SOUTH OF THE ULTIMA THULE
Travels in Scotland and the Orkney Islands
Emily Hiestand

Dedicated to Frances Emily (Watkins) Hiestand (1921-2008)
First published by Beacon Press,1989; revised 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance | Reviews

On ancient Roman maps, the Orkney Islands lie just south of the land the Romans called the ultima thule, “the end of the world.” This remote archipelago is a place my Mum wanted to travel, where a birder like herself might see the Fulmar and Arctic Skua.

As a young man in his early twenties, my father traveled greatly — to Iceland in preparation for WWII, and then on to Normandy, wading ashore shortly after the invasion of Utah Red Beach in June 1944. His wartime tour of Europe continued into Luxembourg for the Battle of the Bulge, and into Germany during the crossing of the Rhine. For my father, travel was bound up with war, with the losses of war, and ever after those formative travels, he generally preferred to stay at home. His preference increased during a legal career that sent him on many domestic trips, travels that were, he said, glamorous only in the minds of his children. In these minds — young, schooled in respect — the opinions of our elders had weight, but my glamorous view of travel prevailed, supported by viewings of the sealskin gloves and lap robe that our father had brought back from Iceland for my Mum, and by seeing him disappear with a wave into an elegant Viscount prop jet on his travels for the law.

All during those years, my mother was making a home for our family. To this end, she often tromped into the east Tennessee hills to gather ferns, Columbines, and Lady Slippers which she transplanted into our garden in Oak Ridge. My mother's work was a rescue mission as the Clinch River was soon to be dammed for the TVA energy grid and the new lake would drown whole forests. At the cocktail parties that our folks had during the fifties, their guests made affectionately teasing remarks about my mother's “weed garden,” and as far as I could tell, she was the only person in town who valued wildflowers. She often took me along on her field trips, and we ate sandwiches on a big rock or log, before we commenced the delicate work of digging up forest flowers with their roots. 

We also went walking in the Smoky Mountains, near Gatlinburg, and over the pass at Newfound Gap, where Clingman's Dome shimmered to the south. At the Cades Cove gristmill, my mother bought a cornmeal that came in cloth sacks and made a very sweet cornbread. After several trips in and out of the gristmill house, my brothers and I pieced together how the great wheels connected: how the paddle–wheel in the stream transferred motion to the horizontal stone slabs that creaked over the fat corn kernels. The gray stone mill was shaded by black locust and tulip trees, and there was a constant rushing sound of water and winds. Watching the wind, water, leaves, and wheel in a perpetual motion that could not be traced to a cord or plug, it seemed to me that this was something alive. 

In the Smokies, we also visited craft shops where mountain people sold willow–twig baskets, homespun cloth, and cotton coverlets named Young Man's Fancy and Blooming Leaf. Once, a mountain blacksmith explained to us that “red hot” was not the hottest fire, and brought the tip of a “white-hot” poker close enough to our noses to give us a thrill. The mountain people were friendly to us, but we were — in their words — “fotched up,” which meant outsiders. From the insiders came The Cas Walker Hour, a country music show on local television: the twangy accents, straw hats, and the breakneck bluegrass on the show were like nothing in Oak Ridge, our hometown, which was populated by scientists imported to the hills to distill uranium and conduct nuclear research. For years, it did not occur to me to wonder where the mountaineers had come from; they seemed to have been in Tennessee as long as there had been coves, hollows, and hills.  

But, of course, like every American group, they first came from somewhere else: these distinctive people had brought their fondness for splendid, isolated mountains, their genius for ballads and storytelling, their recipes for clear, grain whisky from the glens of Scotland. Maps in history books show the Scots–Irish pioneers streaming first from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland in the early seventeenth century, and then sweeping from Ulster to America in the eighteenth century, and finally flowing from Philadelphia and Charleston into the Smoky Mountains.  

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By the time she was in her fifties, it was clear that my mother would love to travel to places like Kyoto, Florence, and Provence, and that my father was not especially keen to do so. In devotion to my mother, he would travel with her to beach resorts where the food was good and things seemed safe, and, homeopathically, he would go anywhere his Second Infantry buddies convened for their annual reunion, which over time became a healing convergence. The remedy to my parents' divergent ideas about travel readily presented itself, and my mother and I first traveled together to Italy where we thrilled to Etruscan artefacts, the blue grotto in Capri, and in Venice stayed in the Hotel de Bain where the movie version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice had been filmed. Thinking of Aschenbach at his taper lit desk, we walked through tall, quiet rooms, stared out dark shuttered windows. and walked the Lido past rows of striped cabanas.

Several years later, my mother suggested we travel again, this time to Scotland, the land of her Presbyterian faith — and especially to Orkney, a remote archipelago where a birder like herself might see the Fulmar and Arctic Skua. I would have gone anywhere that my mother chose, but I was especially curious to explore the place that had generated the Smoky mountain culture that had given so much joy to my childhood.

Courtesies

As our plane descends into the country, a massive fog bank is opening over a rippling, vivid green landscape. Upon landing, the first sign of Scotland’s hospitality appears immediately in the baggage claim area where carts for taking luggage through customs are being wheeled toward arriving travelers by a team of airport staff. The car rental desk team is equally thoughtful: “My colleague Harry will help you with directions,” the agent says. Harry is fair, freckled, and his accent is musical as he describes our route on the city map. When he gets to the part about crossing the river, he pauses, and says with affection, “And here is the River Clyde. The Clyde,” he repeats, and the word is lingered over, spoken like the name of a favorite child.

Harry’s directions are excellent, but we manage to go off course somewhere in Glasgow Centre. Homing in on our destination in the West End takes three more chats with passersby. A silver–haired gentleman wearing tweeds and carrying a carved wooden cane gives directions in full sentences, with a mid–course pause to recapitulate, and a tip of the hat as he wishes us a good day. A bit further on we must ask again; a young businessman waiting for a bus delivers much the same performance. Finally, driving through a narrow alley, we come upon a young man with bright-red dyed hair leaning against a pub door. His flawless discourse, like that of the more staid citizens, concludes with a tip of the head and a “Good day, ladies.”

We are in civilization! This happy fact will be borne out day after day in Scotland, in encounters with fruit stall vendors, youths and teenagers, Presbyterian elders, farmers, and naturalist guides. What is the secret of a society that cultivates manners and public courtesies so widely?

We have arrived in Glasgow during an actual heat wave — a vanishingly rare weather event for Scotland. Soon enough, raw cold rain will return, but for now, the intense heat delights the Scots, and for their sake, we try to not to be dismayed by the woolens we have packed. This is a country that normally needs to conserve heat as much as possible, and even during this heat wave, the fireplaces in our West End hotel are blazing, the bathroom heat ring is wired permanently to ON, and in restaurants, piping hot food is served on warming trays. 

In Glasgow for two days to collect maps and supplies for our drive through the Highlands to the North Sea ferry for Orkney, we set out to visit the famed Glasgow Botanic Garden. In the shady “Old Oaks'“ section we pause to watch a BBC crew filming a news segment program about the remarkable heatwave. To illustrate the intensity of the heat, they’ve arranged a young model in a swimsuit on a grassy lawn area. The palm houses themselves are suffocating, however, and we can go no further in the interior heat and humidity than the grand entrance room featuring a Victorian marble statue of Eve among a bed of ivy. 

The first hours in a new place, before one has any understanding of it, do provide a kind of uniquely, unmediated impression. In Glasgow, the initial impression is of an unusually serene, genial city. Perhaps it is because Scotland is a small country of a relatively homogeneous people with many shared traditions. Moreover, the Scots have embraced a level of social services that provide a basic security for nearly all citizens: education, health insurance, childcare, long vacations, paid parental leave, and old–age pensions.  

The sweet, decent humanity of the country is accompanied by a history of agricultural acumen, scientific discovery, and practical, engineering genius. This is the year for Glasgow to be the European Capital of Culture, and for the occasion the city has commissioned a giant model of itself as part of an exhibition entitled The City within the City. We find that the exhibit, which is housed in an old transportation station with high brick arches and vaulted ceilings, features many Scottish inventions, among them: James Watt's steam engine, the Singer sewing machine, optical devices, fossil records, and North Sea oil drilling techniques, and one remarkable idea about the Earth itself.

An idea about the Earth

In 1785, speaking at the Royal Society in Edinburgh, Hutton offered his most far-seeing idea… proposing that the Earth should be considered a “superorganism.” This was the first known modern, scientific statement of the idea that the Earth itself is alive.

