The flight from Reykjavik to Faroe Islands covers a distance of about 500 miles in 1 hour, 15 minutes. Below, the North Atlantic is a silver blue, the kind of blue you’d associate with Google maps. Today there are few wave-inspired white flecks as the ocean is calm. It is a pleasant flight…until the Avroliner RJ100 banks steeply to allow its port wing to kiss Mykinesholmur, the great lighthouse-tipped seacliff that introduces us to the uproarious, tumultuous, unabashed drama that is Foroyar, The Faroes.

Rust-red earth-topped houses squat precariously beneath Ascot-green glacier-scoured mountains. Red-faced women and thick-haired men squat precariously beneath the rust-red earth-topped houses. The rust-red houses are Nordic, the Ascot-green glacier scoured mountains are Himalayan, the thick-haired men are Scandinavian, the red-faced women are Celtic. That is no lie: for here, again according to their DNA, 87% of the men are of Scandinavian extraction and 84% of the women are of Irish/Scottish extraction, that’s 84%. Just as young men today might drop in at the off-licence to pick up a couple of lagers for the match on telly tonight, so the Vikings on their way to skelp the Icelanders and The Faroese dropped in on Scotland and picked up a few women!

The Faroese people are extremely generous; they even loaned Iceland $52m during the economic collapse. Now there’s a financial fable for the future.

I had hired a car and booked a room at the Streym Hotel in Torshavn, which is the capital of the Faroes: indeed it is the smallest capital city in the world with a population of 19,000. I had also arranged to spend a few nights at other hotels in order to visit different locations in this 18-island country. And although The Faroes prides itself on a superb public transport network with buses and ferries providing the most remarkable joined-up service for both locals and tourists, having a hire car allowed me the benefit of being able to stop at the hundreds of viewpoints to take hundreds of photographs.

My view from my Torshavn hotel was a 100% improvement on that in Iceland. No bland, nondescript, commercial district emptiness here, the view took in a stretch of unruffled water that carried the eye to the island of Nolsoy. And with that view came daffodil sunrises, white seamists, computer-grey fogbanks, the hollow gold of the sun setting on a green island, a variety of weathers and wonders.

After a few days in Torshavn, I moved camp to the Northern Isles and the town of Klaksvik on the island of Bordoy. Klaksvik hugs the two shores at the head of the Nordoyarvik fjord and has about 5,000 inhabitants. The town accounts for 30% of the country’s total fish exports. In recent years the Faroese have been building a series of underground and undersea tunnels to connect the 18 islands. These tunnels can be several miles long and as they are not lined – they just have bare rock – and have minimal lighting, they do take a bit of getting used to, especially the single lane tunnels!

These northern islands are lofty places and the country’s most vertiginous peaks are to be found here; 10 of them are over 800m high. Now you will remember that earlier I told you about just how determined I was to visit the great Shetland seacliff Da Kame…now I shall tell you about the great Faroese seacliff called Enniberg which I needed for my collection. You’ll remember of course that I collect seacliffs in the way small boys collect cards with footballers on them.

Enniberg is a sovereign among seacliffs. It features a ridgeless sheer vertical wall of rock that rises from the ocean to a height of 754m. It is believed to be the highest promontory in the world. I had to visit and photograph Enniberg.

I booked a trip on the Alpha Pilot which would take me around the island of Vidoy to its north-east coast where the seacliffs lined up in order of height: high, higher, highest and further until we came to the tip of the island where Enniberg soared to the skies like a Saturn rocket on its way to launch yet another Sky Television satellite!

During a Monday morning rush hour (I passed at least six cars) I drove through two of those scary tunnels to arrive at Hvannasund (Kwannsund) early enough to enjoy the morning sunshine and to realise what a perfectly wonderful place this village was, surrounded by pointy glacier-gouged mountains and nourished by a perfectly calm fjord. The playful laughter and chuckles from the children’s play area painted colourful notes on the morning’s canvas. Ah…this was an idyll. All was tranquil, all was restful, all was serene – it could, quite rightly, be said the place had a very pleasant ambulance.

Until, that is, a bus-load of boisterous secondary school students turned up shouting and cracking jokes and laughing and play-fighting and singing and giggling like nervous chickens auditioning for Strictly. I climbed aboard Alpha Pilot…the students pushed and pulled, bellowed and belched as they too boarded the boat.

