Orkney Image Library

It'd be more interesting to see some photos of the area before the Oil terminal was constructed. The earliest I have is during construction when the whole area was a sea of mud, calf-deep. The terminal put plenty of money in plenty of people's pockets in those early years and nobody would deny it kept the Orkney economy buoyant, but Flotta ultimately lost out with this eyesore. I remember all the smooth-talk about how the terminal would be planned and landscaped to fit in with the Island's natural beauty. In layman's terms this meant just painting the huge oil drums a specific colour to blend in with the brown-mauve of the heather on Golta (which was turned into an open-air rubbish dump). Pity they then surrounded the site with artificial hills (to bury construction junk), sewed green grass that didn't blend in with the heather at all and planted penned-in copses of trees that were never kept up or thinned out so that after all these years they're still dwarfs. Flotta, and above all Kirkwall, benefitted from the arrival of the terminal in the short term, but it should perhaps stand as a warning not to be too ready to believe company PR claims that their latest Industrial plant will have a 'minimal environmental impact' on the surrounding area.