The new camera is proving a pleasure to use and the quality of the pics it takes is superb. We had a sunny morning today and decided on a 10-minute drive to Burwick where our attention was caught on this occasion by St Mary's, the parish church of the South Parish. This church was built in 1789, replacing an even earlier church, and is also historically known as the Lady Kirk. The site is said to be where the first Christian missionaries arrived in Orkney.
We wandered, as on many previous occasions, around the graveyard; there's always something new to notice.
This is the church from the rear.
The Loutits of old would, I believe, have belonged to this parish (we're now in the North Parish), yet there are surprisingly few Loutit graves here. In fact, there are surprisingly few Loutits in Orkney, although everyone knows it as an Orkney name.
We do see Graeme Loutit the builder's van going about its business quite often and we often get told "oh, my aunt/granny/or female whatever was a Loutit". My current theory is that Loutits were producers of daughters rather than sons and thus failed to maintaining a good presence of the family name.
Anyway, today we did say hello to a couple of ancestors...
...and also admired the excellent crop of lichen on some of the memorials
The sky was wonderful too and I took this picture of the bay before we walked over to the church (which is just out-of-frame to the right).
We took long-cut on the way home because there was a nice view of Dunnet Head that I wanted to photograph, but once of the main road, there was a hillock blocking sight of Dunnet Head. So I took this photo instead, looking back towards Burwick.
PS After posting this, my 'Visuals Consultant' Paul moaned to me - quite rightly – that since I had spoken about the wonderful lichen, I should have had a close up photo dedicated to that. "Always shoot more picture than you need," he admonished. But I hadn't. So all because of Paul, I had the pleasure of going back to St Mary's to make good the error of my ways (and also learn a bit about close-ups).
So here you are, Paul, lichen up close:
And closer
And from another tombstone
And another up close
Finally, on the way home today, we stopped at Olad's summit, the highpoint on the road back home and a lovely viewpoint, because the sun was shining nicely on the island of Hoy.