We sailed for an hour to Enniberg which as I’ve mentioned is the world’s highest promontory at 754 metres…straight up! The seacliffs leading up to this marvel of the northern islands were marvellous in themselves and riding the choppy waters of the High Atlantic we sailed into and through darkened caves, great arches and magical sea grottoes. We fed the fulmars, woke the Kittiwakes, played with the puffins, guffawed with the guillemots, didn’t go anywhere near the shags…

But as we sailed closer and closer to the hefty, thickset mass of granite that was Enniberg, all we could do was gasp. There it stood, a soaring, towering slab of pure power standing fierce and unyielding against the savagery and might of an obstinate ocean. Oh it was spine-tingling and oh it was hair-raising and oh it was eye-thrilling. So eye-thrilling that even some of the teenagers said ‘Wow!’

It was so rewarding to see such a busy seabird city as well…thousands of birds including fulmar, kittiwakes, guillemots, arctic skua and of course terna, sula, lundi and tjaldur (the Faroese names for Arctic tern, gannet, puffin and oystercatcher – the country’s national bird). By this time I had knew the students well and as we ploughed through the green waters surrounding the headland, we had a good laugh getting wet and sliding around on the slippery deck. They turned out to be a really friendly group of kids. One of the lads offered me part of his packed lunch, a slice of pilot whale meat and blubber, called ‘grind og spik’ in Faroese. It was a thin, circular wafer of fishy, rubbery, black and red meat. You probably know that the Faroese maintain their tradition of hunting whales. Over 900 pilot whales are killed each year for food. There is worldwide objection to this but the Faroese claim they can justify this as they have been harvesting the sea for well over a thousand years: their claim is that they do not have an ‘agriculture’ but an ‘aquaculture’. This is not the time or the place to enter into a debate about whaling. But you can read more about the Faroese attitude to, and methods of whaling and have your say by going to the joint website of the Faroese Ministry of Fisheries & the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; it’s a simple and thus memorable address www.whaling.fo

After the boat trip I remained in Hvannasund for a while just soaking up the atmosphere of this glorious little townland. I did a drawing and took a lot of photos. It was sunny and warm – how I wished others had been with me on this particular sea trip.

And if I say nothing else about this visit to view the majestic Enniberg let me say this; the experience will stay burned in my memory forever. It was a colossal seacliff – up, up not just dizzying, but frighteningly treacherous! Down, down not just awe-inspiring but devastatingly humbling!

To complete my journey through The Faroes I drove up the twisty, Alpine-like road to Gjogv (jek-v), The Faroes Islands’ very own chocolate box village complete with a duck pond, a tar-painted wooden church overlooking the harbour and a dainty, shallow stream winding its trickly way through a scattering of colourful, jewellery box houses. The village has its own small jetty tucked into a cleft in the hillside.

My overnight accommodation in Gjogv (jek-v) was at the turf-roofed Gjaargardur hostel which resembles an overgrown Swiss Chalet.  It was basic but comfortable and next morning, before breakfast, I ran up the long road to the top of the encircling mountains. Hard enough work at the best of times but especially difficult and indeed infuriating as I was being persistently buzzed and bombed by savage packs of oystercatchers. When I say ‘savage’, I suppose I mean only slightly angry, and when I say packs, I really mean there only two or three. But they do squeal a lot!

After breakfast I climbed the western hill to visit the local sea cliffs. Lovable puffins abound on the surrounding cliffs. Their Faroese name is lundi which is where we get our own Lundy Island from.

On the last day of my trek I flew from The Faroes to London Stansted and landed at just after 3pm. I had booked a ticket on the 6.15pm train from London Euston to Oxenholme. Clare would be there to pick me up. I had left three hours for the trip across London. Better safe than sorry, or so I foolishly believed.

There were no trains from Stansted to London that day. A trackside fire was the reason. The airport was in chaos. Thousands of passengers were manhandling their bulky luggage up and down stairs, not knowing where the heck to go and when they got there they were impolitely told they could not travel to London by train.  Many were attempting to climb aboard the London-bound buses. All three of them, even though they were already full. Ah, wasn’t it just so good to return to good old British turmoil, bedlam, unruliness, pandemonium and anarchy!

After a month of prolonged travel; island-hopping in the Shetlands, edging up Norway’s frayed coastline, inching up glaciers in Iceland and creeping along cliff tops in The Faroe islands, I had encountered no difficulty, no fuss and no bother when it came to travel by bus, boat, plane or land rover.

Yet back in the UK I somehow knew that taking the train from Stansted to London would not be as simple as it sounds. It would not be an adventure if the British transport system were to disappoint us and take us where we wanted to go.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I end my Atlantic Arc trek with a poem. On this fascinating trip I had expected to write many poems about the merciless seascapes, the sweeping landscapes, and the thrilling seacliffs of the north Atlantic islands. But all that emerged from the heart-store was a batch of what are essentially love poems…but that’s the gawkiness of art, the oafishness of writing, the ticklishness of poetry…like I said about Shetland, you may set out to look for wildlife but find something other than otters.