Scapa Flow

You could drive past Scapa Flow and see nothing — a wide, grey, almost circular body of water held inside a ring of low Orkney islands, the kind of place that does not announce itself. That is precisely why it was chosen. For most of the twentieth century this was the main anchorage of the British fleet, sheltered, enormous, and hard for an enemy to reach. We stood on the shore at Houton on a flat, cold morning, Lia reading aloud from a leaflet, and slowly the empty water filled up with everything that had happened here. It is the most haunted-feeling place I visited in Orkney, and there is nothing visibly there at all.

The scuttled fleet

The story that pulls people here happened in 1919. The German High Seas Fleet, interned after the First World War, was scuttled on the orders of its own admiral rather than be handed over — seventy-four ships sent to the bottom of the Flow in a single afternoon. Most were salvaged over the following decades, but seven major wrecks remain down there, and Scapa Flow is now one of the great wreck-diving sites in the world. I do not dive. Lia, who does, came up from a chartered boat trip over the wreck of the Karlsruhe genuinely quiet, which for Lia is rare. She said it was less like looking at a ship and more like looking at a held breath.

For those of us staying dry, the Scapa Flow Museum on the island of Hoy, set in a former naval fuel pump station at Lyness, does the work. It is unsentimental and very good — oil tanks, photographs, salvaged fittings, and the quiet accumulation of detail about what it meant to keep a fleet and tens of thousands of men supplied at the far northern edge of Britain through two world wars.

The Churchill Barriers and the small graves

The other thing the war left here is concrete. After a U-boat slipped through the eastern approaches in 1939 and sank a battleship at anchor — over eight hundred men lost — Churchill ordered the eastern channels sealed with vast causeways of concrete blocks. The Churchill Barriers now carry the road, linking islands that were never linked before, and you drive across them past the rusting hulks of blockships deliberately sunk as the first crude defence. We pulled over halfway and walked down to a beach made of white shell sand with a wartime wreck breaking the surface a few metres out, gulls standing on it.

What stays with me is the contrast: this gentle, pastoral ring of farmland and sheep and birdsong, wrapped around a body of water that holds more naval history than almost anywhere on earth. Orkney does that. It hides enormous things in plain, modest sight.

When to go: May to August for the long northern daylight, calmer seas, and the best diving visibility — June is excellent. The museum and barriers are accessible year-round, but autumn and winter bring fierce wind off the Flow. Bring layers regardless; the weather here changes its mind by the hour.