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Poet
Stewart Henderson travels to Orkney to hear about its stunning
archaeology and artistic heritage.
 Despite
the high chance of a bad crossing, there's still only really
one way to travel to the ancient isles of Orkney, and that's
by sea. Like generations of settlers and invaders before,
you'll have to take pot-luck with the elements. That means
braving the 20 miles or so of alternately mild or moody water
that separates Orkney from the un-manicured beauty of Northern
Scotland. But if, like me, you suffer from the swaying swells
of the ocean below, take the advice of local people and look
up.
"The
one thing that people keep referring to here is the sky and
the enormity of it," says writer and Orkney resident,
Tom Muir. "I don't know how small skies are in the rest
of the world but here it's like an arc of the world; you see
ships on the horizon just disappearing into the sky."
Something
about Orkney seems to inspire the artistic take on life, and
it's that enigmatic quality that drew me here, along with
other contemporary writers over the years, like Will Self.
Whether
it's the cornucopia of bird-life, over 300 species, or the
elements which lash and fertilise the land, it's hard to be
prosaic about Orkney.
"There
are a tremendous number of artists, writers and poets in the
island and there always has been," says Tom Muir. "There's
Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater and George Mackay Brown, and it
goes back well before that to the Norse sagas and the tradition
of storytelling."
Evidence
of other activities goes back even further. I went to the
South West part of the mainland, Orphir, to visit a weathered
schoolroom with a sublime view of Scapa Flow. Here a stunning
collection of archaeological finds is on display.
"One
of the great things we've recently come across is a bronze-age
burial site," says Daphne Lorimer, an osteologist at
the Orkney Archaeological Trust. "In it we found the
skeleton of a man who had distortions to the bone you sit
on, which is caused by an injury common among modern hurdlers.
That begs the question, what was he doing hurdling in the
bronze age in North Ronaldsay!"
 Beneath
the vast skies of Orkney nothing seems conclusive: the history
beckons but often doesn't fully reveal itself. George Mackay
Brown once observed of the place that "the layers of
cultures and races are inescapable and unavoidable".
According
to Tom Muir, it's this history which gives the modern islanders
of Orkney a unique feeling of continuity with the past. "People
comment that Orkney is just so incredibly densely covered
in archaeological sites," says Muir, "that if you
scratch the surface, it bleeds archaeology".
Orkney's
ancient sites have intrigued experts and lay people alike
for generations. There's the Ring of Brogdar, an awesome puzzle
of 27 standing stones, and the nearby Skara Brae, the best
preserved Neolithic village in Europe. For Anne Brundle, Assistant
Curator at the Orkney Museum, such sites are ripe for professional
and personal speculation.
"We've
just found a lovely Pictish house in Westray and there are
so many new things like that
being discovered every year that we have to constantly reassess
past cultures and realise that 'it didn't go this way, it
went like that'."
Orkney
gives us heart-heaving beauty, and yet always stays elusive.
It's a bit like the short-eared owl on a distant fence that
we watched through binoculars one late afternoon. It was as
close as I got to what you might call the wisdom and wherefore
of Orkney.
"You
can't really over-romanticise it, and say this is perfect",
says Tom Muir, "but from my point of view, I wouldn't
change it."
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