While we were on Orkney we wanted to visit Wideford Hill Chambered Cairn, it took a bit of finding and when we did find a signpost it pointed up to what was a very stoney and bumpy twisty turny track for what seemed like ages, I feared for our new car! Eventually we reached a wee car park and the signpost there said the cairn was a half mile walk from there. Hmmm, it wasn’t. It might have been half a mile as the crow flies but as we didn’t have wings that was no help to us! It must have been at least two miles on a very dry springy peaty, but at times stoney track, up hill and down dale and all at a slant! I was very impressed that our octogenarian friend managed it all so well – so was she! It was a beautiful day though, it was just a bit worrying that we never seemed to be reaching our destination, but as you can see from the photo below the view was fine.

Below is the information board. Click to enlarge it if you need to.

As you can see there’s a metal cover protecting the tomb, it has to be pushed back to gain entrance. Originally, when this tomb was built over 5,000 years ago the entrance would have been at ground level and you would probably have had to crawl through it.

Then there’s a metal ladder leading down to the floor of the cairn/tomb. Getting over the edge was a bit scary for me as the gap seemed quite big, but Jack just stepped over onto it, I made sure I had something to hang onto until my feet were firmly on a rung!

It’s really a very small chambered tomb, the middle of it anyway, there are three side chambers which are bigger. We took a torch with us and I crawled halfway into one, but I wouldn’t go right in, too scary with all those tons of stone above you! But the bones that used to be in the chambers are long gone, it had been robbed by the time it was excavated in the 1800s. Jack didn’t go in either. There is a torch available in a wee cupboard outside the cairn, if you haven’t brought your own.

On the walk back to the car I took more photos of the surrounding scenery, below is a stitch of three of them. The water you can see is a branch of the North Sea called the Bay of Firth.