Life Among the Runes
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It is a place where the sun doesn’t shine…too much. It has as many as 250 days of rain per year and winds of up to 100 miles per hour. You might think that the people of the Orkney Islands are in a constant bad mood. They are not. They speak with a cheery lilt of Orcadian Scot, their own brand of English tinged with Norwegian singsong, brought to these shore by its early Viking settlers. The Orkneys were a haven for Norwegian pirates. The Orkadians thrive in this climate of gray skies and rough seas. They have been living here since well before Stonehenge.
Kirkwall, the capitol of the the Orkney Islands, is a caber’s toss from mainland Scotland. St. Magnus, Scotand’s oldest cathedral, wears its history. Dating to 1137, its walls are craggy and organic, looking as they were ready to crumble to nature. St. Magnus wasn’t always cheerful. It has a dungeon, where women were tossed after being convicted of consulting or consorting with fairies.
But there were also people here who were quite happy. Worn tombstones line the walls of St. Magnus, honoring some who lived very long lives, into their 90s. Was it the air, or perhaps the whiskey, which was first bootlegged and later legally distilled here since the 1800s? One of its leading distilleries, Highland Park, characterizes its whiskey as having essences of heathered peat.
It comes from the land. The terrain is peatland, carpeted by lush green meadows with patches of heather, polka-dotted by white sheep. Glad the whisky doesn’t taste like sheep. There are ancient graves here, dated 500 years older than Stonehenge, aligned to the sun of the winter solstice to celebrate that once-a-year aha moment. The Ring of Brodgar, a circle of stone monoliths, were likely used for ceremonies linked to movements of the sun, moon and stars.
Scholars have interpreted runic carvings unearthed here to depict everything from bears teeth and excerpts from the Lord’s Prayer to descriptions of explicit sex.
Yes, the Orkneys are not Miami Beach, but the subtle beauty of the gauzy greens, whites and browns make it feel a bit like coastal California, where I have lived and loved…cheerfully. And you can literally feel the history here.
PS – Oil and natural gas have always been a major force it economy of the Orkneys. The harbors near Kirkwall are still transfer points for tankers carrying the liquified dead dinosaurs . But now the Orkneys are in the spotlight for clean energy. Windmills and wave generators produce more clean energy than the islands need and exporting the excess to to the UK power grid. They are also working on projects to produce and store hydrogen to be used as a clean fuel including, sound the drums, for the production of gin.
Several cruise lines offer brief visits to the Orkneys on their British Isles cruises, including Viking, which brought me there.
