Get to know Orkney

The Orkney Islands are beautiful, remote and elemental. The Voice Centre is on the mainland of Orkney, looking out over farmland to the cliffs and the sea and the hills of Hoy. It is the perfect place for a workshop retreat.

The landscape, domesticated by farms, is scattered with lochs and wanders down to the rocky bays and sandy beaches that encircle it. Prehistoric time seems present in the stones under one’s feet and is vividly experienced in Stone Age villages and monuments. Bronze Age and Iron Age and Viking ruins feed the imagination of time past.

And yet Orkney life is culturally contemporary and comfortably modern. There’s good shopping opportunity in the two towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, and a variety of excellent eating-out experiences.

Orkney’s weather is unpredictable, swiftly changeable and quite theatrical -  a weather-vane for our human emotional climate and a stimulating inspiration in our daily work.

Orkney brings the senses and the imagination downstage centre against a uniquely primordial backdrop and balances wildness with civilisation.

A dazzling chequer-board of grass and ploughland, the shadow and claret of hills that flow in sweet, unbroken lines.

Eric Linklater, Novelist (Kristin’s father)
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