Hoy is one of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. With an area of 55 square miles, it is the second largest of the Orkney Islands after the Mainland. The dramatic coastline of Hoy is what usually greets visitors travelling to the Orkney Islands by ferry from the Scottish mainland. It has extremes of many kinds: some of the highest cliffs in the UK at St John's Head; the impressive and famous sea stack, the Old Man of Hoy; some of the most northerly surviving natural woodland in the British Isles; the remote possibility that Arctic Char survive in Heldale Water and the most northerly Martello Towers, which were built to defend the area during the Napoleonic War, but were never used in combat. The highest point in Orkney, Ward Hill, is found on Hoy.
