22/08/2026
Some Orkney towns were named for the sea's temper. Stromness was named for the current that never rests.
Stromness
STROM-ness
"Headland of the Tidal Stream"
The name is Old Norse, left behind by the Norse earls who ruled Orkney for centuries. Straumr means the strong tidal stream or current; nes means a headland or point. Straumnes — the headland that pushes out into the racing tide. Anyone who has watched the water tear through Hoy Sound, just south of the town, knows how earned that name is. The flood and ebb run fast and hard between the point and the great island of Hoy, and the whole town leans toward it.
Before the Norsemen fixed that name, the sheltered anchorage here was called Hamnavoe, "the haven bay" — the safe water inside the wild water. Both names are true. Stromness grew as a huddle of grey flagstone houses built gable-end to the shore, each with its own slip and pier, so tightly packed along one winding street that the sea comes almost to the doors. In the age of sail it was the last safe harbour before the Atlantic: Hudson's Bay Company ships watered here before the long crossing to Canada, and whaling crews and Arctic expeditions took on Orcadian men who knew cold water.
That is the quiet thread for anyone with Orkney blood. A great many families who left these islands for Canada and beyond passed first through Stromness, filling their casks at the well, taking one last look at the hills of Hoy. The name they carried was Norse, the harbour Norse, the tide Norse — a thousand years of it, still running.
The stream still pulls through the Sound every day, exactly as it did when someone first called this the headland of the tidal stream.
