odd Orkney islands lie just 25 miles north of Scotland, separated from the mainland by the Pentland Firth – the point, he says, at which ‘the North Sea meets the Atlantic, a place of hidden, treacherous whirlpools, and one of the world’s most powerful tidal currents’. A short, turbulent crossing carries the traveller from the rough terrain of Sutherland into a fertile, Gerard Manley Hopkins-like landscape, ‘plotted and pieced – fold, fallow and plough’, islands patchworked with fields, often running right down to the sea.