The works of the Scottish scientist James Hutton, father of modern geology, physician, and farmer are presented in the exhibit in a cubicle made of sedimentary rock. In 1785, speaking at the Royal Society in Edinburgh, Hutton offered his most far-seeing idea: he described the nutrient cycle of the Earth's soil and the cycle of water from oceans to land as analogous to the circulation of blood, and proposed that the Earth should be considered a “superorganism.” This was the first known modern scientific statement of the ancient idea that the Earth itself is alive; some two hundred more years would pass before it would be taken seriously by other scientists. Geophysicist James Lovelock observed that Hutton's “idea of a living Earth was forgotten, or denied, in the intense reductionism of the nineteenth century.”1 

Another part of the exhibit features a collection of scientific instruments from the laboratory of William Thomson, better known as Baron Kelvin (1824-1907). Lord Kelvin, who was British, spent his entire scientific career as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow where he taught several generations of Scottish scientists, advanced the field of mathematical physics, and helped formulate the first and second laws of thermodynamics. He was also very practical, saying: “I never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model of a thing I can understand it.”

In that statement, Lord Kelvin conveys the spirit of many great Scottish inventors, scientists, and engineers who have dedicated themselves to improving life with, to name only a few achievements from a long list: the refrigerator, the modern lawnmower, beta-blocker drugs, penicillin, insulin, and xxxx.


Through the Highlands

As those whose history is better than mine will already know, the seemingly untouched Highlands are profoundly shaped by human history and economics.

The roads that take us north up the eastern coast of Scotland, past Loch Lomond and through Crianlarich and Glencoe, are mountainous and narrow, and they wind through an ever-changing landscape: dark foothills mutate into bucolic, sunlit pastures, which give way to low heath barrens and moors, followed by vivid green gorges. Just past the purple moors of Rannoch, in the mist–birthing Grampian mountains lies Glencoe Pass, a part of the Earth so stunning that we stop on a ridge to join many others who have parked their cars to stand in a cool grey mist and gape. From this lookout, six tall mountain peaks of the Grampians recede in a model of perspective, each receding hill more silvery green than the last, until the farthest faint peak is lost in a fog.

Past Invergarry, our road hugs the shore of Loch Ness with meadows on the east and a bluff on the west, overlooking the long, narrow lake. At this time in August, the Scottish meadows are full of wildflowers, vines, and berry bushes and halfway up the loch, we stop again to take a short walk into a flowery field. Tall thistles and Queen Anne's Lace sway over mustard plants, musk mallows, vetches, and clovers. The air is spicy, and like most meadows, this one is a pharmacopoeia. Here are the raw materials to prevent colds, bind wounds, and sooth bee stings: tall Saint Johnswort, source of anti–inflammatory oil for burns and sprains, and also the drug hypericin, now used in AIDS therapy; Mullein, an antibacterial remedy for ear-aches; Red Clover, a blood purifier; Comfrey, whose bruised leaves can draw splinters from the skin; and Yarrow, the ancient healing poultice for open wounds. 

By late afternoon, we have been driving for hours through moors and meadows that are virtually empty of humans and human artifacts. An occasional small, stonewashed cottage pops up, otherwise sheep are the primary inhabitants. How wonderful, I think, that some human society has protected so much wilderness. What policies and views have allowed this landscape to survive through the whole of the twentieth century? The Scots do bring distinctive, conserving values to their care of the Earth. However, as those whose European history is better than mine will already know, the Highlands are not without human influence; indeed, the seemingly untouched forests and lakes are profoundly shaped by humans and human economics, especially by an episode called the Clearances.   

For centuries, the Highlands were dotted with the villages, houses, and fields of the Scottish clans: traditional crofters, Gaelic speakers, and famous warriors. Then, throughout the nineteenth century, the clans and their traditional ways of life in the Highlands were decimated in a series of battles. Although only a handful of the Highlanders participated in the Jacobite rebellion, after the battle of Culloden was lost in 1746, all Highlanders suffered. They were forbidden to carry arms, to wear their traditional dress, to play the bagpipes, or speak their native languages, and the chieftain leaders were stripped of their hereditary jurisdictions. In addition to their Scots–Gaelic language, the clans had been held together by a hierarchy with a code of warrior allegiance to the chieftain laird. In this system, chieftains leased land at nominal rents, taking in return some crops from their constituents, but above all, warrior service.2   

Once the lairds could no longer call regiments into battle, they found themselves leasing land but receiving nothing of equivalent value in return. Gradually, they began to envision themselves, not as leaders of their people, but as landlords who needed paying tenants rather than cash poor, loyal soldiers. By the late eighteenth century, the clan system was crumbling. The chieftains and their heirs had largely migrated to southern cities where they needed money to conduct urban lives. The solution to their dilemma, and the final unraveling of the clans, came in the form of the hardy, new Cheviot sheep. 

It had become more lucrative to lease the Highlands to southern sheep grazers (who could pay in cash) than to subsistence crofters. The chieftains ceased to renew their kinsmen’s leases, and the eviction of the clans people from their homes was underway. Even so, the Highlanders did not protest; they were a people who revered tradition and maintained respect for the lairds even as they were being abandoned by them. 

The final unraveling of the Highland clans, came in the form of the hardy, new Cheviot sheep. It had become more lucrative to lease the Highlands to southern sheep grazers, who could pay in cash, than to subsistence crofters.

That sheep were the proximate cause of the Highlanders undoing must have been an especially bewildering detail. Until this time, the Highland sheep, scarce and thin, were a blessed animal, often named as lambs and carried inside on cold nights. But word of the clearances had come to Highland clans via a seer who traveled through the villages calling “Mo thruaighe ort a thir, tha'n caoraich mhor a' teachd!” Woe to thee, oh land, the Great Sheep is coming! In a report prepared for the Society for the Improvement of British Wool, Mr. John Maismyth describes the Cheviot sheep as so uniformly bred that “a flock of some hundred ewes may be found, almost any two of which might pass for twin-sisters.”3 To secure reliable, hearty profits, ancient Highland villages were burned and whole communities evicted with few if any schemes for alternate shelter, food, or livelihood. The most “benign” of the landowners suggested to the farmers that they migrate to coastal areas and become a fishing people. 

Most painful are stories of families who lived entire winters in the lee of a gravestone; many others emigrated unwillingly to the New World. Those who remained were the subjects of intense anglicizing: by 1773, when James Boswell took Samuel Johnson on a tour of Scotland, the distinctive sounds of the Highlands were fading. Said Johnson, “(T)heir peculiarities wear away fast; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves.”4  Today, save for imports into standard English (among them the words bog and inch), Scots–Gaelic is a relic tongue, spoken only on some of the western islands, and the vast, gorgeous Highland acreage is owned by a handful of absentee landlords, and secondarily by the Nature Conservancy Council and the National Trust for Scotland. Much of the land is designated as National Park Direction Area, which prevents “undesirable landscape alterations.”  

Judging from the ecological health and beauty of the Highlands, one might say that the brutal clearances episode was beneficial (if unintentionally) for the land itself, much like the bubonic plague outbreaks that reduced human population in Europe by nearly sixty percent, and allowed depleted soils, forests, and creatures to recover over the next century. 5  Human presence, especially in large numbers, can certainly create conditions that test the capacity and integrity of ecosystems. 6 But are there advantages that our species contributes to the rest of nature, or do we nearly always, inevitably, diminish its well-being?


Silvery light

Past the Highlands, on the north coast of the Grampian peninsula, we reach a small fishing village that, since 1962, has been the site of an intentional community known as Findhorn. It is a project that is, among other things, exploring and testing sustainable ways for human to live on the Earth. At seven in the evening, as we pull onto the crunchy gravel and sand driveway of an inn near the Findhorn community, there are many hours left of a clear, silvery light that will last deep into the night.

The inn is a handsome villa originally built by the Glenlivet family of whisky distillers. Nestled in a hollow on seven acres of estuarial beach and moors, it has tall windows with views of the sea and the silver, astringent light that reflects off the bay and a wide sky. Downstairs in the dining room, young Dutch contemplatives from the Findhorn community serve us a mushroom soup, encourage us to have a polarity massage, and to join in an evening meditation. In the morning, we take a trip to the famous gardens of Findhorn, first to the community’s vegetable fields (said to have grown cabbages 4ft. in diameter!) and then through the village itself which is full of pocket gardens, small pools with waterlilies, and trellises of flowering vines over shops and houses. Earlier this year, when these gardens were being planted, the world was still inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Findhorn poster from that time declares “Humankind is breaking new ground.” We don’t know it yet, but as we’ve been admiring Findhorn's flowers and explorations, an army has invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War has begun.


North to Orkney across the Pentland Firth

At flood tide, waters race through the Pentland Firth at nine knots. In a hard wind and slanting rain, our crossing is rough. Unfazed, my mother happily identifies Skuas and Shags through her field glasses.

