Customer Reviews

Orkney (Pevensey Island Guides)

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Patrick Bailey's "Orkney" is an excellent travel guide for the Orkney Islands off northeast Scotland. The Orkneys, although long part of Scotland, are also a land apart. In easy to read prose, Bailey describes the unique prehistoric (standing stones) and later Norwegian heritage of these northern isles, along with their more recent history as a principal anchorage of the British Fleet during two world wars and as a port for the North Sea oil industry today. Bailey provides descriptions of each of the major islands, with lots of notes on historical structures, customs, terrain, and weather. The book is richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and diagrams that impart the charm of Orkney.

Travelers to Orkney will wish to consult the internet or other resources for accomodations and flights; otherwise, this book provides an excellent resource for planning a vacation there.
This book is highly recommended to those planning a vacation for northern Scotland who may wish to take the ferry or a flight for the short hop across the Pentland Firth.

Patrick Bailey, Orkney (David and Charles, 1985)

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. *** ½