Orkney: arrivals

ARRIVING

21st May 2017 

Looking towards Eynhallow over the Broch of Gurness

Eynhallow Sound is still today. Low tide, with bowed kelp trunks breaking the few waves there are. A raven is chuckling away on a fence post, a low stone-knocking conversation with itself that is oddly reassuring. Hugin or Muninn having a bit of a grumble maybe

Swallows buzzed the car on the way, playing dare and double-dare as I bounced down the narrow little road. Then there were those little brown dunnocky birds that shoot across the front of the car, dolphins on a bow wave. I am always surprised to arrive and find I don’t have a neat swallow and dunnock presse in the front grill of the car

Eynhallow Sound

Sometimes just getting here feels like a pilgrimage in itself. Not even getting here to Gurness but here onto the Islands at all. This trip started several weeks ago when i left home and came trundling across the country, storytelling my way round Highland schools and steadily wearing myself down to the frazzle of an ol’ toad who set off at 5am that morning to drive the final stretch north to the first ferry of the day

Arriving at the ferry really starts the final movement for me. I simmer like the sea, a rolling tide of excitement that has me wanting to hug strangers as we load the catamaran and wave at every puffin I see. I tend to do the latter anyway

I come here full of ideas but am gradually recognising the difference between need and want. There are places I would like to go to, islands I would like to see, whales I would love to stare at, point at and probably faint over. But more importantly, there are the places I need to go to. Places where I stop. Where I don’t have to go inspecting, ticking a mental box of sites visited, plants seen, stones identified, stories told. These are the places that hold me, enchant me, tell me to shut up and just relax. Their names become a litany in themselves: Gurness and Brodgar, Stenness and Birsay and the Happy Valley where the bluebells fill the woods like smoke

I arrived this time carrying burdens. A knee that feels like its ready to fall apart so that a pirate’s wooden leg has a certain appeal. A work diary that excites and oppresses in equal measure. And heaviest of all, the imminent departure of a long-standing and very dear friend. In hospital, 700 miles and probably 3 days away so that by the time I reached her I would be too late. So, I chose north and long distance vigil, sitting beside the sea here at Gurness and reaching across the miles, watching hares in the field and the precise shapes of gannets, sharing memories and acknowledging change and departure and grief.

Sometimes just getting here is enough.

One bright, beady eye

Between Goldsitch and Eynhallow

Goldsitch Moss

I am not heathen but I respect and honour those wild northern gods and sometimes they feel very close…

  

One bright beady eye

 

Goldsitch Moss

Goldsitch Moss

Trembles with life,

A vibrant, simmering

Shimmer of sphagnum green.

Willow holds the edge

Of the frog-calling bog,

And birch climbs the crags,

Trailing a leaf-fall of

Delicate blades,                                 

While bilberry coyly flirts,

In purple,

Seducing visitors,

Into impromptu, lip-stained feasts.

Heather’s leaves and scented flowers

Belie the twisted determination,

Of rope-roots

Knotting rock to peat,

Tying the world together,

While Odin sits

On a grit-stone throne,

Watching the world go by

Through one bright, black, beady eye.

 

Midhowe Broch

Barely the beat of a raven’s wing,

To carry his will

From Memory to Thought,

From the Moss to the Sea.

Wet skins,

Take a breath,

Barely the draw of a longship’s oars

From Midhowe to Gurness,

The sail flaps,

Billows into blowing cheeks,

Straining,

Slowly,

Reluctantly,

The prow yields to the wind,

Lifting,

Storm-runner

Surge-cutter,

Foam-rider,

Wave-breaker.

The Sound swells, races

Lifts the longship, runs,

Drops, suddenly, into

The turquoise calm

Of a seal-wife bay

Behind the Holy Island.

 

Eynhallow Sound beyond the Broch of Gurness

Odin broods,

On his gritstone throne,

Watching the world,

Through one bright, black eye,

Pecking holes

In my heart.

But Freyr

Picks a path into my soul

And I am filled

By the hope of

A God made of wind and oak-leaves

And the Boar who bristles

In the thicket.

Orkney - raven - Huginn? Muninn?

