Get Down and Dusty

It's a brand new year in the Orkney Archive and time to get down and dusty. Here are a group of regulars doing just that on Thursday night. Shoes and pencils were cast aside, casual onlookers bewildered and staff were trapped behind the counter.

Some of our maps are just ginormous and have to be unrolled on the floor. This one of a part of Westray in the 1830s, proved difficult to figure out. North was not at the top of the map, there were only a few houses or farms shown and parts of the coastline did not match the modern map. But then a lot can change in 190 years!

The map shown is D8/N/15[E2] Plan of the lands of Midbea, Tuquoy and Fitty Hill, Westray showing land belonging to Dr. Traill of Tirlet. c. 1830

A Pinch and a Punch, 'Tis a Rubbish Month

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.

 

 

 

 



Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all our lovely followers. I hope you all had a great holiday full of laughter, singing and parties.

Talking of singing, here is a link to The Big Orkney Song Project's version of the New Year Song. Every year we have a little bit more information about this song, which was once sung throughout Orkney on New Year's Eve.

And this year all the details, words and music can be found in a book & CD which was published in 2012. It's called "Voices in Chorus Songs and their stories from The Big Orkney Song Project" by Sarah Jane Gibbon. In this book you'll also find lots of information about other Orkney songs which the project gathered from our archive collection and the Orkney community.

"the men of a district travelled around the houses performing the song. An older man led the singing, the other men joined in the chorus, and one man carried a caisie (creel) on his back in which to gather food and drink. The bounty was shared out at the last house visited, where the men held a party." http://www.reverbnation.com/bigorkneysongproject/song/2535631-the-new-year-song

The book can be purchased here: http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/ORKNEYSINGERS/index.asp?pageid=3863