Skaill Bay - Orkney Islands

[Skaill Bay, Orkney - June 2018]

Nothing can match the beauty of light and colour that Orkney commands on a sunny day.

The Emperor was lucky to have some nice days on his most recent campaign to the Northern isles. The bay of Skaill is the location of the ancient World Heritage Site, Skara Brae - a Stone Age settlement dating to between 3180 BC and 2500BC. (Dates that would make Roman - and even Egyptian -  heritage blush)

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae 

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The historian Tacitus reminds us that Roman power - at least at one time - extended as far as the Orkney Islands:

"But when you go further north [in Britain] you find a huge and shapeless tract of country [Caledonia], jutting out to form what is actually the most distant coastline and finally tapering into a kind of wedge. These remotest shores were now circumnavigated, for the first time, by a Roman fleet, which thus established the fact that Britain was an island. At the same time it discovered and subjugated the Orkney Islands, hitherto unknown."

[Tacitus, Agricola*, I.iv.]

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*Agricola was a military governor of Britain who campaigned extensively in the North of Britain between c.AD 78 - 84. Although the Romans did not ultimately settle Caledonia, there is little doubt that they explored and campaigned deep into the Northern lands, leaving forts and other physical evidence of campaign.