Orkney, Scotland
Orkney, an archipelago of some 70 islands—20 of them inhabited—lies 10 miles north of the northern tip of Scotland. I first visited the islands when I was 11, on a school trip. The roads shimmered in the intense midsummer heat. The white nights were like waking dreams, with the sky blue even at 11 p.m. Neolithic standing stones were circles of fire in the blazing red sunsets. We took jaunts on brightly painted lobster boats. I spied the poet George Mackay Brown—the Robert Lowell of Orcadia—sitting on his accustomed bench in Stromness harbor. I was entranced. With the fervor of childhood, I swore to return and live there. But I broke the engagement.
Now, 30 years on, I am back for the first time, attending the island’s annual music festival. When I exit the twin-prop plane at Kirkwall Airport, the islands look as different as I do. The temperature is in the mid-50s and it’s raining. Three-armed wind turbines cartwheel maniacally in the low fields. The sea is sullen. Pebbledashed houses hunker low to the ground. My hotel has 1970s-style wallpaper and carpets in which the colors of red wine, tea, cigarette ash, and Guinness vie in a blotchy collage. The shower makes a noise reminiscent of the plane’s engines. Suddenly, Kirkwall seems like a frontier town, gray and gritty. The liquor store models triple-glazed replacement windows. Beermats in the bar urge the suicidal to seek help. I wonder briefly if I am foolish to revisit the scene of my youthful adventure. But once I have found my way to the first of many musical gatherings, my mood lifts. And over the week that follows I fall in love with Orkney all over again.
The St. Magnus Festival, held each June, is a series of concerts, talks, plays, exhibitions, poetry readings, and workshops. According to one of its cofounders, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, it was born in a phone box on the island of Hoy. From such beginnings it has grown in eminence and ambition: New work is regularly premiered; collaborations are fostered; music lovers fly in from all corners of the world; young composers and conductors study with internationally renowned artists.
Charles Peebles, who leads the conducting course, told me that Orkney’s remoteness was one of the factors that made it musically powerful: People have to travel to come here, and the journey often stimulates an inner progress toward psychic readiness. Orkney also provides neutral ground for the motivated, competitive young conductors; they get to know one another on equal terms. I sat in on a three-hour session and was fascinated to see how differently the eight conductors led the same orchestra. One danced on the balls of his feet, his hands fluttering butterflies. Another was rhetorical, scarcely moving from the waist down but gesticulating with punchy vigor. Another nodded his head in open-mouthed exhortation, hands making the motions of kneading bread or folding laundry. Peebles refers to the conductor as the orchestra’s “fusebox,” and I began to appreciate conducting as akin to electrical conductivity: the transmission of invisible energy, in this case through the thin and light shaft of the baton.
Festival concerts take place all over the islands, but the principal venue is the 12th-century St. Magnus Cathedral, a massive Romanesque red-sandstone edifice that is, once you sit inside it, a surprisingly intimate space with warm acoustics. The nave is narrow, with a ceiling like an upturned longboat. The columns are vast in circumference, and warm light falls from the stained glass high in the walls to bathe them yellow, pink, and orange. Hearing a late-night concert in the cathedral, with sunlight still pouring through the glass, is like being in a beating womb of sound. My favorite concert was called “Octets and Quartets in the Round”: Two string quartets joined forces to play together in the heart of the cathedral, surrounded by the audience. Like a witches’ coven, the strings squabbled, chased each other’s notes, threw in ingredients, and in their fury concocted something so exciting that the very air felt changed as after a thunderstorm.
When I wasn’t at concerts, I was often deep in the past. Orkney is exceptionally rich in ancient sites. To live here is to be aware of strata of settlement that go back over 5,000 years but are still very near the surface. Skara Brae, Europe’s most perfectly preserved Neolithic village, was uncovered in 1850 by a ferocious storm. It lies by a beach and resembles a mini-golf course. There are sandy bunkers and grass-topped mounds. Look a little closer and you can see that the bunkers are in fact rooms, all designed to the same pattern, with two inset beds that would have been lined with animal skins, stone shelves for storage, and a hearth for cooking. The rooms were connected by covered passages. The outer walls were insulated with refuse—animal bones, shells, plant material—that tells us a good deal about how varied a diet these early people had. They ate fish and shellfish, deer, birds, boar, and sheep. They made tools, heather ropes, intricate jewelry, and dimpled stone balls—a bit like sea urchins—that may have had a ceremonial purpose. Most died young; the oldest were in their 50s. They suffered from arthritis and impacted wisdom teeth, and they cared for members of the community with disabilities (the skull of a woman in her 30s with congenital blindness was recovered at one of Orkney’s sites). They were gifted engineers. And they marked the solar and lunar calendars with complex structures.
