It is harvest time in Orkney and the fields are full of beautiful, golden bundles. Gardeners are gathering up their vegetables and children will soon be piling up cans of soup and beans for their Harvest assemblies.
In celebration, we bring you an excerpt from Ernest Walker Marwick's The Lore of the Harvest which discusses the straw 'bikko' dog made from the straw in the last field. Below is an example of said 'bikko'.
We also found a J. Omond photo of some Orphir schoolgirls gathering peas, the sadly ruined harvest of 1909 (another Omond image) and a lovely harvest tea-break or 'half yoke'.
You can't live in Orkney and then complain about bad weather. (Except we do. Constantly.) On days like these it's better just to give in to it. It's not blowing a gale, It's just Orkney 'singing':
Click to enlarge
Poem taken from a 1948 edition of The Orcadian. (16th December 1948).
A regular US reader of the blog, Genknit, has just written to let us know that she is safe after the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey. We were pleased and relieved to hear this.
I could not help but think about the so called Orkney Hurricane of 1952 and the destructive gales which followed the next year. Unlike Hurricane Harvey, the two storms - miraculously- claimed no lives but the damage and trauma was immense.
The remains of the Wyre Shop at Helziegatha after the 1952 Hurricane
Orcadians were unsure of the exact wind speed of the 1952 hurricane as the wind recorders at Costa Head in Evie were broken after exceeding their 120mph limit. Estimates were made of 135mph in places.
'I wakened and I wondered what was wrong. It blowed and blowed and blowed. I lay on, for I thowt that if I wakened Jock, he wid go outside and hid wasna safe - so as long as the kye didna boggle I wid bide in... we were lucky. The (hen) hooses were end on tae the wind.'
Sarah Gaddie of Holm recalling the storm
Many were not so lucky, however, and the thriving egg industry which provided so many Orcadians with income was seriously damaged over night, with hundreds and hundreds of hen houses and their occupants strewn over Orkney by the ferocious winds.
Hurricane Damage, 1952
'We woke up to devastation. We could see what we thought to be reddish-brown snowdrifts along the dykes. What it was in fact was dead and dying Rhode Island Reds. My father went out and managed to breathe life into a few who were merely stunned but I can remember my parents shock and horror, with the added worry of knowing they'd lost such a valuable source of income.'
Morag Russell of Shapinsay
Flooding was the main problem in 1953 as the sea defences were battered in many locations, turning streets into rivers.
Junction Road after the 1953 Storm.
(Original photo taken by S. Twatt)
Shore Street after the 1953 Storm - the water mains were completely exposed.
(Original photo taken by S. Twatt)
Orcadians are known for their grit and resilience and the County, with the aid of hastily set up aid funds and some government assistance, was soon up and running again. People were even able to joke about some stories from the storm such as the gentleman bowled over fields in his wooden house only to emerge clad in nothing but underpants. Or the farmer whose dwelling's roof was torn off only to be quickly replaced by another one. He took this as proof that 'the Lord is kind'.
Texans and Lousianans are also known for their grit and resilience and we send the survivors of Hurricane Harvey our thoughts and heartfelt best wishes in their time of need.
Information taken from:
The Orkney Hurricane - R. G. Ross
How the Orkney Egg Industry was affected by the Great Gale of 1952 - Simon Carmichael
The Orcadian book of the 20th Century - Howard Hazell
Firstly, these ridiculously detailed 'probable weather' predictions for an entire year taken from some late nineteenth century almanacs...
Peace's Almanac 1866-8
... and secondly, an early marriage contract, or what we may call a pre-nup from around the same time:
Orkney Archive Reference SC11/38/8
... Jane Blackwell Gordon used this document to protect her assets when planning to marry Dr Edward Mitchell. Her money and property would otherwise have become her husband's upon marriage. Therefore, Dr Mitchell had to 'renounce' his rights to Jane's possessions.
This legal protection was only available to wealthy women. Most married women lost the rights to all property including their children until the married women's property act of 1870. For more information see here.
These days, the big February festival would seem to be Valentine's day, mainly because this celebration is easily commercialised and has been since the 19th century.
