Today I left natural items aside and concentrated on man made attractions.

The first one on the agenda was Kirbuster Farm museum, a wonderful stone farmhouse or 'firehoose' that had been lived in and added onto for over 500 years. When I arrived I was the only one there so I had the warden to myself, and once I had got my head around her twisty turny accent, we got on quite well. She had that look of all Orkney born locals - ruddy complextion, a downy covering of light hair on the face, ginger touches to the hair and hairy moles. Cultural stereotype #3, but it's true. All Orcadian woman over 40 look like this. But as I say, she was ever so nice, and she was NOT wearing tartan or a tam-o-shantar. She clearly loved her job and I even had her scurrying away to look up answers to some of my questions at one point (i.e 'when did wood become readily available on the island?' - answer, the mid 1800's).

The main draw of Kirbuster is the fireback fire place, and neuk bed. A fireback is basically a fire in the middle of the room as per Scara Brae specifications circa 3000BC, only lent against a low (waist high, couple of feet wide) stone wall - not a hearth as such, just lent against it. The reasoning was that the wall itself heats up like a big stone hot water bottle and helps keep the house warm.

A neuk bed is a box bed built into the stone wall - yes, more echos of Scara Brae. The neuk bed is merely a slightly contemporised version of the neolithic one with straw mattress (hard as rock), cotton mattress on top and a pillow - it had the same nooks in the stone wall for effects, two big upright slabs of stone to seal it off and create the box effect, and you could completely shut yourself off in it with a rug hung over the entrance hole for extra insulation. I mentioned the similarity to Scara Brae to my warden and she very philosophically said 'well uf ei works alrieet, ye mae us wull continue using at'. I liked her honest practicality. When I said it all looked lovely right now but I bet it was hell to live in in the winter she just shrugged as said 'Ay, bet ye jest poot oan anutha jumper an geet oan wi et, doan't ye?'. And she was all for community spirit and sharing and pulling together in the bad times, reckoning Orkney folk still do this today. I tried to explain living in Manchester and she dinnae understand at all. Last murder in Orkney was 20 years ago...

The fire was lit with finest peat, and the little house was filled with sweet smelling smoke because the only place it could escape was a big hole in the middle of the roof, against, as per neolithic building plans. Said hole was open to the elements, so a big round patch beneath it behind the fireback would indeed get wet when it was raining. And thus comes the concept of 'In-by' and 'Out-by' in your firehoose.

Your In-by is the bit facing the fire. Its where the family sit around at night, where all the cooking takes place, etc. Its the nominal kitchen cum livingroom. The Oot-by however is where you keep your most precious beasts, either cow or horse or pigs, tethered to the far wall so they can share some of the warmth of the house - effectively a stable. What do you reckon, does 'in-by' and 'oot-by' just mean 'in bit' and 'out bit'? And 'neuk bed' simply means Nook Bed?

You could easy see this type of house growing organically from the stone aged huts. In another museum house just down the road in Corrigal, the old layout has been even more contemporised so a full inner wall has been added where the fireback was, separating the In-by from the Oot-by and creating the concept of rooms in your hoose and a chimney in the middle (though the hearth is still open with just a hole in the roof above). And in this house, the neuk beds were sealed up and box beds had been made out of wood, just as the one I saw in the Fossil Museum the other day. These carried the spirit of the neuk bed, but had the advantage of being movable, and you can use them to create subdivisions in large open barnlike areas (Corrigal was a converted Viking longhouse) to have cosier spaces and different areas for different things.

The occupants of both houses would have burnt peat, strung meat and fish over the fire to smoke, cooked on griddles suspended over the fire with a hook (and I got brownie points with the warden for not only knowing what a bannock was, but actually have gone into a bakers this morning and asked for two white bannock to go with me tea tonight).

Both houses were truely excellent in creating a feeling that the occupants had just popped out this morning for some milk and would be back later. All the fripperies that the old owners may have had were cluttering every surface - thread and part ground wheat on quern stones, rams horn spoons and whale bone needles, fresh spun sheeps wool in a ball, smoked herring on a string over the fireplace, old newspapers, everything. It was meticulously done.

