Mainland Orkney is green and pastoral - small fields, stone walls, low rolling farmland. Hoy is different. The island extends roughly 14 miles north to south and 6 miles east to west, and the northern half is dominated by uplands: Ward Hill at 1,578 feet (481 metres) is the highest point in Orkney. Cloud catches on these hills more often than not. Drizzle is the default weather. The terrain feels more like the bleak Outer Hebrides than the gentle Orkneys. The northern part is an RSPB reserve, hosting upland breeding birds - golden plovers, dunlins, great skuas, hen harriers. South Walls, once a tidal island, is now joined by a permanent causeway built in the late nineteenth century. The two together form a single landmass.

The Old Man of Hoy is the island's icon - a 137-metre stack of Old Red Sandstone standing offshore on the west coast, narrow and tall as a cathedral spire. It is young, geologically speaking. A painting from 1817 shows it as a much wider feature with a flat head and two stout legs straddling a sea arch, like Frankenstein's monster. Within a few decades one of those legs collapsed and only the slender half we know today survived. It is being eroded as we watch. Climbers first scaled it in 1966. The following year a live BBC outside broadcast of a second ascent drew around 15 million viewers and is widely credited with launching the British appetite for outdoor adventure broadcasting. The hike to view it is six miles round trip from Rackwick - clear path, signposted, increasingly steep toward the cliff edge. It is worth every step.

Hoy and Mainland together enclose Scapa Flow, the vast natural anchorage that has been one of the most strategically important pieces of water in the world for over a century. The Royal Navy based its Grand Fleet here in both world wars. In 1919, after the Armistice, the interned German High Seas Fleet was scuttled by its own crews here - 52 warships sent to the bottom of the Flow on the orders of Admiral von Reuter, the largest mass scuttling in naval history. Many of the wrecks were raised in the 1920s by the salvage firm Cox and Danks, working out of Lyness on the Hoy side. Others remain on the seabed, dived today by sport divers who pay quiet respect to the sailors lost on both sides. Lyness Royal Naval Cemetery holds 445 service personnel from the two wars, including casualties from HMS Royal Oak, torpedoed in Scapa Flow on 14 October 1939 with the loss of 835 lives.

Midway up the island road, near the Water of Hoy, there is a small grave. Betty Corrigall was a young woman who lived here in the 1770s, became pregnant by a sailor who promptly disappeared to sea, and took her own life when she could see no other way. Because suicide was considered a sin, she could not be buried in consecrated ground. She was buried instead on the open moor, at the boundary between two parishes - the kind of in-between place reserved in older Scotland for the dead the church would not claim. Her grave was rediscovered by accident in 1933. Today a simple white headstone marks the spot, and visitors leave flowers. There is a quiet kindness in that, two and a half centuries late.

You need wheels to get around Hoy - or strong legs. The ferries land at Lyness in the south (car ferry from Houton on Mainland, about 45 minutes) and Moaness in the north (foot-passenger ferry from Stromness, 20 minutes). A community bus connects the settlements two or three times a day. Cycling works well until the weather turns. Walking is the best way to see the cliffs and the moors, but bring waterproofs and accept that the views will probably arrive between squalls. There is no bar on the island and no mobile phone signal anywhere from any UK carrier as of 2024. Bring your own bottle. Send a postcard from the Post Office near Moaness. The whole experience is the point.