For the final stretch of our journey north, we’ll take a two-hour car ferry across the Pentland Firth from the port of Scrabster on the northernmost tip of mainland Scotland. As we arrive at the ferry dock, we find some thirty other Orkney–bound travelers sitting in vehicles bristling with wicker creels, fishing rods, kayaks, and tents. One sedan also holds three Brittany spaniels aligned in a sleepy row along the back seat. We’re all waiting for one of the P&O ferries: a line of seven ships named for saints, among them St. Ola, St. Ninian, St. Rognvald and St. Magnus — all household words in the islands to the north.

Only eight miles separate Orkney from Caithness, but at flood tide water races through the Pentland Firth at nine knots. In a hard wind and slanting rain, our crossing is rough. While my mother happily identifies Skuas and Shags through her field glasses, I must stagger to the top deck to ward off seasickness. Keeping my eyes fixed on the miles of massive cliffs as the ferry tracks along the western coastline of Hoy island, is steadying and also provides a study of the “old red” sandstone palisades, which rise a thousand feet high in places. Weathered into fantastic geos, gloups, arches, and sea–stacks, the striated formations are topped with dripping vegetation, and home to Herring gulls, fulmars, and puffins. Now and then, sun splits the heavy clouds, illuminates a section of the sandstone face and casts a frail rainbow over the cliffs. The handsomest results of this ceaseless activity the rock arches that spring like rough Arc de Triomphs from the cliff; and the sea–stacks, each one the lingering leg of an eroded arch. Past Hoy, the ferry turns east into the calmer, protected inland sea of Scapa Flow, then docks at the port of Stromness on Orkney’s largest island, known as Mainland.

Islands of the wild boar people

The 70 skerries and islands that make up the Orkney archipelago lie at 59 degrees north, the same latitude as Fond du Lac in Saskatchewan and Kuskokwin Bay in Alaska, closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. 

While remote, the northern point of the Caithness peninsula is still Scotland proper. The Orkney archipelago feels like another world. We drive from the port to our hotel in the town of Kirkwall through a treeless landscape with wide plains and gentle hills. Farmhouses are widely dispersed on the sparse terrain. With no imposing hills, no forests, and only a few villages to act as a break, a strong south–westerly wind is always blowing, howling, or whistling over the island. The 70 skerries and islands that make up the archipelago lie at 59 degrees north, the same latitude as Fond du Lac in Saskatchewan and Kuskokwin Bay in Alaska, closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. At the time of our visit, sixteen of the island were inhabited; of these, Mainland island makes up nearly one–third of the total land area of the chain.

Gale winds blow on Orkney for twenty–four days a year on average, and the combination of caustic salt and wind is so potent that it is considered an eccentricity to attempt to grow a tree on Orkney. Planted in the lee of a house or barn, a sapling will begin to grow, but as it grows taller than the protective structure, the trunk bends in the wind, eventually keeling over nearly ninety degrees. The southeastern prong of Mainland is articulated by a thin neck of land, an isthmus with two bays on either side of a narrow land bridge. This strand corresponds with the crossing point of two geological rifts: the North Scapa and Brims–Risa faults. Kirkwall town is nestled on the isthmus along the northern bay, perhaps a half mile from the intersection of the faults. 

On ancient Roman maps, Orkney lies just south of the land the Romans called the ultima thule — the end of the world. 7 Due east is Norway, and Orkney is still awash in vestiges of the sea–faring Norse. They left a distinctive cadence in the Orcadian accent, along with laws for free fishing, unique landholding systems, and faint scratches of walruses and sea–serpents on the tomb walls of Maeshowe. For five hundred years, the people of Orkney spoke the Norn, a now extinct variant of Old Norse. Modern speech on Orkney is English in a Scottish accent layered with Old Norse overtones.  

Edwin Muir, a poet and native of Orkney, recalls that when he was growing up on the farming island of Wyre, “The women could [speak] at a great rate in the soft sing–song lilt of the islands, which has remained unchanged for over a thousand years.... It is a musical inflection, slightly melancholy, but companionable, the voice of people who are accustomed to hours of talking in the long winter evenings… a splendid voice for telling stories.”8 *

Not only the inflection, but almost every ancient place-name in the Orkney islands is Norse, and the names for bays, villages, and rocky ledges is a showcase of the Norse influence. Here is a tiny sampler of typical names: Tammy Tiffy, Scarva Taing, Braebuster Ness, Mirth Hilly, Glebe, Smoogro Skerry, and Skorn. Earlier than the Norse Vikings, Celts and Picts were present on Orkney, and before them, the first human colonists, neolithic farmers who, judging from the beehive tombs they built, came from a Mediterranean territory. Of these southern peoples' settlement in the northern isles of Scotland, archaeologist Gordon Childe wryly comments: “The reasons which might have induced anyone to travel the treacherous roads of the sea from the sunbathed coasts of the south to our fog–enshrouded shores have been the subject of intensive speculation.” 9  

At least part of the answer might be that neolithic Orkney was neither fog–enshrouded nor cold. By 7500 BC, the frigid glacial climate had warmed up and the balmy Boreal phase was underway. Summers in Scotland were warmer, and there was far less rain and wind than at present. Even with good weather, however, it was surely an adventurous group who sailed their lamb and seed–laden boats up the coast from the Mediterranean, coming ashore as far north as Shetland. The warm climate continued, with fluctuations and increasing rain, until about 700 BC when startlingly cooler weather arrived, and a Southern people found themselves stationed in a cold land that had become home. From the beginning, Orcadians have been people who came from somewhere else: immigrants and invaders who have raided, settled, and populated the remote islands, as well as Native American women who came with Orkney husbands returning from working in Hudson Bay.

Appropriately, a good etymological guess is that the name Orkney is a multicultural sound whose first syllable is the Celtic orc for wild boar, and the second is the Old Norse ey, meaning, the islands, plural. Thus, Orkney means something close to islands of the wild boar people.10 Historians speculate that there may have been a neolithic people for whom the orc was the totem animal. It is plausible because, in the prehistoric culture that prevailed in Orkney as elsewhere in Europe, the boar was an important animal, a primary emblem of death and renewal. 


Let your fears go, fly away in the wind

Inside and out, the surfaces of St. Magnus cathedral are polychromed marvels. Building began in 1137 under the watch of Norse chieftains and master masons with names like Rognvald and Kol.

The day after our arrival is Sunday, and we set forth for the famous St. Magnus Cathedral, built on a plateau in Kirkwall, and since the Reformation, a parish of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. My Mum is bringing greetings from her home church to this congregation. Enroute to the cathedral, we stop to ask directions from two young lads and receive this melodic direction: “Kip carrrryin' doone, Leddies, kip carrrrryin' doone.”

Arriving at the cathedral, we admire the flanking sandstone columns of the entrance which lead inward in rows toward a vaulted recess and the door. The surfaces of the cathedral, interior and exterior, are polychromed marvels: red stones from the nearby Head of Holland and yellow-ochre stones ones from the island of Eday — the tones alternately patterned. Building began in 1137 under the watch of Norse chieftains and master masons with names like Rognvald and Kol. 

As we enter the high, narrow nave, the three bells of St. Magnus are sounding over the square. The clappers beat against cast–iron crown staples releasing the same sound that the islanders have heard for five hundred years, ringing in a Norse way known as clocking. Inside, we join worshipers who are wearing tweeds, wool suits, and burnished leather shoes. Oiled rain capes and black umbrellas are neatly arranged over their arms. The scent in the air is of waxed wood, damp wool, and lavender. It is a special Sunday morning: Reverend H.W.M. Cant and the Kirk Session are welcoming their former minister and his wife back to the island. Rev. Whiteford appears to be in his early sixties, tall, with grey hair, his vestments a simple, stately black robe and a dazzling white collar. He speaks English with only a rare glisk and sough from the old regional variation of English called Scots. This is the way it has been from the pulpit since the early seventeenth–century when James I ordered the kirk to conduct services in standard English. 

Even today, no complete Scots Bible is available, but William Lorimer's long-awaited 1983 translation of the New Testament is embraced in households that keep lowland Scots alive as a language of identity. (There must be a story behind the fact that the only voice in standard English in this translation that of the Devil.)13 In the cathedral this morning, listening to Rev. Whiteford’s prayers, I think that the word Christ might never sound better than it does with the rolled rrrrrr of Scots–accented English. When the people of Kirkwall rise to sing Lord for thy tender mercies' sake, Lay not our sins to our charge, their voices fill the chamber in resonant harmonies. In his benediction, Whiteford invokes the fierce, ever-present Orkney winds: “Let your fears go, fly away in the wind,” he says,“Let your fears go, fly away in the wind.”

By her lifelong studies, ecumenical nature, and open mind, my Mum has given her children a moving example of questing and discovery. With that visa, I have admired and learned from several wisdom traditions, and as this morning reminds me, they are layered over language and sounds from my earliest years, which are not lightly shed. After the service, parishioners start to leave the cathedral only to discover that the skies outside have opened in deluge. Most duck back inside, as we do, gathering under the rose window to have conversation and what they really do call “a wee spot of tea” until the storm abates.


