South Ronaldsay travel guide

The main settlement is the picturesque little village of St Margaret’s Hope on the north coast. It is said to be named after Margaret, Maid of Norway, who died near here in 1290 at the age of seven while on her way to marry Prince Edward, later Edward II of England. She had already been proclaimed Queen of Scotland, and her premature death was a major factor in the long Wars of Independence with England. The word ‘hope’ comes from the Old Norse word hjop meaning bay.

Before visiting the tomb you can handle the skulls and other artefacts at the small ‘museum’ in the family home, which actually means their front porch. Then you walk for about five or 10 minutes through a field to visit a burnt mound, a kind of Bronze Age kitchen, where Ronald Simison will regail you with insider information about the excavation process, before walking out along the cliff edge to the spectacularly sited tomb which you must enter by lying on a trolley and pulling yourself in using an overhead rope. It is particularly eerie being here because there is generally no-one else around, and as you haul yourself into the tomb, with the sound of the North Sea crashing into the cliffs nearby, you wonder to yourself how those buried here met their fate. There is also a lovely, but generally wild and windy, walk back along the cliffs, via a different route, to the car park.