In the Northern Isles, however, Candlemas, which falls on the 2nd of February, was far more important to young people. We have blogged before about some of the strange rituals young Orcadian lasses followed when trying to find the identity of their future husband. According to local folklorist, historian and archivist's dream, Ernest Walker Marwick, Isles folk would have "thought it soft to send a love token" but that didn't stop the young women from following a Candesmas ritual:
"It was at Candlemas that the lasses chased the crows. In the grey dawn of a winter morning, a maiden would steal forth with a fluttering heart, and give chase to the first 'craw' she chanced to see, and anxiously watch in what direction it flew, for there dwelt her husband to be, and there lay her future home."
Candlemas was also very important as that was the very first day that ploughing could commence in Orkney. It was also an immovable date (40 days after the birth of Jesus) from which all other Easter holidays could be calculated:
"First hid comes Candlemas Day,
And than the new mune;
And than hid come Brose Day
If hid wis ever so sune,
An than there's forty days
Atween Brose Day and Pase Day (Easter)
The forty days o' Lent."
Lastly, the other significance of this date to the islanders was as a weather predictor:
"If Candlemas Day is fair and clear
There'll be twa winters in the year."
Groundhog day in America also falls on the 2nd of February and has a similar significance. If it is cloudy when the Groundhog emerges then winter shall soon be over. If it is sunny enough for the creature to cast a shadow and startle himself back into his den then six more weeks of winter are to be endured.
We have been complaining about the weather a lot recently which is most unlike us, but we were very cheered to see several candle-lit windows in Orkney this winter. Flickering flame or battery powered plastic both lifted the spirits during this stormy winter. When discussing this candle profusion with a customer she said:
"I always light a candle every morning from the Winter Solstice to Candlemas." We liked this idea so much that it inspired this post.
Before calendar re-jigs, the 13th of December was the date of the Winter Solstice and that is when the Scandanavian festival St Lucy's day is celebrated in Kirkwall.
On these cold, Northern rocks, you sometimes need a bit of light to keep you going through the long, dark nights.
Lighting Candles In Midwinter
Saint Lucy, see Seven bright leaves in the winter tree
Seven diamonds shine In the deepest darkest mine
Seven fish go, a glimmering shoal Under the ice of the North Pole
Sweet St Lucy, be kind To us poor and wintered and blind.
George Mackay Brown
Information taken from Orkney Archive reference: D31/BBC/6
Lighting Candles In Midwinter taken from The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, Edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray.
When trying to sum up how we felt about being back at work today after all of our festivities, all we could muster was a collective 'bleeergh'. Oh January, you are tough.
We'll leave it to George Mackay Brown to describe this month in this excerpt from a 1972 column for the Orcadian:
January
January is the month when for a morning or two you expect to wake up with a dry mouth at least.
January is the month when you observe, sadly, six of your seven good resolutions blow away on the cold wind.
January is the month you dismantle-on a precise date, the sixth - the Christmas tree and give all those expensive Christmas cards to the children to scrawl on with their crayons.
January is the month when bills seem to seep through your letter box with pitiless monotony. The man who was as rich as Rockefeller on Christmas Eve is poor now as a church mouse.
January is the month when you wait for the worst of the winter to fall, sleet and hail and snow out of the north-east. You kind of exist between an iron earth and a leaden sky.
...
January is the month when the full moon is most glorious of all (although I think the stars have it, for December).
There is no month of the year quite like January. What is better than a walk along the west shore in that cold, silver air?
George Mackay Brown
The rest of the entry can be found in Letters From Hamnavoe, columns written for The Orcadian between 1971 and 1975.
It is most definitely time for a Friday Bop. The hideous weather (we had THREE DAYS of thunder and lightning and it is STILL rubbish today) demands it.
But we're all sick of Christmas songs already right? And yet this kind of weather creates a need for something seasonal and at the same time heart-warming and jolly doesn't it?
What could fit the bill?!
THIS:
Oh let's just stop work altogether and listen to Aztec Camera all day long:
We are pretty good to our customers really. While the rest of the county is drunk and 'tasting' cakes in Bignold park, we valiantly maintain our posts at the archive desk just in case someone gets tired of a field full of home-brew, home-bakes and waltzers.
It is County Show day again in Orkney and, whilst we would normally be crying into our documents because we're not eating a cake next to a pony, we feel slightly less short-changed today. Because it is raining. Lots.
Those good old Orkney gales are starting up again and, once more, we battle to work through solid wind walls, weep in front of mirrors whilst trying to comb the tangles from our hair and muse anew about running the house from a windmill.
We're a topical bunch and so a keyword search of 'wind' was duly deployed in preparation for today's blog post. Our attention was drawn to a number of mentions of 'protests against wind and weather'.