Security
The next day is cold and sunny and we make a trip to the Kirkwall Post Office. There, as in the banks, city halls, and other official buildings throughout Scotland, we notice prominent racks holding brochures about family programs, health care services, and old-age pensions. In Scotland, we have a glimpse of a more secure culture than our own. One of the most striking examples appeared as my mother and I wandered up to the main market street to buy scones, fruit, and a local cheese for the next day's field trip. The flagstone streets are full of shoppers and tiny cars that weave slowly through the pedestrians. Women push their babies in prams fitted with clear plastic rain-hoods that can be opened or closed quickly. And on this sunny day we noticed something I’ve never seen elsewhere: dozens of parents have gone into tea shops, shops, or bakeries, and have left their babies in prams on the sidewalks — completely unattended. Clearly, a town that can leave its tenderest members unattended for a time, on its busiest street, has created a kind of collective safety trust to a degree that would be a pipe-dream in most cities.


Whispering at the bird hide

A steel–grey sky is shining as waves of birds arrive in jagged, silhouetted clusters and commence bobbing for food. 

In late afternoon, we arrive at the bird hide of Birsay, a small wooden hut on a preserve called The Loons, where my Mum can start bird watching in earnest. The hide, which sits on the edge of a large marsh favored by wading birds and waterfowl, has horizontal shutters that can be latched open, making the hut into a concealed viewing stand. Inside, sitting on wooden benches under the windows, our elbows on the windowsills, we are cold, damp, and very happy to be so close to the ducks, among them Little Grebes, Wigeons, Mallards, a Goldeneye, a pack of Coots, a flight of Lapwings, and some Whimbrels. Here, my mother is in one of her elements, geared up with lightweight, powerful binoculars, a cozy, waterproof jacket, and decades of birding experience. 

When an Orcadian naturalist and his young son arrive, they and my mother nod to each other silently. Then, after some twenty minutes of polite, hushed bird-watching, my mother whispers to the naturalist: “Pardon me, I wonder if you think the bird to the left of the reeds is a Snouted Scoter or a Mauve–Bellied Thworp?” [I’m making up these names, I can’t catch the actual ones.] The man and his son lean toward her slightly, and reply in whispers, “The pintail feathers suggest the Mauve–Bellied Striped Thworp, but the overall shape looks like a juvenile Grimp.” “Ahh, yes,” my mother replies, “it could be the juvenile.” She pauses, then adds “except perhaps for the tail spread.” “Too spade-shaped for the young Grimp.” chimes in the young boy.    

The child is already a dazzling birder, and both the adults beam on him with affection and pride. For another hour the three of them carry on in a deep, contented silence, punctuated lightly with occasional hushed exchanges. Even in whispers, the Scots accent is a joy. Another day, on Scottish television I come across a program that consists of eight people sitting in a semi–circle speaking what I soon realize is, to me, an entirely unintelligible, unrecognizable language. I have never before heard, in the West, a language whose every syllable is unfamiliar. The group is smiling, conversing with verve and at moments with near-hilarity, but the subtitles on screen indicate that nothing especially funny is being said. Gradually it dawns on me: these are revivalists, people who have learned to speak fluent old Scots–Gaelic, and they are simply overjoyed to be speaking it together. It is a melodic, muscular stream of sound (e.g. Cha chuir, cha chuir, arsa bean an tuathaniach) and after a while, I am smiling too.14

In the time of natural theology

Just as the old–European culture survived longest on the peripheries of Europe, in Orkney it seems to have been possible for a person to weave the scientific and spiritual magisteria together well into modernity.

In the upstairs rooms of the museum in the port town of Stromness there are long wood and glass cases that shelter, among other things: bird's nests arranged in sizes from tiny to huge; eggs of all colors nestled in cotton wool; specimens of spiral and whorled chambered shells; and fossil fish from the Stromness Flags and Sandwick Fish Bed, including the commonest Glyptolepis paudicens, crossopterygians, and placoderms. Around the low cases stand tall vertical glass houses for stuffed birds; there are perhaps a hundred birds in the glass houses, among them a Snow Bunting presented by Miss Macdonald, a brindle–headed Brambling with ginger and black feathers, a Kingfisher, a Corn Crake, a Wigeon, and a black Velvet Scoter with a bill as yellow and red as a circus wagon. 

The museum dates from 1837 when the Orkney Natural History Society was begun “for the two-fold object of investigating the natural history and antiquities of the Country, and stimulating the inhabitants of these Island to the study of the Almighty's works.” It was the time of natural theology, before the division between science and spiritual life grew wider in modern thought. Just as the old–European culture survived longest on the peripheries of Europe, in Orkney it seems to have been possible for a person to hold the scientific and spiritual magisteria together well into modernity. 

Charles Clouston, for example was minister to the parish of Sandwick and the first president of the Orkney Natural History Society, where he was scholar of rocks, meteors, birds, plants, and marine algae. The Stromness Museum cases also hold the vast shell collection of Robert Rendall, a theologian and student of the Mollusca. Rendall arrived on the islands from Glasgow as a seven–year–old, and his memoir gives a sense of what the island was — and still is — for a naturalist:

I came to know the scalies and the curly doddies, the sea pinks, the wild white clover, the seggies in the Crantit meadeows, golden dandylions run to seed, meadowsweet in the gullies of the cliffs at Scapa and Berstane, wiry ‘sodgers’ to slash in mimic battles. Insects, too, of all sorts laid a spell upon me: burnished beetles in the sun, cabbage butterflies in the garden, small blue ones by the roadside ditches, bumble bees in their ceremonial splendour of colour.15      

Stoneworks

Many questions remain about the cairn earthwork and the standing stone formations: What are they? Who made them?  And how?  These are the questions of learned debates, and because the evidence is scanty, there are several interesting proposals.

On our roadmap, Orkney’s Roman antiquities are marked in a bold, san-serif typeface, while the locations of Neolithic and Bronze Age antiquities are marked in calligraphy. We are headed toward three of the places shown in the hand-drawn letters. The central plain of west Mainland island is flat pastureland with swaths of moors and bogs, surrounded by low hills. Almost alone in Orkney, this inland plain is beyond sight of the sea and sound of the swa — the Scots word for the low, prolonged note of waves heard at a distance. It was here that a prehistoric tribe chose to build three large works now called the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, and Maeshowe. All three works date to the late Neolithic era and, like St. Magnus Cathedral, are built of the abundant local stone that has enabled successive peoples to create enduring structures on this island.

The Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar stand within a mile of each other on a causeway between the tidal Loch of Stenness and the freshwater Loch of Harray. The stones in the two circles are enormous monoliths, hewn from somewhere, moved to the site, arranged in a circle, and sunk deep in the ground for stability. Approaching from the east, we see the Stones of Stenness first, close by the road, on flat land. There are four tall, narrow slabs remaining from a 98-foot diameter circle that once contained 12 such megaliths. The remaining stones are about 17 feet high, four feet wide, and four inches thick. They are deeply and irregularly weathered, and flecked with bright mica and healthy lichens. As a plant sensitive to acidic precipitations, lichens are an indicator of the air quality of the prevailing Atlantic winds. 

At the nearby Ring of Brodgar, a mown path curves up around a hillside of purple heather, and the megaliths rise against a deep blue sky. Sixty stones stand in a ring 340-feet in diameter, and fully occupy the hilltop, which overlooks two lakes. There is nothing else in view beyond the vast, open Orkney sky and the rolling, surrounding fields. Archeologists say that signs of erosion suggest that these fifteen foot stones were originally much taller, perhaps twenty feet tall, and that they may have been shaped into rectangles. The stones have now weathered into lean, asymmetrical forms and textured surfaces that recall the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. 

One mile east of the Stones of Stenness we come upon the chambered tomb (or cairn in the local language) called Maeshowe. Seen from the road, it is a large, softly cone-shaped mound, covered in grass, rising on the otherwise flat plain. About 24 feet high and 115 feet around, the mound is visible from everywhere on the plain, suggesting that it was a central focus of the region. Walking towards the mound, we cross a pasture filled with brown cows who push their noses through a wire fence to be petted. It is a sunny day, windy of course, and racing clouds are casting raggedy shadows on the pastures and the mound. 

The entrance to Maeshowe is guarded by an elderly gentleman dressed in a crisp gray uniform. He shows us where to enter a corridor that leads into the inner chamber. Immediately inside, the space is dark, low, and cramped. We are poking along, hunched over, down a narrow passageway, thirty–six feet long and about four feet high. Just 15 feet into the corridor, however, the dank air threatens to trigger my mother’s asthma, and we turn around quickly and make our way back into the fresh air. After a while, when she has recovered, my Mum persuades me to re-enter the passageway with a new group while she rests outside on a bench.