Not only that, but there were the little touches - the necessary improvisation because of limited materials. For instance, wood was in very short supply because there are no trees on Orkney. This meant anything that could be built of something else was,be that bone or horn or stone or driftwood. Straw chairs for instance, drift wood tables. Beams stolen from awash ships. Gate posts of whale bone.

I ended up burning a couple of hours in both museums just soaking up the atmosphere, then I had a hasty beef and bannock in the car park, and pressed on to Minehowe and The Tomb of Eagles.

Minehowe is a funny sort of place. A windraddled old woman in a portacabin gives you a hard hat and a torch in exchange for £3.50, and then you go down a small dark wet hole to look at a teeny tiny version of Maeshowe...then come up again. No-one has any real clue what it was for, but it's certainly wierd. The Spanish couple behind me were certainly utterly non-plussed. I wonder if neolithic man every built anything just because it would look wierd. Oh yes, and I have a theory that Stone Henge is actually hollow and that's how they carried the rock so easily.

The Tomb of the Eagles is a much more classic tomb. Discovered by a farmer in his field one day, he called up some archaeologists to ask them to excavate it, then waited 18 years for someone to arrive. No-one did so he called up again and they said 'well if no-one turns up in the next xx months, you can do what you like with it'. No-one did, so the farmer taught himself how to excavate by watching someone do a similar site up the road, then uncovered the site himself and discovered a massive amount of bones, split up into chambers, and buried with a large amount of eagle talons. Kudos to the farmer for a good bit of improvisation there.

The animal thing is totemistic says the guides who give you and excellent lecture as you come in. All around the island, various tombs have various different themes e.g. dogs skulls in one tomb, sheep skulls in another. This has an eerie correlation with the present parish nicknames on Orkney, suggesting they may accidentally be perpetuating the tribal names of antiquity.

In the very good tourist centre, they let you have hands on experience of Neolithic tools, i.e. stones. Something you don't get from tv or books is the subtly of these tools. Superficially, it may look like an elongate rock, but when you hold it in your hand it simply feels right in your left rather than your right hand for some reason, and the weighting is just right for it to pound grain. Another large round rock may look like nothing but it for some reason very definately feels good in your two hands together to be used to scrape or roll. And so it is that you go through a whole bunch of ordinary rocks but as soon as you hold them, you know what they are for, its strange but exciting. And then you realise that the polish on them could have been through generations of neolithic people using these implements and handing them down and it becomes more impressive still.

The site itself, once excavated, was covered over with a concrete roof and then grassed over as it had been originally. You get to it via a tiny passage way which you either have to crawl through on your hands and knees, else lie on a skateboard and pull yourself along by a rope and the kids loved this). Either way the tomb itself is quite simplistic, but good fun. Nearby is also the remains of an iron age workshop, with stone tanks full of water and a huge mound of burnt and cracked stone outside of it. Again, going a lot on guesswork but some people say the tank was full of water and heated by hot stones, others that it was used to cook meat. Some say it was hot baths in the style of the Romans. We'll probably never know.

By the end of that tour, it was shutting up time for most attractions and I was all for calling it a day and going home. On the way back though, I got lost in Kirkwall and found myself near the Cathedral which was still open, so I had a quick 15mins in there before getting kicked out. It was ok. It's not Lincoln Catherdral but 7 out of 10, good effort.

Finally, I finished up with a self heating meal at Evie beach and watching the sun go down over Costa Head. If you sit around long enough, you can see the odd seal head popping up out of the water and the ocassional walker on the beach flailing their arms around wildly as they get attacked by midges. I locked myself in my car, but even then the midges coated the windscreen and beat their fists against the glass, glaring at me. I also have to say that my front number plate is unreadable now because it is coated in a thick layer of midge bodies. Ack they'd do the same to us if they could drive a Honda Civic, is the way Iook upon it.

A ferry to Hoy Island tomorrow I hope, weather permitting, to see it's Old Man. I'm not sure the name was intentional but to have a huge long thing sticking vertically out of the sea and calling it an 'Old Man' sounds dubious to me - but perhaps those were more innocent times (then again surely not if the Vikings had anything to do with it)...