What would these protests entail? A sit-in against snow? Placards saying 'Go Home Arctic Chill!'? Reference D7/9/10 was selected as it was apparently a book full of the things.
We expected to find a book containing entries such as "Damn you wind!" Or, "Dear driving hail, you suck..." Instead this book is full of the captains of freight ships recording with a notary public any damage done to ship and cargo by forces outwith their control.
Log books were proffered to prove that they had been assailed by storms and heavy seas and fellow crewmen offered as witnesses. Some of the stories are terrifying, with skippers detailing how their ships were torn apart, piece by painstakingly recounted piece by ferocious winds and how they were forced to cut down masts to save themselves from being blown further out to sea.
The main point of these protests were to ensure that 'damage should fall on and be bourne by the Merchants or freighter interested or underwriters or whoever else it shall or may concern.' (As said by Ole Pederson, master of the barque "Emerald" which had been sailing from New York to Gottenburg but got stranded on the rocks of the Holm of Aikerness off Westray, Orkney).
Basically, the Captains are saying 'It's not my fauuuuult! Don't blame me. It was that damn wind! Stoopid wind...'
The Orkney County Show is a wonderful thing. Taking place at the beginning of August each year, it is usually a balmy delight of farmyard animals, fairground rides, stalls brimming with local produce and, most importantly, home bakes. Yet there is always a cold shadow to be felt behind the warm joys of craft tents, crab - meat baps, 'refreshed' teenagers and wee lasses on their be-ribboned ponies..
.
If you listen closely enough you can hear the whispers: 'County Show... then winter!'.
"Rubbish" You think to yourself every single year as you eat your third ice-cream and decide which of the roosters looks most psychopathic. "There's at least six weeks left of Summer time. My washing's out and everything. I'm only wearing one fleece for Pete's sake!".
And yet every year the old wives are proven right. The day after County show always has a nip in the air and a distinctly autumnal smell. It is September now and the sunny show season is but a distant memory.
Photo: Charles Tait Photographic, The Orkney Guide Book, Third Edition.
Who wouldn't? Eynhallow (from the Old Norse oyin helga, holy isle) is thought to be the site of Orkney's earliest monastic settlement and boasts the remains of a 12th century church.
Other names for Eynhallow include 'The Enchanted Isle' and 'The Disappearing Isle' as it was allegedly not always visible to human eyes and was the summer residence of mermaids and finfolk. Apparently, the only way to be sure to reach the island is for the pilot of the boat to never take his eyes from land and to be gripping iron at all times.
The uninhabited island is inaccessible for most of the year due to strong tides from both sides but the wonderful Orkney Heritage Society, put on a trip each year in July.
This year's trip should, weather permitting, take place on Monday 22nd July. Tickets are £20 for adults and £10 for under 12s and available from the Archive department (we are on the first floor of Orkney Library.) We accept cash or cheques and require the names of all ticket holders and a contact telephone number in the event of cancellation.
PLEASE NOTE, THE ARCHIVE IS CLOSED ON WEDNESDAYS.
The boat shall depart from Tingwall at 7.15pm and shall leave Eynhallow at 10.15pm.
Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult and no dogs are permitted.
Information taken from:
The Orkney Guide Book, Third Edition by Charles Tait.
Eynhallow by John Mooney www.orkneyjar.com
We shall be closed on Monday for our May Day holiday, apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
The current plan is to pinch the book trolleys and ride them down the dunes of Dingieshowe beach on route to swimming in our pants but we may just sit at the back of a bus throwing sweets, we haven't quite decided. We're definitely all dressing up as Pop and Ma Larkin though.
Posts from other years have already explained Orkney beliefs and customs for this time of year so we shall just leave you with Ernest Walker Marwick's thoughts on May taken from his Island Calendar show for BBC Radio:
'I've always thought that one of the loveliest lines in English poetry is, "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May." They are a comment on life itself. If you were to talk of May in human terms you might say that it is the adolescent month.
We have no sooner had a couple of halcyon days, blue as sapphire, than there comes a bleak wind which cuts us to the bone, and which makes the kye in the fields look so miserable that we speak of the koo-kwacks o'Mey. In other places this is the gab of May.
And yet in May we feel that the time has come when we must really forget the winter and get on with the work of the spring...'
He goes on to say that, to people of his age (EWM was born in 1915), May was when children's winter boots were taken away 'no matter how cold the weather' and they went bare-foot until harvest was over.