The corridor walls are massive megalith flagstones: slabs about five feet wide and eighteen feet long form the roof, sides and floor of the passageway. A pamphlet describes the construction: the slabs are accurately plumbed and leveled; rebated to fit one another precisely and dressed by hammer stones; some joints are so fine they do not admit the blade of a knife; a slightly obtuse fracture angle has been used to make the lower courses of the oversailing smooth and not stepped. In prehistoric Britain, only Stonehenge compares to the technical achievement of Maeshowe; the cairn inspires archaeological praise for the “assured competence and mastery over building material.” At the end of the corridor, we enter a square, high–ceilinged stone room that contains large burial cells, with surfaces covered with runic inscriptions. 

The guard re-appears in this room with a lamp, and standing before the middle cell, begins to show us a series of animals scratched in the stone. He holds the lamp under the faint drawings, one by one: “The dragon,” he says. “The walrus.” “The serpent.” Then he holds the lamp under the deeply cut runic markings on the tombs and translates them for us: one inscription is a boast by a Viking that his lady, Ingaborg, is the most beautiful in all the land; another says that the inscribers have stolen a magnificent treasure from the tomb; a third that while Earl Harald and some of his men were snowbound in the tomb two of the men lost their wits, which was “a great hindrance to their journey.” Another rune mentions “Jerusalem–farers.” That would be crusaders leaving Orkney for the Holy Land in 1151.  

Standing in the room, with Crusaders and Vikings crashing into the prehistoric centuries, I’m confused about when the mound was made, by whom, and whose runes these are. Maeshowe confused archaeologists too. First, the Viking runes led them to think, for some years after the 1861 excavation, that the tomb itself was Norse. In time, they discovered that the cairn dates to about 2,700 BC, that it had existed for about four thousand years when the Norse Vikings arrived. 17

Summer is the wrong season to see the other sign of the ideas embodied in this tumulus mound. In late December, on the day of the winter solstice, the sun shines down the long entrance passage, turning the corridor stones a bright gold color, and briefly illuminating the inner chamber. The funerary architecture of Maeshowe is so much like the kinds built on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean that most scholars agree that these are works by people who came from the south, a people familiar with burial rites and the techniques of tomb–building. Beyond these basics, many questions remain about the cairn and standing stone earthworks: What are they? Who made them? And how? These are the questions of learned debates, and because the evidence is scanty, there are various interesting proposals.

The same mid–winter sun that enters the cairn bisects the circle of Brodgar, and some archaeologists propose that the standing stones are computing–devices to predict eclipses and perform other astronomical calculations. Others believe that they are primarily ceremonial centers. Archaeo-mythologist Marija Gimbutas suggests that rituals of regeneration took place at Brodgar and Stenness through “energetic ring dances” of a matriarchal society. Euan MacKie thinks the rings and cairns were ceremonial centers of a patriarchal theocracy. Graham and Anna Ritchie agree that the works indicate social cohesion, mathematical skills, and a grasp of the principles of solar and lunar cycles, but wonder how a non–literate society could make astronomical recordings. 

Some argue that the complexity and difficulty of the engineering indicate a stratified society; others counter that two or three farmer–hunters, in the seasons of leisure, could have easily quarried, transported and installed the monoliths. Yet others recall that in traditional societies neighbors come together to co–operate in large projects with ritual purposes (canoes in the Trobriands, lodges on the Pacific Coast).18  Some scholars doubt that we can ever know anything conclusive about late Neolithic beliefs. We do not have to decide between astronomy and ritual, however, to know that these stone works put us in touch with deep time.

Once outside again I see that my mother has climbed to the top of the Maeshowe mound, and is waving at me to join her. From the top, we have an expansive view of a world stripped of ordinary vegetation, wide open, and wind-swept, as elemental a landscape as I’ve ever seen. In this world of grey flagstones, grey seals, grey fences, grey stone buildings, and grey skies over a grey sea, how do the people of Orkney respond? Not by intruding, but by melding their material culture into the grey surround. Over the course of the day, we see three splashes of vivid human color: one purple door in a grey farmhouse facade; a hunter–green painted gate in a grey stone wall; and one pink house by the bay in St. Margaret's Hope. These departures from the greyscale are rare and prominent events.

Skara Brae

This Neolithic settlement close to the sea, sunk into the earth to protect against the cold and wind, is the oldest prehistoric site in Europe — older than the pyramids of Egypt, older than Stonehenge.

A possible clue about the builders of these moving stoneworks lies midway up the western coast of Mainland on the small Bay of Skaill. Here, in 1850, a storm blew the sand dunes away and uncovered ten skillfully constructed, interconnected homes made of thin slabs of unmortared flagstone. This Neolithic settlement close to the sea, sunk into the earth to protect against the cold and wind, is the oldest prehistoric site in Europe, older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids of Egypt. It is an affecting cluster of homes for a kinship group who lived here for some six hundred and fifty years, from about 3100 BC to 2450 BC. These dates are the late Neolithic era, a transitional time whose artifacts are at once primitive and familiar.  

Since the storm, a lush green grass has overgrown the tops of the excavated mounds. We join a circle of visitors in bright anoraks and Wellingtons around the rim of one living space, looking down on a hearth stone slab, stone bed chambers, a series of recesses that served as cupboards, sideboards, closets, and a small watertight tank where, it is surmised, the group kept fresh shellfish. Because the bones of red deer, wild boar, sheep, and cattle are found in abundance in the excavation, it’s likely the roofs were made of animal skins.

By the time these pastoralists, farmers, hunters, and fishers made this settlement, the Boreal climate had given way to the Atlantic phase, a more erratic but still warm period. The calm fjords were full of fish. The people of Skara Brae already grew a primitive form of barley; they had a tiny kind of cattle, and sheep that must have been the unique seaweed–eating sheep that continue to live on the northernmost Orkney island. “An intelligent people,” concludes the National Trust guide.

As my mother and the guide wander through the excavated rooms, I am once again confused about how to link peoples to works. It turns out that everyone is. Maeshowe is carbon–dated to 2700 BC and Stenness to about 2356 BC.  The people of Skara Brae (3100-2450 BC) are contemporaries of the cairn/tomb builders, but are not definitively the builders themselves. Part of the mystery may lie in that fact that the Skara Brae people lived at a turbulent time that coincides with the very end of the Old European goddess culture, evidence of which goes back as far as 80,000 BC. 

For at least forty thousand years, prehistoric Europe had been inhabited by people who predated the invasions of warlike Indo–European tribes during the fourth millennia BC. The culture originated in the Mediterranean and its rituals centered around a female divinity who embodied the cycles of the earth and appeared in the form of birds, boars, and deer — in the north, especially as deer. The northern most tribes were luckier than their contemporaries in other parts of Europe. They arrived on Orkney about 4000 BC, about the time that other parts of Europe were starting to be overrun by Indo–Europeans with their domesticated horses, daggers, bows and arrows, their bigger, stronger bodies, and their sky god. 

In the face of the Indo–European invasions, the Old European culture essentially collapsed. Save for piecemeal pockets, it survived intact only on the fringes of Europe, and only for a few thousand years: in Minoan Crete until about 1500 BC, and perhaps in Orkney until the arrival of the Picts and Celts. The stoneworks may have been made by tribes with slightly more sophisticated building skills than the tribe at Skara Brae, peoples who shared the same worldview, driven by invaders from the mainland. It is commonly said that nothing else of the culture that made these dwellings, rings, and mounds survives.


A home in Suleskerry   

However, some days later, we pay a visit to a nineteenth–century farmstead in Kirbuster in Birsay parish where some echoes of the Neolithic life in Skara Brae still seem present. The structure is a typical long–house of a subsistence life that, like that of the Skara Brae people, combined farming, fishing, and hunting. A massive whalebone forms the overhead lintel of the garden gate. The largest room has a central stone hearth with a smoke–hole in the ceiling slightly off center from the hearth so rains will not put out the fire. There are short beds in recesses on the walls, cupboards and sideboards of stone. There is a small stone recess near the floor where geese nest and a place for calves to huddle just beyond the hearth. 