One such structure is Maeshowe, a chambered cairn, reachable by ducking through a long, low tunnel into a hill. Once inside, you are in the middle of a perfectly square chamber. On three sides are rooms that would likely have contained human bones. The entrance tunnel is precisely designed so that during the winter solstice, the setting sun between distant hills sends a shaft of light to illuminate the back wall, transforming it into a door of shimmering gold. Pure stone-age ritual cinema. In 1153, several millennia after Maeshowe was built, a party of Vikings got stuck in a snowstorm and sheltered here. We know because the bored men carved runes into the walls. The graffiti they left to posterity is hilariously banal: “I carved this with an axe”; “I carved this very high up”; “call the widow Ingeborg if you want a good time.” However, they left us one tiny artistic gem: a dragon with its head turning toward its tail as it, perhaps, feels the blade of a finely wrought dagger in its back. You can practically hear the Vikings stamp and blow, the men cursing and bantering, the chink of metal on stone.
Maeshowe is only accessible with a guide, but you crawl yourself into the Tomb of the Eagles, another chambered cairn, located above a bay of seals on the island South Ronaldsay, facing east to the rising sun. By midsummer the farmland is hazy with wildflowers: myriad buttercups, yellow irises and birdsfoot trefoil, pale pink thrift and purple orchids. The place immediately provokes that thrilling childhood sense that you are among buried treasure, that you might stumble upon a prehistoric artifact: a perfectly carved hematite axe, a ring, a pot. Kathleen MacLeod, whose father Ronnie discovered the tomb in the 1950s, remembers vividly how impressed she was as a child when first the local doctor, then the local policeman arrived to look. For years, her family lived with Neolithic skulls under the stairs. They came to know them as “the ancestors”—familiar characters with nicknames: Jock Tamson, Charlie girl. The tomb is remarkable for the number of sea-eagle talons it contains; others have predominantly deer antlers or the bones of dogs or songbirds. MacLeod theorizes that the different tribes of Neolithic Orkney may each have had their own totem animals.
I am lucky and, during the week of my stay, the weather changes. Sunlight turns the sky the deep blue I remember from my childhood trip. The fields, drenched in long daylight, are brilliantly green. I take a ferry to the island of Hoy to visit Bunnertoon, the croft (farm cottage) owned by Peter Maxwell Davies, known here simply as “Max,” who died last year at 81.
As the ferry docks, I inhale deeply. It is stunning here. Where most of Orkney is gently rolling, Hoy is mountainous. The land rises abruptly to peaks where sea eagles nest. The island’s Rackwick Bay is sublime—and, when I get there, empty. There is no shop, no bar, no street lamps, only the faded red phone box in which grass is growing a foot high and a sign warns visitors that if they attempt to hike the path that passes the Old Man of Hoy (a spectacular natural column of stone near the shore) they should allow three hours each way and understand that there is no trained professional on the island to rescue them if they get stuck. This is remote.
The St. Magnus Festival exists within a year-round framework of social music and creative collaboration. Nurturing fresh talent with limited resources through the long winters takes time and commitment. Orcadians are exceptionally good at teaching music as a language to all their children; they value the arts as oxygen vital to the breath of the community. Local schools offer free, high-quality instrumental lessons. Folk musicians pass on the many dialects of the oral tradition. As gifted local musicians Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley told me, “You have to live your practice” so that it becomes not an interruption to your day but intrinsic to the social flow of your existence.
I climb up to Max’s croft and picture him trundling a wheelbarrow up here with provisions. It is steep. There are streams to wade through. But the view is worth anything. Immense pink-red sandstone cliffs, stacked like the library of a clumsy giant, drop down to white sand, pink and gray stones as large and smooth as mangoes, turquoise shallows, and harebell-blue deeps. The bubbling cry of curlews rises out of the peat; redstarts and pipits chide on every fencepost; skuas ride the wind down to the sea. Max said that he used to walk his music when he was composing. It is little wonder that Orkney has produced generations of musicians: The landscape is lyrical—I think one would wake, work, and dream music here.
Sara Lodge is a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.
