Rackwick is in Scottish Islands, in the United Kingdom — coordinates 58.8730°, -3.3860°.

Islands · Scottish Islands

Rackwick

Rackwick in Orkney + Shetland, United Kingdom.

Plan your visit

Typical visit: 4 h–12 h

Rackwick is a place of interest in Orkney + Shetland, United Kingdom — drawn from open-data sources for visitor reference. See the linked Wikipedia article for the full description.

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From the Wikipedia article

Rackwick is a small coastal crofting township in the north west of the island of Hoy in Orkney, Scotland. As well as a handful of tourist amenities the township is largely made up of crofts and other small dwellings, however most now form second homes with Rackwick having very few full time residents. In 2016 there were only three dwellings occupied year round. The Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown's poem Rackwick describes the township as "the hidden valley of light" and "Orkney's last enchantment". The name Rackwick may derive from the Old Norse reka-vík, meaning bay of jetsam.

Excerpt from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. See the source article linked in Sources below.

Background

History

The is little evidence of prehistoric activity in Rackwick, while the older farm buildings date from the 18th century. The first known reference to Rackwick was in Lord Sinclair's 1492 rental of Orkney, and the first detailed map dates from 1791. In 1718 the first schoolhouse (now a museum) was opened by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, although this was short lived as the school closed in 1724. In 1879 a new school building was built (now the hostel), closing in 1953 as there were no longer any children left in Rackwick to teach. Rackwick was home in WWII to a light anti-aircraft battery, two search light batteries, and various small ancillary buildings and…

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