Moreover, the worldview of the European goddess culture seems to have lingered, if tenuously, in spite of widespread efforts during the 16th and 17th centuries to suppress pagan culture. In Sir Walter Scott's novel The Pirate, the sibyl Norna is based on an elderly pagan woman who Scott found living in Stromness town. This woman made protective charms for whalers and was thought to be able to cause the sea to swallow thieves. 19   

But it is not surprising that a worldview of one hundred thousand years duration should continue to inform early modern and modern Western society. Most obviously, the lifegiving aspect of the old European goddess remains in Christianity as Mary and, in Scotland and Ireland, as Brigit, the patron saint of childbirth, celebrated by special cakes holy wells, and corn sheaf dolls.21  Beyond such absorptions, images and rituals of the pagan culture occur in daily life in unassuming ways. Into the nineteenth century, the custom in Orkney was to become engaged at the Rings of Stennis and Brodgar, which local people called the Temple of the Moon and the Temple of the Sun. 22 The majestic, enduring standing stones certainly still look like an ideal place to plight a troth!

Pagan traditions also survive in modern Orkney in households where weddings are set for days when the moon is waxing and the tides flowing. Goddess emblems are seen on cast-iron house signs with deer or trees hovering over the numerals. And the worldview survives in a story particular to Orkney. Seals in this part of the world come in two categories: the common seal, which Orcadians call the tang fish, and the Selkie folk, the large seals who have the power to assume human form. Stories of Selkie folk can be found in children's books, in sea–songs, and in the works of modern literary masters. In all forms, the stories come from a time when, as the Netsilik Eskimo poet Nalungiaq writes: “a person could become an animal, and an animal could become a person if she wanted to.”23


Afternoon tea

Home is a fluid place. Each day at four o'clock in Scotland, I could easily be an expatriate.

By rights, tea would have been the first and frequent subject of this story, for it is the daylong companion of the Scottish day, and each inn where we stay, however modest, stocks its rooms with supplies for what the Scots call brew-ups. In every inn, we find an electric pot for boiling water, a nice ceramic pot for brewing, China cups, small tea–creamers, and a raft of teas, along with honey, fresh milk, and lemons. This is a delight and astonishment, for very rarely, if ever, is there such attention to tea in American hotels. Home is a fluid place: each day at four o'clock, I could easily be an expatriate. 

One cloudy afternoon around two o’clock my Mum and I are poking up the rocky coastline from Black Craig north to Brough Head; this western end of the island has a cascade of bays, headlands, caves, and the invasions of ocean into the land called geos. We wind slowly north toward the Brough of Birsay, stopping to walk Marwick Head. The wide plateau at the summit of the cliff tilts toward the sea, perpetually wet and glistening with cold water pools that dot depressions and fissures in the rock. As ever, a wind is blowing in steadily from the sea. 

We’re here to visit the home of the largest, most spectacular seabird colony on Mainland; some thirty–five thousand Guillemots, ten–thousand Kittiwakes, as well as Fulmars and Razorbills who favor the eroded flagstone ledges for nesting and the abundance of shoaling fish for eating. The Guillemots (who are clumsy on land) huddle along the rock cliff. I have never before or after seen as many birds in one place at one time. For my Mum, this seabird colony is a high moment of birdwatching. For me, her joy in the arctic birds goes on my life list. We admire the activities of the massive colony for a hour and would stay longer, but the weather has grown stormier.

As we drive slowly away from Marwick Head, it is nearing four o'clock in the afternoon, tea time, and sure enough, parked just off the road on the top of a cliff overlooking the tidal flats, we come upon a small caravan camper. Its wide double door is open so we have a glimpse inside: an older Scottish couple is sitting at a folding table, taking afternoon tea and biscuits. She is wearing a print dress and a cozy cardigan. there is an electric kettle on the table, and a plate of something on the table. This is Scottish teatime and domesticity being blithely carried on in a storm, in a cold wind, near the edge of a cliff. Respect!

•

Among the oldest artifacts of Orkney are Neolithic pots that have impressions of primitive, four–rowed form of bere, a variety of barley that the ancient farmers grew for making beremeal. Some bere grain is still grown on Orkney and marketed. After days of strong tea, heart–stopping sweets called cluttie dumplings, and irresistible chips served with everything, we are pining for a green salad. At the organic market in Kirkwall, we find ginger and orange teas, lavender-scented soaps, and if not salads, a lunch of fresh vegetables and grain. And there, my mother discovers a flour made from bere. A sack of beremeal strikes her as the perfect souvenir gift for many friends at home. As all agricultural produce must be declared at U.S. Customs, her inventory will provide a bit of drama during our re-entry.

At the Orkney Agricultural Society’s annual show

The annual celebration of farm life and farmers is the Academy Awards, the Oscars, of agriculture in this archipelago.

By good fortune we are in Orkney during the Agricultural Society's 105th Annual Show and for the next six weeks, on one island after another, Orcadians will be plunged into their annual round of harvest rituals. The smaller shows have already been held, and in the papers we read this headline news: the Supreme Beef Cattle Championship changed hands at the East Mainland Show, Jim Baillie's steer bowing to the champion animal reared by J.M. Lennie of Tankerness. One afternoon, we drive to Bignold Park outside Kirkwall where the Mainland show is just getting underway.

As the poster promises, there is a carriage driving competition, a musical dressage, and a turnout of vintage vehicles. But the real excitement and attraction are the animals, vegetables, flowers, and an incredible number of baked goods and sewn items. Tall, gold trophies are lined up for dozens of awards in every category. To name only a few in the animal group: there are awards for: Best Black Polled Cow, Best One-Year-old Horned or Colored Heifer, Steer Calves calved after 31st January, Best Leicester ram, gimmer and ewe; and Light-legged and Heavy Legged Horses. (I would also give an Award for the Best Award Title to the “Special Prize for the Best Pen of Three Fat Lambs.”)

Past the animal pens, we enter the fairground stalls — a sea of tables displaying flowers, vegetables, things preserved in jars, and things baked and knit. As the entries and awards pile up they are a paean to farming, expertise, and place. Prizes here are given for Cut Flowers and Pot Plants (meaning African Marigolds and Busy Lizzies). In the latter category, “Vase of Candytuft” was won by Mrs. J. Pirie of Comely Toab. There are prizewinning Beets, Broad Beans, and Golden Garden Turnips. There is a massive Fruit category, in which Miss Mabel Eunson received the most points, winning in Gooseberries, Blackberries, and Redcurrants.

At other stalls, there are winning Oatcakes (thick and thin), Bere Bannocks, Drop Scones, and Victoria Sandwich (top decorated). Tea Cosy was won by Miss Elsa Work. Young children have won awards in these areas: Wild Flowers (pressed, named, mounted); Buttonhole; Writing (envelope addressed to the show secretary); Local Shells; and Nature Diary kept for one month.

This annual celebration of farm life and farmers is the Academy Awards, the Oscars of agriculture in this archipelago — and for me, it is high on the list of vaut le voyage experiences.

Bog trotting

Years ago in a newspaper, I saw the photograph of an Iron Age man dug up from a peat bog in Denmark — his features, flesh and hair intact, the small leather cap on his head perfectly preserved. Here on Orkney I've now several times seen someone pick up a small, hard fibrous cake of peat and toss it on a fire in the lobby of an inn or a bank. Nineteenth century postcards in Kirkwall shops show women struggling home with great straw baskets laden with peat bricks. And everywhere, in the town streets and through the countryside, there is a sweet, distinctive smell of burning peat. Wrapped daily in its smoke and scent I realize that, I am not entirely sure what peat is.   

One day we take a walk with Michael Hartley to his peat fields in Evie — on the way passing a pond with a family of Mute Swans. These peat fields came as part of the bargain when Michael and his wife Jenny bought a small farm called Inner Urrigar. Their farm has electric baseboards, but the Hartleys' peat stove is stoked throughout the year to keep down the heating bill. The mixture of old and new fuels in the Orkneys is a commonplace, most dramatically pictured where peat fields are adjacent to the recent stands of mighty wind turbines. By this time in late summer, all but the very preoccupied have harvested their supply of winter peat, dried the bricks, and stacked them up high alongside their houses — where they look almost exactly like cords of wood piled up neatly next to New England houses. Michael and Jenny brought their dried peats home three weeks ago.

Their field, like all the other peat fields in Orkney, is a deep, black mire with a beautiful top coat of heathers and other plants, the moor-like surface interrupted at intervals by long trenches from which peat bricks have been harvested. Although this is blanket mire — a type drier than the bog peat of Ireland — the crusty surface is springy and porous, and in places gives way to squelchy, saturated veins. Walking the field, one can suddenly step in a watery puddle. Of his lifelong bog enquiry, Sir Harry Godwin, emeritus professor of botany at Cambridge, once commented that it was “a delightful involvement with what might be called bog–trotting, although heaven knows, there can be few natural communities less adapted to sustain trotting than those of the squelchy rain-fed mires.”27 As dryly as possible, Sir Harry also recalls how, as a young man just beginning his studies, he was present when two great peatbog authorities, Knud Jessen and Hugo Osvald, while debating a bog classification point (soligenous vs. topogenous) in situ, in the rain, slowly sank up to their knees in the soft bogland.

