Orkney Weather

For Orkney travel, following is the weather information.

Weather often cool and rainy, sometimes biting winds. Never exactly hot, but can be brilliantly sunny.

What is probably the most striking thing about Orkney weather and living in Orkney is the stark drama of light and darkness. In summer it is never dark. On clear nights the glow of the sun never leaves the north; the sun is just under the horizon; the fires of sunset and dawn intermingle. In winter the lamps are lit at three o’clock. But the midwinter skies are beautiful with moon and stars reflected in the many waters of burn, loch, quarry, rock-pool, ocean. Five or six times a winter the aurora borealis is abroad.

On those long winter nights, there was once a great treasury of lore and legend for the country folk to draw upon; trolls, sea-monsters, seal-men and seal-maidens; and stories of smugglers and pirates and witches. The coming of newspapers, compulsory education, radio, television, the cinema diluted that native culture. But modern Orkney can still show achievements in art and music and literature. A symbol of that perhaps is the new Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, a small beautiful complex of rooms and galleries played on by the shifting harbour gleams. Here, among a permanent collection of works of the St Ives school, are changing exhibitions of artistic work from Orkney and elsewhere, poetry readings, Lectures and film shows.