From Issue Eight of Hidden Scotland Magazine

Back to Orkney

Jim Richardson on forty years of photographing Orkney.

Words by Hidden Scotland

Printed in Issue Eight of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Spring and Summer 2024.

Orkney, it started like this. Jim Richardson on the islands he has returned to for forty years, and the room of National Geographic editors where it began.

Back to Orkney, photograph by Jim Richardson Back to

Getting There:

Mainland Orkney can be reached by ferry or plane. Ferries depart from various ports on the north coast of mainland Scotland, as well as Aberdeen and Lerwick, arriving in either Stromness, Kirkwall or South Ronaldsay. Loganair flies to Kirkwall from various UK airports.

I was in a room crowded with National Geographic editors showing my first Scotland story. Editor Bill Allen looked over the layouts and said “We don’t have any Orkney in here, do we?” While he flipped through Orkney pictures that hadn’t made the cut (a lobster fisherman pulling pots from the North Sea, a ewe bedding down with her lambs beside the Stones of Stenness) I could see gears turning in his head. “We almost have another story right here.”

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