With a friend, Michael harvests a year's worth of peat at a time, working from early to mid–summer during a run of warm and sunny days. He likes the work, cutting into the earth until it is too wet to cut, no sounds save the wind, the tools, and spare work talk. Using a tusker, the men cut off the top layer of dwarf shrubs, heathers, and grasses in long strips — like sod — and set it aside. Later, when the peat has been removed, they carefully replace this top layer of vegetation over the harvested base, now some ten feet below the old surface level. This practice spares the landscape from bearing gashes like West Virginia and Ohio strip–mined hillsides, and as the lower level widens with the years, the strips of vegetation meld together until their borders disappear. The result is a carpet of continuous plants, although it undergoes startling drops in altitude here and there. Most common in the surface tapestry are dwarf shrubs of heather, then heath, lichens, tussocks of purple moor grass, Bogbeans, Cow Parsleys and Sundews, and Sphagnum moss.

The plant tapestry saved, Michael and his friend slice into the peat in a strip about twelve inches wide. They continue down the trench, essentially taking a long slice off the exposed edge, cutting down about ten to fifteen feet and carving large brick shaped pieces of peat off the strip. The deeper they cut, the wetter the earth becomes, and at some depth the peat becomes a slurry. As Seamus Heaney has it:  

“Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.” 28  

Even the topmost layer of blanket peat is somewhat wet, and all the fresh–cut bricks must be set out evenly to dry for several weeks. As they dry, the peats harden and lighten, and in a few weeks they can be loaded up in a truck and driven home. When we pass scattered remnants of some drying peat that another harvester has left by his trench, Michael snorts at the sloppiness: not only were the peats laid out to dry in random disarray, by now they have hardened into unusable sizes and shapes. 

The ability of peat to slowly enfold materials into itself is what makes this substance accumulate. When conditions are right — poorly drained soil and a wet, cold climate — vegetation becomes waterlogged and sinks to the bottom of pools, or decays on the surface of rain–fed mires. With a wet climate and a mean annual temperature of about forty five degrees, Orkney is an ideal niche for rain-fed, blanket peat. Over hundreds of years, the decaying plants have accumulated into thick deposits, the bottom layers growing ever more greatly compressed, and finally carbonized — a process of time and pressure similar to the one that yields diamonds. 

Michael's peat field has been forming for 3,500 years. That was well after the first human colonists arrived, and during the onset of the new colder, wetter climate. We can know these things because peat is an acidic archive. Bone is quickly dissolved, but proteins — like leather, flesh, wood, wool — are preserved, and vegetable material can be analyzed and pollen-dated. The peat calendar of the Orkney Islands tells the story of when these islands were forested, when the glaciers melted, and when the seas rose.  

Walking across the moors back to Michael's Land Rover, the only sound other than our voices is a curlew. Like oil, peat requires vast tracts of formation time, but unlike oil it is a quasi-renewable fuel. I have heard that peat–burning pollutes the air, and ask Michael what he thinks. “People have done this for centuries,” he says, “and in a way in which the countryside and its wildlife have not suffered. I would be inclined to say that the burning of peat presents little threat to the environment, when compared to coal and oils. The only threat to the peatlands comes from commercial firms using machinery which claws out the heart of the hillsides leaving an ugly scar, and the use of peat in horticulture. But ordinary cutting by hand does not pose any problems.”   

All the while that we squish in boots along the crusty surface, the wind and waves are steadily blowing and crashing: two of the most reliable energies in nature are constantly hurling themselves at the island. Where are the wind- and tidal–energy stations? When I ask Michael, he leads us to see several towering wind turbines located high above sea level on Burghar Hill. Here, we are standing on one of the windiest spots in Britain. The turbines, which have a sleek Art Deco look, are an experiment by the Wind Energy Group Consortium and the Department of Energy. Although some islanders fret about a future in which their landscape sprouts a forest of wind turbines, the experiment seems to be working; the largest of these structures, built in 1985, supplies one thousand homes, producing three megawatts of electricity. 

Meanwhile just north of Orkney, the sea is being drilled for oil. The Orcadian reports that a new oil field has been found (to the west of the Scapa field which supplies Orkney's Flotta terminal) and is being drilled by the semi–submersible rig, Treasure Searcher. Another newspaper article reports that Orcadians have grown uneasy about the transporting of nuclear materials through their waters. Here on a tiny North Sea island are most of the elements of the energy predicament of the human world at large: a plausible, but minute, energy source that was sufficient only for a smaller population with more modest energy demands; toxic, non–renewable fossil fuels that bring profit to a few while threatening the planet itself; and slow, early experiments with the energies of wind, sun, and tides. [Update: On recent energy advances in the Orkney Islands]

Scottish news

Like much of the world, I am thinking about energy more than usual this summer and fall because of the Persian Gulf conflict, which has continued throughout our travels in Scotland. It is an apt time to be in the proverbial land of thrift, and near the North Sea oil drilling stations. Many nights we find a television and watch a Scottish news station, often in a hotel lounge or pub. Troop deployments are shown, pictures of British warships and pictures of American destroyers and airborne divisions setting off into the Gulf. Scottish reporters interview the young from both countries going off to war. 

The Scottish soldiers are reflective and many have tears in their eyes. Their faces and voices convey their awareness of mortality, a sense of call to duty, and a longing to return home soon. American pilots, leaning against their fighter jets have a different tone, saying things like: “We'll bomb the hell out of Baghdad,” and “Yeah, sure I'm excited. Nothing more exciting than the fear of combat. An exciting fear.” The swagger might be mostly to convince themselves, or an expectation in their units. But when the footage of these soldiers appears, or the President flickers across Scottish television cruising Kennebunkport Bay in his guzzling cigarette boat, I want to be a citizen of, not some other country, but some other, possible America. 

Camera obscura in Edinburgh

The great city’s projected image floats in the dark room like a pale planet, or a soundless dream of itself.

When at last we must leave Orkney and head south toward Edinburgh, we are keen to spend time in the famous city. But within hours, both of us, who live in standardly polluted American cities, have burning eyes and raspy throats. The weeks on Orkney have quietly accustomed us to the pristine air from the Atlantic as well as to open stretches of land and time. We struggle uphill in Edinburgh, past buses spewing exhaust, to the see the legendary camera obscura installed in the Outlook Tower.  

This camera obscura is operated from within a small dark room by a museum guide holding a long black rod. When she opens the camera shutter, a 360-degree picture of the outside world is cast onto a large, white, concave and circular pan or dish. We stand around the dish alongside a family of elegant Italian travelers, the men and women in dark, formal clothes, their children in lacy dresses, black patent–leather shoes, and tiny, tailored suits. The great city’s projected image floats in the dark room like a pale planet, or a soundless dream of itself. With her long rod, the guide points out city features on the image: the Water of Leith river, John Knox's house, the King's Stables, and the Queen Street Gardens. 

And then she shows us a trick. She places a piece of plain white paper over the image of the city. When she then lifts the paper, the man walking in that part of the image is lifted up off the city block and onto her paper; he strolls above the sidewalk all by himself, high over the cars and buildings. Then, she sets him down again on the sidewalk, and he glides off the paper. The children squeal at this quintessential image of lightness, of a flying carpet made with lenses and mirrors. Next, the guide picks up a city bus, which streams over her paper like an airship, and then she lifts one of the grand red brick buildings of the University from its ancient foundation and lets it hang weightlessly over the Earth. 

At Customs

My mother and I go about the city for another day, sometimes with handkerchiefs over our noses against the exhausts, until we realize that we must lift ourselves out of the city and into the cool foothills of the Trossachs just north of Glasgow. There, we spend several days walking along streams in mossy emerald forests, and then it is time to return to our homes in the U.S.

At Logan Airport in Boston where we land, I’m wondering how things will go at Customs with my Mum’s souvenirs of prehistoric beremeal. The Custom agent is friendly but he is not sure how to categorize the grain, and calls in a Senior Supervisor to consult, who then calls in another colleague. The uniformed men of Customs and my mother are soon huddled in a discussion, during which they pass around the soft, lumpish meal sacks, handling them carefully like show-and-tell items in a school class. The Customs’ team looks concerned, but such diplomatic situations are an area where my mother needs no help. By the time I join the edge of the group, she is reading aloud the recipe for bere bannocks printed on the back of the sack, and the officials are now focused on trying to decide if these will taste more like waffles or pancakes. 

