Heading from Kirkwall (St. Magnus cathedral just visible) to Westray - just before the hail-storm which (luckly) was the only weather which fell on us during the trip - but it was bloody cold!

While there I made some note which were turned into a Six Sentences post:
Westray wildlife reactions to a backfiring B33

On the Earl Sigurd it apparently requires half a dozen orange boiler-suited crewmen to make the bike secure - two straps and two chocks - for the ninety minute inter-island crossing from Kirkwall to Rapness;  not rough but had we stayed outside the hail would have been painful.

Westray – population six hundred – typical Orcadian landscape; gently undulating skyline, rough-squared in yellow and green, smudged clouds around the edges of a gigantic sky from which showers fell all around but not once on us, all day.

Several long straights from ten-mile end to end, more dog-legs heading sideways to the farmsteads on the edges – it’s easy to assume the view must compensate for the hard work, but is that really so?

Morse code dotted woollen messages were strung along the wire at the edges of the fields and I wondered what they might say about our at times very noisy progress.   Wondered whether the lurching panic of the lapwings would have made the headlines, or did the fat kisses of the sixty or so sky-sweeping starlings make the louder claim?   Would the cattle, fudge-coloured and agitated, lumbering wild-eyed to their feet, have the wit to pass the word along, and was it really the black-stockinged sheep with dirty bums who had the final, censoring word?

Monday sunrise in Stromness

Prediction prompt : 'post', 'shield' and 'immoral'

A forge-like image created for 100 Orkney Days of Summer and this week's post on Phil Ambler's 'Friday Prediction'

The blacksmith's wife [part 34]

Gabriel’s ever-fluctuating sense of filiality returned him to accusative.

‘Your callous immorality shocks me,’ he complained, days after he’d willingly posted his limp and green-shit-leaking brother through the side-slats of the dead-dog cart while I shielded him by offering soup to its malodorous driver.

My own concerns were several:   I was with child to a man I’d wed most willingly but now wondered if I should have second thoughts; the Earl was like to demand both letters and retribution for my alleged releasing of Mathias, and now approaching with a needing-shod stallion was the speedwell-eyed youth I’d once lain with.

The blacksmith's wife [part 33]

Post his immoral interlude with the tavern-doxy, how would Gabriel now view my past philanderings?   Given that he’d also seen me taken by his brother, he surely couldn’t now complain?

The boy was beautiful, which was why I’d wanted him.  Finger to my lips I directed him to the meadow behind the forge, trusting that the meadowsweet would shield us.  

Led the horse to Gabriel, smiled sweet and said ‘No hurry.’

But I was mistook to think that all was fair, that because there was no danger of foisting onto Gabriel a bastard brat, he would not mind.

He did.