Here is the small, picturesque island capital, Kirkwall, with its ruins of the old Bishop's Palace and its magnificent St Magnus Cathedral. By pure chance we witnessed a local custom involving a girl who was engaged to be married. According to a travel agent down the street, the bride-to-be was being bound in a cellophane sheet with tape before her "friends" applied black shoe polish to her face. The ritual is called a "blackening". A male counterpart is often publicly stripped before the ritual.