Kirkwall

The first sight of St Magnus Cathedral stops you. Not because it is the tallest building in Kirkwall — it is, comfortably — but because of what it communicates about ambition and distance. This is a twelfth-century cathedral of red Orkney sandstone built at the very edge of the medieval world, and it has been standing here for nine hundred years, through Norse earldoms and Scottish annexation and Reformation and two world wars, absolutely indifferent to all of it. I came around the corner from the main street and walked straight into the west facade and stood there longer than I meant to, my head tipped back, trying to take in the size of the thing.

Inside the cathedral the stone changes colour — the red Kirkwall sandstone alternating with the yellow from Eday — creating a striped effect in the nave arches that is both unusual and somehow exactly right for a place this far north. The bones of Saint Magnus himself are in a pillar, discovered there during restoration work in 1919. Across the road, the ruins of the Earl’s Palace — a Renaissance palace of genuine quality, built in 1607 by the tyrannical Earl Patrick Stewart — compete for your attention. The Bishop’s Palace ruins sit alongside. Kirkwall manages a concentration of significant buildings that would be impressive in a city three times its size; here, in a town of ten thousand people at fifty-nine degrees north, it is remarkable.

Food is the other reason to come. I had a crab sandwich at a bakery on the main street — both claws, a serious quantity of brown meat, fresh bread, nothing else necessary — that required two hands and full attention. Orkney beef appears on nearly every menu because the Orkney breed is genuinely distinct, the cattle raised on grass in a climate that does not push growth. The Highland Park distillery is on the southern edge of town, and the whisky — particularly the twelve-year — is made with Orkney peat that gives it a particular quality of smoke: maritime rather than medicinal, softer than Islay. I did the tour and bought a bottle and felt no guilt about either.

When to go: Kirkwall works year-round as Orkney’s main hub. The St Magnus International Festival in mid-June is worth planning around — classical music, street events, the town at its most animated. The Ba’ — a riotous street football game played on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day — is one of the more genuinely strange British traditions still operating.