Walk in Viking footsteps on Scotland's windswept northern isles

As beach houses go, Thorfinn the Mighty's is a cracker. Absolute waterfront. Views for miles. White-sand beaches. Great fishing. Sauna. The tide washes in twice a day to cover the causeway from the mainland, turning the location into a private island.

It's spectacular, or at least it was 1000 years ago. Only its stone foundations remain, partially overgrown by grass, but in its day it was a right royal residence.

Perched on a speck of land called the Brough of Birsay, on the west coast of Scotland's Orkney Islands, this was the power base of Earl Thorfinn. He ruled these islands, as well as nine earldoms on the Scottish mainland and much of Ireland.

Sitting on the grass in one of the former rooms of this seaside palace, I felt a powerful connection to my ancestors. Recently, when a DNA test came back peppered with markers from Scotland and Scandinavia, I discovered I am descended from Vikings.

My mum always suspected her Scottish ancestors were Viking stock as they were Nordic fair, blue-eyed, rumbustious and rather partial to feasting. She was right. Also, she and I always felt thoroughly at home on windswept, northern islands such as these.

I'll never know which individual Vikings I am related to but it's fun to consider that they may include some fantastically named individuals: Eric Bloodaxe, for example, or Harald Fairhair, Helga Bow-bender and Thorfinn Skull-splitter, all of whom feature in ancient Norse sagas. I do hope, however, that I am not related to Sigurd the Stout and Asgeir Audunarson Scatter-brain, who must have been at the back of the queue when the nicknames were handed out.

Whatever my lineage, the Brough of Birsay was the perfect spot to channel my inner Viking.

From the remains of the beach house I looked out over the causeway exposed by the low tide and imagined Thorfinn's clan foraging in the rockpools for seafood, while others kept watch for passing boats and potential attacks.

The house's location is sheltered in the lee of a hill which slopes up to mighty cliffs that face the wild North Atlantic ocean. It would have been relatively calm down here, even on the most cyclonic days ... and, by Thor, Freyja and the other Norse deities, does it get cyclonic here! Apart from a couple of remote skerries, there's no land west of Birsay until Greenland so it gets battered by the full force of winter maelstroms.

On balmy, halcyon summer days such as this, however, it is paradise.

After wandering through the remains of the settlement - including a space that once housed an ingenious sauna heated by beach pebbles - I headed up that slope. As I approached the cliffs, there was a crescendo of shrieks and cries. Orkney is one of the world's most important seabird sanctuaries, with thousands of birds flocking here every spring to mate and to nurture their young.

Arriving on the clifftop was a bit like walking into a garden party in full swing. Everyone was there. Razorbills and kittiwakes hurled themselves off narrow ledges and shot down to skim along the tops of the waves. Puffins flew past sideways, looking wildly out of control and making comical, clumsy landings near their clifftops burrows.

Shag chicks sat on nests like cossetted royal children, fed relentlessly by doting parents. Great skuas patrolled the scene menacingly, looking for food to steal, while gannets did their best kamikaze impressions, diving hundreds of feet straight down and smacking into the waves to catch fish.

Fulmars snuggled up together, appearing slightly aloof as they looked down on the mad antics of the others. On the wing, these are possibly the most majestic of all the Birsay residents. Within minutes of me dangling my feet over the cliff, a young fulmar swooped over my head and hung there on the breeze just a few feet away, as still as a drone. We watched each other until the bird was satisfied I was no threat and it soared away majestically.

Presumably my Viking ancestors witnessed this seabird spectacular every year too, on Orkney and other northern isles, but rather than revering and protecting them as we do today, they may instead have licked their lips and thought "yum, food".

I was here in early July when days are 20 hours long with little more than a nighttime dim when the sun briefly dips below the horizon, so the avian activity was almost constant. But with so many seabird species declining, they need every hour they can get to ensure the next generation is ready for the world.

To get the full seabird skinny, I left the wonders of Birsay and headed south down the coast to even higher cliffs at Yesnaby to meet local wildlife expert Megan Taylor. When not volunteering for nature charities and campaigning for birds, Megan runs Wild Orkney Walks, an award-winning, small-tour company.

