Orkney & Shetland

Orkney and Shetland sit off the north coast of the Scottish mainland, closer to Bergen than to London. The hills here are modest by Highland standards — nothing reaches 500m — but the context could not be more different. They rise straight out of the Atlantic and the North Sea, treeless and windswept, with weather that arrives from every direction and almost nothing to break it. The highest point in the Northern Isles is Ward Hill on Hoy (481m) in Orkney; Shetland's highest is Ronas Hill (450m), a red-granite dome on the north Mainland whose summit carries arctic-alpine fellfield vegetation found nowhere else in Britain at such a low altitude — the latitude and the wind do the work that height does further south.

This is walking for people who care more about wildness than about summits. Hoy, the most mountainous of the Orkney islands, has the Old Man of Hoy — the 137m sea stack that is one of the most famous rock features in Britain — reached by a superb cliff-top walk from Rackwick. Shetland's hills are scattered across a long, fractured archipelago from Fair Isle in the south to Unst in the north, where Saxa Vord looks out over Muckle Flugga and the most northerly point in Britain. The coast is the real draw: vast seabird colonies at Hermaness, Noss and Sumburgh Head, with puffins, gannets and great skuas at close range through the summer.

Getting here takes commitment. NorthLink ferries sail overnight from Aberdeen to Kirkwall and Lerwick, and from Scrabster near Thurso to Stromness for Orkney; Loganair flies from the mainland to both. Once there, inter-island ferries and flights connect the smaller islands. June and July bring the "simmer dim" — the near-perpetual twilight of high-latitude summer, when it never really gets dark and you can walk the hills close to midnight.