View looking South from Houton Bay.
KIRKWALL
"Voir Kirkwall, et mourir," a French naval officer remarked to me when visiting Scapa Flow. Without inquiring too closely as to whether there might not have been some ironical "double-entendre" in his apparent admiration of the capital of the Orkneys, it was certainly the Orcadian "Mecca" of the Grand Fleet, and never in its history has it known such activity and prosperity as during the five years of war. A sleepy little town of four or five thousand inhabitants, it was suddenly called upon to assist in supplying the needs of a floating population of close on 100,000 men, and its narrow main (and only) street, "where two wheelbarrows tremble when they meet," bustled with unwonted activity—messmen from the ships loading provisions, naval men and officers engaged in an afternoon's shopping and sightseeing, with an occasional motor lorry or car trying to thread its way amongst the traffic.
Kirkwall, as will be seen from the map, is approached from the Flow by way of Scapa Pier, whence it is a walk or drive of about a mile and a half to the town.
The little hamlet of Scapa, incidentally, from which the Flow takes its name, assumed importance during the war as a seaplane station, and is the scene of an old custom long forgotten, which is related rather amusingly in a volume on Orkney by a Rev. John Brand, dated 1701. He writes: "In Scapha about a mile from Kirkwal to South-West, it is said there was kept a large and ancient Cup, which they say belonged to St. Magnus, King of Norway, who first instructed them in the principles of the Christian religion and founded the Church of Kirkwal, with which full of some strong drink their Bishops at their first landing were presented; which, if he drank it out, they highly praised him, and made themselves to believe, that they should have many good and fruitful years in his time." He adds rather regretfully: "The Countrey to this Day have the tradition of this, but we did not see the cup; nor could we learn where it was." The fact that the Highland Park Distillery (the most northern distillery in the British Isles) is on the upper Scapa road rather tends to confirm the legend!