Goldsitch Moss is a Staffordshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve near my home in Buxton

Eynhallow, and  Midhowe and Gurness Brochs (I haven't linked the brochs - start at Eynhallow and make the journey yourself) are in Orkney

Goldsitch Moss

Eavesdropping

Sitting in a broch: 

the provocation of 

the overheard conversation

 

I admit it. I like listening in on other people’s conversations. Not the deeply personal, requiring-the-release-of-eavesdropping-mice, tucked-away-in-a-corner exchanges but those brash, loud and quite-possibly-intended-to-be-heard-by-strangers ones. And given that I am not all that inconspicuous, being some 190cm tall, extensively tattooed (if not always obvious), and excessively hairy (in some judgements), I seem to be quite good at being overlooked*.

In visiting a place, be it historic monument, ancient site, city park, formal gardens, rock on a beach or occasional tree, I like to just sit. To sit and soak up the atmosphere, to sit and feel the place around me, to sit and simply enjoy the moment. And eavesdrop.

The Broch of Gurness is a favourite loitering place for me when I’m on Orkney. 1000 years of settlement in layers and structures and precisely stacked stones, mortar free houses and wheel-houses and twin-walled towers of rock.

I watched. I listened. Standing in the centre of this dramatic site, this set of visitors could only talk about other places. Yes, I concede, without question, that the ancient tombs of Malta are wonderful but you’re not on Malta, you are here. Have you come to these islands on the edge of the world to stand in the midde of this broch and burble about somewhere else. And no. You’re not burbling about somewhere else. You are burbling about yourself in that other place. Is that the key? You can visit marvellous places as long as everyone knows it is you (or, in Scots, “yous” as in you plural) who is visiting. You are the centre of this story - the “you” in this instance being 4 people. I was there. I listened for all of the 15 minutes they were in the Broch. Not long, but quite long enough for uninterrupted monologue, and no-one seemed to even notice me (suprising, see parag 1 above, and add barefoot and crosslegged on the grass….ok, maybe “carefully not noticing wierdo in corner” counts as a survival strategy). But in that time, there was no reference to here, to looking at, enjoying, appreciating this place - or even comparing it to the Tombs on Malta. It was enough that here in this place everyone knew that yous had been Somewhere Else (within a genre)as well. Is a visit to a site like that just to provide a setting for broadcasting of your own experience?
O, it was dull. But intriguing in a dismal sort of way, so I waited and watched and listened and wondered if we would ever get to any perception of here. We didn’t.

This wasn’t a random monologue directed at the rocks, the winds and the wierdie in the corner. It could have been a closed conversation among the visitors concerned, but they seemed to have cornered a young man who I took to be the curator/guide/warden of the Broch (there had been a little notice in the window of the gatehouse: “warden on site”), but no, the young man being so informed and instructed was just another visitor. Maybe the warden had already escaped or was spreadeagled out of sight just over the cliff-edge waiting for the terns to scream an all-clear. I met the victim/subject later and we shared a quite, stone-filled moment of empathy.






 They left. I sighed. I think the Broch sighed, too. It’s seen worse after all. They left, with Birsay and Skara Brae and the Tomb of the Eagles to do as their declared targets in the next 2 hours. This would make for an interesting whirlwind tour of Mainland and South Ronaldsay especially as the tide was high and Birsay would be out of reach

Birsay causeway at high tide

This is a bit of a rant. Not really an angry one but more a recognition of a challenge. For those of us who try to educate and work face-to-face - but more for those of us whose interpretation has to do its job in our absence, there is a question renewed for me about what can we do to encourage people to stop. To simply stop, to shut up, and appreciate a place for what it is: not for its connections, its similarities to 6 other places I’ve been to and which might have been better, not for its amazing this or appalling that, not even for its story but just for its own sake.

Can we build a philosophy of observation into our work?

And I still wanted to slap those people with a bit of wet kelp.

And the great mountain
Is unconquered, when
It remains the victor
By not noticing the men

Nicholas Stuart Grey

* There is an activity I sue withg roups that amkes the point that being invisible isn’t about being able to hide, it is about beign able to become inconspicuous, see Celebrating Nature