Island Paradise: Kitchener Memorial

I'll spare everyone a recitation of the great feats of Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener. He's a major figure in the history of the British Empire, was highly regarded in his time, and is one of few British figures of his day to still enjoy widespread notoriety to this day. Earl Kitchener perished on 5 June 1916 off the west coast of Orkney after the ship conveying him on a diplomatic mission to Russia hit a German mine and sank.

A couple of years ago, I learned of the Kitchener Memorial at Marwick Head on the west coast of the Orkney Mainland. I resolved to go see it! After getting some directions from some construction workers who were working on what I think was a hostel, I piloted my intrepid chariot to go see it. Unfortunately, I only got as far as here. Since it was colossally muddy out, I decided that I'd made the effort, and I extricated the intrepid chariot from the muddy road I'd driven up. I later learned from Gray 1 and Gray 2 that there is, in fact, a path, but I expect that I would have been so hideously caked in mud by the time I'd gotten to the memorial and back that the whole thing would have been a fool's errand. To prove that I'd made the effort, I got a couple of pictures of the tower from a distance...

... and I finished it out with a great picture of the Orkney landscape, stretching out across the Orkney coastline toward the Bay of Skaill. I'd seen Skara Brae back in '04 and didn't feel the need to repeat it, so I drove past Skara Brae and back toward Kirkwall. I passed the Ring of Brodgar (to be discussed later) and Maeshowe, and I'm pretty sure that it was on that particular drive back to my digs that I heard that Olly Murs song from The Songs That Remind You 3. It was the end of a fantastic first full day in Orkney.