About Geos, Stacks, and Dangerous Waters

A visit to Duncansby Head

I looked forward to every day on our tours; I knew that Dorothy always had a beautiful place for us to visit, and often I had lined up a great musician to join us as well.

But I especially looked forward to visiting, and giving others a chance to see, the spectacular sights at Duncansby Head, just north of Wick.

The vistas began right where we parked, near the lighthouse. The view was beautiful from the cliffs overlooking the sea.

Behind us was a gentle slope full of flowers that we walked through. Here’s a photo of that field of flowers as it looked on our way back to our minivan. From that point of view, you can see the Orkney Islands in the distance.

As we walked the path, or off the path through the field, we passed some of the locals — sheep and cows as you can see below, and some beautiful foliage including large thistles.

Suddenly, as we walked along the coastal side of the field, we came across a chasm at our feet. This was the first of a number of spectacular formations called geos that we are about to see on this tour, here on the mainland, and in the Orkneys and Shetland.

A geo is cut out by the ferocious sea as it erodes the rock and soil, leaving steep cliffs on both sides.

Below, you can see a view from the end of the Sclaites Geo, looking out toward the sea, and another view from closer to the sea, looking back toward the end of the geo.

Both sides of the cliffs are dotted with bird nests — fulmars, guillemots, kittiwakes and other birds manage to find spots to hatch their eggs, which are of an oval shape that, if they are moved, will roll in a circle instead of rolling off the edge of the cliff. The air is filled with cries of the birds, and the graceful sight of them careening through the geo to bring back food to their nests.

Below you can see another view of the geo, and some of the nests of, I believe, fulmars, that we spotted. At the time, the eggs had hatched and the grey-feathered young ones were getting ready for their life on the sea.

A short ways further along the path brought to the breathtaking sight of the Duncansby stacks. These amazing geological features are formed through endless erosion wearing away the rocks and stranding these formations in the sea.

The two pointed stacks stand apart, as can be seen below on the left. In the photo at right we can see a hole, an archway being cut into a third formation, which will some day become another stack.

The nearby scenery is just beautiful, as you can see below. At left, we are witnessing the geologically slow birth of a new stack.

Not far west of Duncansby Head is the village of John O’ Groats, a popular tourist destination famous for being the northernmost end of the longest possible overland route in Great Britain, from Land’s End in Cornwall, which is at the southwestern tip of the U.K.

John O’ Groats was named for Jan de Groot, a Dutchman who operated a ferry to between the mainland and the Orkneys during the late 1400s. This was shortly after the Orkney Islands were given to Scotland by King Christian I of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as part of the dowry for the marriage of his daughter Margaret to King James III.

De Groot charged 2p for the ferry journey, an amount which eventually became known as a “groat.”

Below is a picture I took of the famous John o’ Groats signpost, which shows that Land’s End is 874 miles away, Orkney only 8 miles away, Shetland 152 miles, Edinburgh 273, and New York all of 3,230 miles from there!

The building on the right is the John o’ Groats House Hotel, which was built in 1875. Part of it is octagonal in honor of the house Jan de Groot is said to have built, the ruins of which are apparently located under a mound of earth near the hotel. De Groot’s house was octagonal because he had eight sons, none of whom could get along with each other. The house had a door in each side and an octagonal table inside. This way, each son could enter his own door and sit at what each could consider the head of the table!

The waterfront at John O’Groats still hosts a ferry to Orkney that takes 40 minutes, though it costs a great deal more than a groat. There are a couple of other ferries as well, from other terminals nearby; the one we took was the one-hour ferry from Gills Bay.

John o’ Groats also has a number of shops, a good bakery/cafe, and a display about the local geology, describing “nomadic boulders,” each the size and weight of a car, which are shunted back and forth along the sea floor by the powerful currents of the Pentland Firth.

The Pentland Firth, pinched between mainland Scotland and the Orkney Islands, connects the waters of the Atlantic on the west with the North Sea to the east. It has some of the fastest currents in the world, and requires exceptional skill for sailors to traverse it. There are wave rifts, colliding tides, and a whirlpool called the Swelkie at one spot. Sailing directions published in 1875 for passing through the Pentland Firth warned that at times, “a sea is raised which cannot be imagined by those who have never experienced it.”

At one point in novelist Neil Gunn’s story The Silver Darlings, his protagonists decide to sail through the Firth from east to west, and as always, Gunn describes their daring efforts vividly.

If you look carefully at my photo below, you can see a wavy line on the surface of the water. This marks where the tides of the Atlantic meet those of the North Sea.

It’s certainly a dangerous passage. I’ll leave you in suspense until next week to see if we survived it!