Orkney

Patrick Bailey

Patrick Bailey's survey of Orkney, which came up on my screen during a search on travel books, is only travel writing in some sick, sadistic parallel universe where one cannot travel to a foreign country without knowing everything, and I mean everything, there is to know about it.

Wait a minute. That sounds rather like utopia.

If you pick up this book, you will learn about Orkney. You can forget tourist destinations, with the exception of a chapter in the back (which sounds much like most other travel writing). The bulk of the book is taken up with history, geology, the study of place names, population movements, that sort of thing. It's quite an excellent overview, given its brevity (just shy of two hundred fifty pages). Not really for the traveller, but the armchair archaeologist and the person who really wants to get down to the nitty-gritty of the Orkney Islands will really get a kick out of it.