Excuse us won't you? We must go and kiss and hug our shoes and socks with tearful gratitude...
The only way to describe the weather in Kirkwall today is the noise "UUUUUUUUURRRRRRGGGGHHHH!"
How wet, how cold, how windy, and dark. Not even the reappearance of our flock of waxwings outside the window can lift our soggy, water-logged hearts.
Thank goodness for Stromness library's wonderful advent calendar then which has been filling our days with cosy, Christmas cheer and reminding us of classic children's serials such as The Box Of Delights and The Children of Greene Knowe.
We therefore humbly remind you dear readers of the1988 BBC adaptation of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe which is the final member of the holy trinity of Children's Christmas shows.
We don't have anything to do with this C. S. Lewis classic in the archive but we do have the screenplay of Margaret Tait and Peter Hollander's documentary of Perugia entitled The Lion, The Griffin and The Kangaroo as well as some lovely snapshots taken by Margaret Tait when she was living in Italy.
This morning, a strange yellow light was detected over the town of Kirkwall. The light had a definite warming quality to it and was all-pervading; penetrating every window, cracks around front doors and the gaps between curtains.
Citizens were alarmed until one of the older folk chuckled wisely and said 'It's chist the sun! Do you no mind the sun?' Ah... the sun, welcome back old friend, we have missed you. We're a bit annoyed at your tardyness, if we're honest, but better late than never I suppose.
Here are some things from our collection which remind us of you. Wait... don't go... come back! We didn't mean to scare you!
A Rousay Picnic, c.1950.
Magnus Spence's notebook on Sun Worship in Orkney D32/3/20
Stromness Swimming Club, 1958
Kirkwall Swimming Gala in the basin.
The Sun newspaper's ridiculous take on Margaret Tait making Blue Black Permanent.
Things got a bit breezy on Thursday night, and not just for us in Orkney but, it seems, for most of the country. You'll be happy to know, reader, that your favourite archive has not suffered any damage and that our water sooking up pillows did not have to be deployed.
We're used to a bit of wind in Orkney (yes, I know there's a joke there but I'm going to ignore it on the grounds of good taste) but sometimes, even here, we're not quite prepared for its severity.
Here's a photograph of Whitehall village on the island of Stronsay during a combination of high tide and gales. I'm not sure about the date but it looks fairly recent.
The worst weather, or at least the weather with the worst consequences, was encountered in 1952 and 1953 and is still spoken about today, and made headlines around the world. On both occasions hurricane force winds battered the islands and caused untold damage. In the storm of 1952 over 1000 domestic and 2000 agricultural buildings were wrecked or severely damaged. And then almost exactly a year later it all happened again!
This photograph shows some of the damage caused to Shore Street in Kirkwall. Hundreds of metres of the road along the front were washed away by the force of the waves.
All we need is snow now and I can tell you all about the blizzards of 1955 when people in the West Mainland had to have supplies delivered by lifeboat!
It's another day of cloud, rain and wind in Orkney today. So to cheer everyone up I thought I'd look back at the weather of the past when summers were long and skies were always blue. The chart above records the weather for October 1917 so that we can compare.
Systematic weather observations were begun in Orkney in 1827, by Rev Charles Clouston, minister in Sandwick. Although reputedly the second oldest complete set of weather records in Scotland, the records held by the Archives begin in 1890. The first recorder of these was Magnus Spence F.E.I.S. in Stenness who carried on until 1919.
So let's take a look...
This part of the chart gives a brief description of the weather on each day. Day 1 is overcast and foggy, day 2 is overcast and cloudy, day 3 is overcast and cloudy, day 4 is overcast and cloudy. I think we can detect a pattern here!
So there it is readers, the startling news that the weather was just as rubbish 94 years ago as it is today. Oh well, time to unpack the long johns.
The library is open today but the staff are a little depleted due to the weather. Us town folk must admit that the thought of leaving our warm beds to trudge through the snow was difficult, but we are not only dashing, adventurous types who laugh in the face of ice and snow, we are far too dedicated to you, dear customers, and so we are here; a little creased and rosy-cheeked but eager to serve.
However....
The Bookbug Rhyme time session has been postponed until Wednesday morning and the mobilelibrary van shall not be in Burray and South Ronaldsay today.
Also, the library and archive shall be closed tomorrow, Saturday the 18th.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.