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Glossary  

crofter a tenant, rather than an owner, of a land holding in the seven Crofting Counties 
bairn  baby, child, heir
bannock  cake, like barleycake
cinno   (c hard) cannot
fae   from 
handshouse  gloves
humeen, huming  twilight
ken  knows
peedie  little
selkie  seal
swa  the low prolonged note of waves heard at a distance

Bibliography

Bailey, Patrick Orkney, David & Charles, London, 1985.
Berry, R.J. The Natural History of Orkney , Collins, Grafton Street, London. 
Black, G.F. County Folklore , vol. III, Examples of Printed Folk–Lore Concerning The Orkney & Shetland Islands, David Nutt, London, 1903. 
Brown, George Mackay, A Time To Keep and Other Stories ,  The Vanguard Press, New York, 1983.
Childe, V. Gordon  The Prehistory of Scotland , Paul, Trench, Trubrer & Co., Hertford, England, 1935.
Gimbutas, Marija The Language of the Goddess , Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989.
Godwin, Sir Harry FRS, The Archives of the Peat Bogs , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1981.
Hawkes, Jacquetta A Land , Beacon Press, 1991.
Heaney, Seamus, Door Into the Dark , Faber & Faber Ltd., London, 1969.
Levi, Peter, ed. Johnson's Journal to the Western Isles of Scotland , and Boswells' Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides , (London and New York, 1984). 
Lorimer, W.L. (trans.),New Testament in Scots  (Southside, 1983).
Lovelock, James The Ages of Gaia, A Biography of Our Living Earth ,  Commonwealth Fund Book Program, ed. Lewis Thomas, M.D.; W.W. Norton & Company, New York
McCrum, Robert; Cran, William; MacNeil, Robert;  The Story of English , Penguin Books, New York, 1987.  
Merchant, Carolyn The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution , Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980.  
Muir, Edwin  An Autobiography ,  William Sloane Associates, Inc. New York, 1954.
Muir, Edwin, Collected Poems , Oxford University Press, 1965,  New York.
Prebble, John The Highland Clearances , Secker & Warburg, London, 1963.
Rendall, Robert  Orkney Shore , Kirkwall:  Kirkwall press, 1960. 

Notes

[1]  James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, A Biography of Our Living Earth ,  Commonwealth Fund Book Program, ed. Lewis Thomas, M.D.; W.W. Norton & Company, New York, p.10.

[2]   John Prebble, The Highland Clearances , Secker & Warburg, London, 1963.  The historical information in this section is drawn from general reading, but especially from John Prebble's thorough account. 

[3]  John Prebble, The Highland Clearances , Secker & Warburg, London, 1963.  p. 31-32. 

[4] combined edition of Johnson's Journal to the Western Isles of Scotland , and Boswells' Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides , edited by Peter Levi (London and New York, 1984).  quoted in The Story of English , Robert McCrum, William Cran, Robert MacNeil, Penguin Books, New York, 1987.  My knowledge of Scots imports into English comes from The Story of English , which includes an account of the relationship of Scots and English.  

[5]  See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution , Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980.  

Not only population increase, but inhumane practices preceding the outbreak bubonic plague were the root cause of the poor condition of the European soils. Heavy taxation unraveled the medieval economy and ecosystem: because peasants were unable to reinvest in their land or to plow and properly manure, the soils became exhausted. Marginal soils were cultivated; crop yields and nutritional values decreased, and there was not enough land to ward off famine in bad years. Between 1300-1350 the bubonic plague hit the already malnourished populations very hard. 1450 is the low point of the population. By 1550, the lands, forests and soils were recovered.

[6]   Values will be challenged as we seek a new balance with a changed Earth. If our species enjoyed an effortless equilibrium with our surrounds, both pristine landscapes and decent societies would be common enough, and if sound habitation was less elusive, we would not be tempted to try to wrest it at any cost. Sadly, the clearances cannot be dismissed as a bit of historical barbary. It has recently been proposed that a small, wealthy human population — achieved by draconian means — could be a solution to human overpopulation and stressing of the Earth. Garrett Hardin's “lifeboat ethics” is a triage approach to overpopulation that calls for rich countries to disallow immigration, to eschew medical, food and economic aid to poor countries, to become isolated, relatively comfortable lifeboats, leaving the rest of the world to drown. Like the clearances episode, lifeboat ethics reminds us that in times of extremis, many moral compasses will spin. Even so, one can hope that Hardin's proposal, like the views of biocentrist thinkers, is a stimulus toward decency. Conventional humanists have often pegged biocentric views — in Earth First literature and Deep Ecology philosophy, for instance — as misanthropic. Yet paradoxically, a shift from anthropocentrist to biocentrist values — putting the Earth first, identifying with the living planet — will likely sustain the envelope of human life.   

See Garrett Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival , New York, Viking, 1972, and Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” BioScience , 24 (October 1974):  561-68.  See also Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb , New York, Ballantine, 1968 and D. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth , New York, New American Library, 1974.  

[7]  This map feature must date from at least 330 BC, when a Greek explorer, Pytheas of Marseilles, circumnavigated Orkney and said that he had seen the edge of the world.  See R.J. Berry, The Natural History of Orkney , Collins, Grafton Street, London, 1985, p. 18. 

[8]  Edwin Muir,  An Autobiography, William Sloane Associates, Inc. New York, 1954, p. 62. Muir grew up on a Wyre Island farm, and his Autobiography is a remarkable account of late nineteenth–century rural Orkney.

[9]  V. Gordon Childe,  The Prehistory of Scotland , Paul, Trench, Trubrer & Co., Hertford, England, 1935. p. 59

[10]  Patrick Bailey, Orkney , David & Charles, London, 1985, pg. 16.

[11]  Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess , Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989, pgs. 196 - 197

[12]  R.J. Berry, The Natural History of Orkney , Collins, Grafton Street, London, 1985, pg. 36.  See also Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land , Beacon Press, 1991.  Her geological history of Great Britain is wonderful.

[13]  W.L. Lorimer (trans.):  New Testament in Scots  (Southside, 1983).  Also W.W. Smith's New Testament   (1901).  For a clear account of the encounter between standard English and Scots, see The Story of English , Robert McCrum, William Cran, Robert MacNeil, Penguin Books, New York, 1987.

[15]   Robert Rendall, Orkney Shore , Kirkwall:  Kirkwall press, 1960.  quoted in R.J. Berry, The Natural History of Orkney , Collins, Grafton Street, London, 1985, p. 204/5. 

[16]  T.S. Elliot, in the Introduction to Edwin Muir's, Collected Poems , Oxford University Press, 1965,  New York.

[17]  Archeological dates and information about Maeshowe are from the site itself, supplemented by data from Patrick Bailey,  Orkney, David & Charles, London and North Pomfret, Vermont, 1985, pps. 208 - 210;  and from R. J. Berry, The Natural  History of Orkney, The New Naturalist Series, William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, Grafton Street, London, 1985, pps. 166-7.

[18]  V. Gordon Childe,  The Prehistory of Scotland , Paul, Trench, Trubrer & Co., Hertford, England, 1935. p. 55

[19]  Lord Teignmouth, Sketches of the Coasts and Islands of Scotland , London, 1836,  vol. i. pp. 286, 287.  reprinted in G.F. Black, County Folklore , vol. III, Examples of Printed Folk–Lore Concerning The Orkney & Shetland Islands , David Nutt, London, 1903. 

[20]  “Trials for Witchcraft, Sorcery and Superstition in Orkney,” printed in Miscellany of the Abbotsford Club, vol. i. pp. 135-142, reprinted in G.F. Black, County Folklore , vol. III, Examples of Printed Folk–Lore Concerning The Orkney & Shetland Islands , David Nutt, London, 1903. 

[21] Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess , Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989,  pg. 110

[22] George Low, A Tour through the Islands of Orkney and Schetland, containing Hints relative to their Ancient, Modern and Natural History .  Collected in 1774.  Kirkwall, 1879.  reprinted in G.F. Black, County Folklore , vol. III, Examples of Printed Folk–Lore Concerning The Orkney & Shetland Islands , David Nutt, London, 1903. 

[23]  Poetry of Nalungiaq, a Netsilik woman, translated from the Netsilik by Knud Rasmussen, English adaptation by Edward Field.  (add complete poem )

[24]  George Mackay Brown, "Sealskin," A Time To Keep and Other Stories ,  The Vanguard Press, New York, 1983, pps. 172-173.

[25]  This account of the selkie story is based on several versions, including one given in W. Traill Dennison “Orkney Folklore.  Sea Myths.”  from papers published in the Scottish Antiquary, vol. v. pp. 171-77, and reprinted in G.F. Black, County Folklore , vol. III, Examples of Printed Folk–Lore Concerning The Orkney & Shetland Islands , David Nutt, London, 1903. 

[26] Edwin Muir, An Autobiography , William Sloane Associates, Inc. New York, 1954, p. 36 

[27]  Sir Harry Godwin, FRS, The Archives of the Peat Bogs , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1981, pg. 1.

[28]   Seamus Heaney, “Bogland,” Door Into the Dark , Faber & Faber Ltd., London, 1969.

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance