Upon my word, my journal goes charmingly on at present.… How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skilfull wheelwright turning tops in a turning-loom. There’s fancy! There’s simile! In short, I am at present a genius: in that does my opulence consist, and not in base metal.
― James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763
I wish I could have Boswell’s innocent confidence in the quality of my prose. Today, he would be the world’s most tireless blogger.
Sigurd Hlodvirsson’s mother, a sorceress, responds when he asks her for advice when he’s challenged to fight by the Scottish Jarl Finnleik: “Ek mynda þik hafa lengi upp fætt í ulllaupi mínum, ef ek vissa, at þú myndir eirnart lifa, ok ræðr auðna lífi, en eigi, hvar maðr er kominn; betra er at deyja með sœmð en lifa með skömm.” [“Had I thought you’d live for ever,” she said, “I’d have reared you in my wool-basket.”]
― The Orkneyinga Saga, 1230 AD
Having slept well enough for the conditions, I proceeded to walk across Mainland to Kirkness. This gave me ample time to savour the country, but my camera batteries were low, and I took no photographs on the journey. I was beginning to get a feeling for the farm life of Orkney. The warm North Atlantic current assures that it seldom experiences frost, and equally cools it in summer. The soils are nothing special: the moorlands are pretty much useless for agriculture; on the remaining high ground, the soil is little more than crumbled sandstone; the low ground looks like a clay- rich sandy till, which must get waterlogged in such a wet climate. But five millennia of adding seaweed, manure and crushed shell have made it remarkably fertile. The beef raised here is superb. The poorer land is dotted with sheep, all of a white-faced breed that I didn’t recognize. A farmer told me they were “Lane” [this is what the word sounded like to me, but this was filtered through my still awkward grasp of Orcadian dialect]. He also informed me that there’s brown-wooled breed unique to the island of North Ronaldsay that lives exclusively on seaweed.
The Orcadians don’t seem to be great talkers, but they will chat with a stranger walking by. None prodded me for any information about myself. I was just another “ferry-looper,” a status that made me one in the same with anyone from Caithness to Kathmandu.
With the sky overcast, the hills and fields that had glowed the previous day now took on a picuresque gloom. Most people in the North Atlantic like to paint their houses brightly, to contrast with the grays that dominated the landscape much of the time. But the Orcadians prefer to blend in with the background colours. Almost all their houses are grey stone, but even the stuccoed walls are usually painted gray, dull blue, or off-white.
I walked through the village of Finstown. Refreshments at Baikie’s Store. I wondered why, among all the greys and blues, one house had a bright red door. The tiny hotel is called Pomona Inn, a curious name that recurs now and then. Most place names in Orkney are derived from Norn, the variant of Old Norse that was spoken in the islands until the seventeenth century. But surely “Pomona” is neither Norse nor Celtic. Finstown, however is no mystery. The term “finn” was used in Old Norse to designate the aboriginal inhabitants of Scandinavia, before the arrival of the Indo-European Norse. Classical authors referred to the Fenni of the far north. It was applied, in the Middle Ages, to the people we now know as Sami, or Lapplanders, and this may be whom the Romans meant. Subsequently, the name was transferred to the Suomi, the Finns of Finland. Orkney was settled by the Norse in the ninth century. What happened to the earlier Pictish inhabitants is not known; driven out, exterminated, or absorbed. It’s quite probable that, among the Norse settlers there were Sami, or descendants of Sami, perhaps brought as slaves. They would have been regarded as having special access to the supernatural. The arrival of Christianity would have transformed them into witches and warlocks. The only puzzle is why this particular village would be actually designated as the abode of witches ― “Finstown”. Maybe witchcraft was not always seen in a negative light, and Finstown had a going commercial concern in magic.
Rather than take the main road along the coast, I chose to walk to Kirkwall by the smaller Old Finstown Road, and this provided some excellent views from higher ground. I passed what appeared to be a ghost village. One house was whole and sealed up, two were in ruins and deeply buried in brush and tall grass, and there were some substantial, well-built walls fronting the road. When the village was abandoned, I could not guess. The road ducked south of a high hill that bristled with telecommunication towers, then entered Kirkwall in the general neighbourhood of the hostel where I hoped to bed down for the night. Not that I minded sleeping out of doors again, but I needed a convenient base for exploring the town.
Kirkwell is the largest settlement in Orkney, and in essence the capital of a small nation. The mere 19,000 Orcadians possess everything that goes with nationhood except the political stamp of it. They have a history, immensely long, with five and half thousand years of it preserved in stone structures. Only Egypt can boast a rival pedigree. They have a literature, ranging from a medieval epic (the Orkneyinga Saga) to well-regarded modern novelists. They had their own language, Norn, replaced only in recent times by a dialect of Scots that differs significantly from anything on the mainland. They have an entire mythological universe of their own, with, among other things, the folk hero Assipattle, who defeats the Stour Worm, or World Snake. Kirkwall boasts a fine library and superb public archives, as well as a college hosting academic and scientific institutes that do work of global importance. With a population of less than 9,000, it nevertheless boasts one Britain’s oldest cathedrals, and it is no mean structure. St. Magnus looms over the town without competition from any modern buildings.
Around the cathedral there are old streets of gray slate and sandstone houses and shops. These, as in Stromness, are narrow and paved with the same stone. Further from the centre, there are more modern streets paved with asphalt and boasting the usual bunch of Tescos, parking lots and petrol stations. But even the newly built houses are covered with stucco only a shade paler than the ancient stones.
The effect for the visitor is of being a land, a place which is definitely not England, and not even Scotland, but entirely its own thing.
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