There is virtually nothing she doesn't know about Orkney's wildlife but while her knowledge is exemplary, it's her passion that is so intoxicating. She brought the entire landscape to life for me.

Less than 10 minutes after we met we were on our hands and knees on the clifftop peering at a tiny, pink flower called Primula scotica, or the Scottish primrose. It's super rare, found only in a few spots on Orkney and in remote parts of the Scottish mainland. It's remarkable that something so delicate can survive in an environment as severe as these gale-ravaged North Atlantic cliffs. If I hadn't been with Megan I would have barely noticed it, let alone realised its importance and beauty.

As we admired it, a shadow passed over us.

"Oh, there goes a bonxie," said Megan, reaching for her binoculars. "You might know it as a great skua but seabirds have different names up here," she explained. "We call puffins 'tammy norries', fulmars 'mallimacs' and oystercatchers 'skeldros'."

These are mainly old Norse names and yet more hangovers from Orkney's Viking colonisers. Even the name of the cliffs that Megan and I were standing on - Yesnaby - is Norse.

While the Viking history is certainly old it is by no means the oldest on these islands. Several of the standing stones in the fabulous Ring of Brodgar have Viking runes carved on them but they had already been standing there for several thousand years when the Vikings showed up. The Norse folk assumed that if ancient Stone Age people had gone to so much trouble to raise these terrifically heavy objects, they must be pretty important, sacred even. So they adopted them as monuments to their own Norse gods and beliefs.

There are more Viking runes inside the Maeshowe Chambered Cairn burial mound; at least 30 inscriptions, the largest collection in the world. The cairn is Stone Age but was plundered by Vikings several millennia after it was sealed. The graffiti gives visitors a thrilling, direct link with Orkney's past but don't expect anything too sophisticated or lyrical... the slogans are as basic as those we find today in railway sidings and concrete underpasses. "Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women," reads one. "Haermund Hardaxe carved these runes," says another. In today's parlance: "Ingigerth is a babe" and "Haermund woz 'ere."

To celebrate the islands' numerous Norse links, a long-distance walk was established by a local charity in 2017, which coincided with the 900th anniversary of the death of Orkney's patron saint, Magnus the Martyr. He was Thorfinn the Mighty's grandson, Earl of Orkney and the OG Orkney Viking.

The St Magnus Way pilgrimage route winds across the main island - Mainland - with the final short stage on the islet of Egilsay, where our hero was murdered. I didn't have the time to walk the entire route but a fair amount of it is on or near roads, so I drove to certain points and completed shorter, circular walks to tick off various stages.

One of the most picturesque was the south coast section between the Scapa whisky distillery (just south of Orkney's capital, Kirkwall) and the hamlet of Orphir. Most of this stunning 20-kilometre stage hugs the shoreline of the wide bay of Scapa Flow, passing through the heather-strewn bogs of the Hobbister bird reserve.

I took it easy, breaking my journey with an overnight stay at The Foveran, a restaurant with rooms. In the long, sunlit evening I ate delicious Orkney scallops and lemon sole, then strolled down to a small, pebbly cove for a chat with the resident seals.

Back in Kirkwall, I had one last Viking shrine to visit: the mighty St Magnus Cathedral. It's a huge, sandstone monolith, seemingly far too big for this small northern town but evidence of just how important Magnus was, and still is. It was begun by his nephew, Earl Rognvald, in 1137 and is the only church in Scotland to harbour the bones of its original saint.

Saying a final cheerio to Magnus, I walked through the empty evening streets of Kirkwall and arrived at my journey's end: the Storehouse Restaurant with Rooms. I devoured cured sea trout with blackened cucumber and jalapeno ketchup in buttermilk, a vast plate of haddock and chips, and possibly one too many bottles of nutty, tawny Puffin Ale from the west coast Orkney Brewery.

It was a feast fit for a Viking, or at least a modern-day descendant.

The writer flew to the UK at his own expense but in Orkney was a guest of VisitScotland.