My second day in Orkney, I made my way to the western coast of Mainland to take a gander at the Yesnaby Sea Castle, a rock formation carved from the coastline by the crashing waves of the North Sea.
After hearing so much about the sea stack, I was pretty pumped to see it up close. It was, well... a little underwhelming. Don't get me wrong, it was insanely cool that waves and wind had systematically severed this one pillar of rock from the motherland. But let's face it, unless you know anything about the rock itself, it's just another flipping rock. Turns out I was woefully ill-informed as to just how incredible the Yesnaby coastline is. Once I got there, the sea stack was but a minor afterthought, relegated to a distant corner of my mind as I geeked out over the sandstone cliffs under my feet.
Here's the story on Yesnaby: In the late Silurian/early Devonian--approximately 440-415 million years ago, give or take a couple millenia here and there--what is now the Orkney islands was once the bottom of a shallow, freshwater sea on the supercontinent of Pangaea. Around this time, jawed fishes, mostly heavily armored placoderms, began to radiate across the globe. The sandy, silted sea bed at Orkney saw millions of generations of thick-skulled fishies through life, received their remains upon death, and when the conditions were just right, preserved their scaly bodies sandwiched between layers of sand, silt, and detritus. Over the course of time, the red sandstone beds of Orkney were moved in a violent upheaval as the supercontinent dismantled, creating the sandstone cliffs we see today at Yesnaby.
Sandstone cliffs at Yesnaby with individual layers of the rock clearly exposed, washed away by a multi-million-year onslaught of water and wind.
Don't let this picture fool you. The waves crashing against the coastline were a good 120 ft. below this little outcropping. A local man saw me angling for this photo and told me it was a good thing the winds were relatively calm, else my camera would likely be capturing my death. Eep.
He wasn't kidding about the wind, either. On your average day in Orkney, the winds whip about you at a brisk 30 mph, and gales are a common occurrence in the fall when the weather gets a bit nasty. As you can see, the constant wind and rain have conspired together to form these ripples in the grass carpeting the cliffs.
Armed with the knowledge that I could easily be swept to my end, I quickly made for the patch of grass farthest from the cliff edge and crawled the two miles back to my car...
Shyeah, right. Because I'm young, convinced of my own immortality, and reckless to a fault, I decided I wanted to walk out onto this sea arch (a sea stack in the making) and take pictures from that wee little ledge.
When I got onto said wee little ledge, I found it to be approximately the size of a bar of soap. (Okay, so it was really about three feet wide, but when you're standing on the damn thing and the wind is swirling your hair about, and you have five pounds of soil samples strapped to your back, it feels a bit smaller.)
However, safely back on level ground, I took a peek at the photos I had managed to take while half-frozen with fear, half-delirious with norepinephrine.
The view down. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
Me perched precariously atop my little ledge, a shit-eating grin plastered across my face. I've taken several similar photos thus far on my return trip.
Finally, the photo that my grandfather said was evidence that I had a great eye for composition. (Coming from a photographer as talented as my Paw-Paw, that's something.) Naturally, I had this professionally printed and framed for him.
As I was walking back to my car, I called my mom to tell her what I had done, assured she wouldn't flip out too much, seeing as I was, you know, alive. No such luck. She sputtered, then heaved that sigh to which I have become all too accustomed to hearing. "When are you coming back from Orkney?" she asks. "I fly back in two days," I replied. "Oh, goodie."
Well, guess what, Mom! I got to play on more cliffs today...and yesterday! And I'm not scheduled to come for three more weeks! Bwahahahaha!
1 comment:
As I read your blog, I am making arrangements to hire a new guide for our adventure. At the rate you are going, you will be hobbling along! Remember, a Ford Mondeo cannot accomodate both you and a cast.
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