Orkney – a group of islands at the north of Scotland, sea-scoured and wind-battered, between the North Sea and the Atlantic – has a good provision of services: hospital, airport, cinema, two secondary schools, a supermarket. One thing it does not have, however, is a secure unit for people certified mentally ill and a danger to themselves and others. If someone is sectioned under the Mental Health Act, they have to be taken south to Aberdeen.
Seen from above, from an aircraft carrying oil workers out to a rig or mail bags from mainland Scotland, the airport runway is a jolt on the open, treeless landscape. Regularly closing for days during high winds or sea fogs, it’s where the daily drama of leaving and return is played out under air-traffic control, among the low-lying isles and far-reaching skies.
This May evening, as daisies shut their petals for the night, guillemots and kittiwakes return to the cliffs with sand eels for their chicks, and sheep shelter beside drystone dykes – it is my story’s turn to unfold. As I arrive into this island world, my father is taken out of it. My birth, three weeks early, has brought on a manic episode.
My mum introduces the man – my dad – to his tiny daughter and briefly places me in his lap before he is taken into the aircraft and flown away. What she says to him is covered by the sound of the engine or carried off by the wind.
I
THE OUTRUN
ON MY FIRST DAY BACK I shelter beside an old freezer, down by some stinging nettles, and watch the weather approach over the sea. The waves crashing do not sound very different from the traffic in London.
The farm is on the west edge of the main and largest island in Orkney, on the same latitude as Oslo and St Petersburg, with nothing but cliffs and ocean between it and Canada. As agricultural practices changed, new buildings and machinery were added to the farm but the old sheds and tools remain, corroding in the salty air. A broken tractor shovel acts as a sheep trough. Stalls where cattle were once tied are now filled with defunct machinery and furniture that used to be in our house. In that byre I strung a rope swing from the rafters, and hung backwards by my knees over a gate that’s now rusting into the ground.
To the south, the farm stretches along the shore to sandier land, which becomes the Bay of Skaill, a mile-long beach where the Stone Age village, Skara Brae, sits. To the north, the farm follows cliffs up to higher ground where heather grows. Each field has a prosaic name: ‘front field’, as you come up the track to the house; or ‘lambing field’, sheltered on all sides by drystone dykes. The largest of the fields, the ‘Outrun’, is a stretch of coastland at the top of the farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by wind and sea spray year-round. The Outrun is where the ewes and their lambs graze in summer after they are taken up from the nursery fields. It’s where the Highland cattle overwinter, red and horned, running out under the huge sky.
Some historical agricultural records list farmland in two parts: the ‘in-bye’ arable land, close to the farm steading; and the ‘out-bye’ or ‘outrun’, uncultivated rough grazing further away, often on hillsides. In the past, outrun was sometimes used as communal grazing for a number of farms. This land is the furthest reaches of a farm, only semi-tamed, where domestic and wild animals co-exist and humans don’t often visit so spirit people are free to roam. In Orcadian folklore, trowies are told to live in communities in mounds and hollows of the hills and there are tales of hillyans, little folk who emerge from the rough land to make mischief in the summer.
In a photo of the Outrun from the early eighties, I ride on Dad’s shoulders as he and Mum show visiting English friends the desolate-seeming land they have bought. My parents wanted to buy a farm and kept travelling further north until they found one they could afford. Family and friends were surprised, and unsure if they could make it work, as were the locals. Orcadians had watched many idealistic southerners move to the islands only to leave after a couple of winters.
I grew up here next to these cliffs. I have never been afraid of heights. Dad would take us clifftop-walking as children. I’d shake free of Mum’s hand and look over the edge at the churning water below. Grey flagstone – sheer drops and massive slabs – fringes the farm, and this monumental material and unforgiving forces formed the limits of the island and my world.
We had a dog once that went over. The collie pup set off chasing rabbits in a gale, did not notice the drop and was never seen again.
It’s a windy day. I leave the shelter of the freezer and walk up to the Outrun for the first time in years, breathing deeply. There are no trees on the farm and in this open landscape there is an abundance of space.
All the rocks slope towards the sea. In my wellies, I walk along the cracks in the flagstones so I don’t slip. Wisps of hair have blown free of my ponytail and are getting into my eyes and mouth, sticking to my face with sea spray, like when I was a kid and followed the sheepdogs, under gates and over dykes.
I find my favourite place: a slab of rock balanced at a precarious angle at the top of a cliff. I’d come here as a teenager, headphones on, dressed up and frustrated, looking out to the horizon, wanting to escape. From my spot on the stone I would watch the breakers crash, the gulls and fighter jets flying out over the sea.
On a clear day, south across the Pentland Firth, I can see the tips of the mountains of mainland Scotland from here: Ben Hope, Ben Loyal, Cape Wrath. About the horizon’s distance due west of the Outrun lies Sule Skerry, once home to Britain’s most remote manned lighthouse. Out at sea, bobbing on the surface, I can make out wave-energy devices being tested by engineers. It’s low tide and below me, at the base of the cliff, the rocks are exposed where a fishing boat came aground when I was eleven.
From my seat on the slab, I look north to the headland at Marwick, with its tower built in memorial to Lord Kitchener. In 1916, Kitchener died with 643 of his crew of 655 when HMS Hampshire went down two miles north-west of here, sunk by a mine from a German U-boat. Some of the twelve survivors were given shelter in the farmhouse that later would be ours.
In his account of the loss of the Hampshire, one survivor, W. M. Phillips, a sailor, vividly describes the night of the tragedy: ‘I with my boots off, but otherwise fully clad, jumped, and with a last goodbye plunged into seething waters.’ He was able to climb onto a large float and gives an account of how, since it was overloaded, those wearing lifebelts were ‘asked to leave’: ‘With a few smiling remarks such as “We shall be there first”, some 18 answered the call and plunged into the billows, thus sacrificing themselves to give their fellow shipmates their only possible chance of survival.’
After many hours when the sailors feared being dashed to their deaths on the rocks, the float came ashore in one of the geos – Nebbi Geo – on the Outrun. Walking this stretch of coast, I imagine the raft, as Phillips described, ‘wedged in between the cliffs as if human hands had placed it there’. I picture farmers of the time searching the coastline in the dark for survivors, and the bodies of sailors strewn on the rocks.
The wind in Orkney is almost constant. At the farm, the westerly gales are the worst, bringing the sea with them, and tonnes of rock can be moved overnight, the map altered in the morning. Easterlies can be the most beautiful – when the wind blows towards the tide and skims a glittering canopy of spray from the top of the waves, catching the sun. The old croft houses are squat and firm, like many Orcadian people, built to survive the strongest gales. That sturdy balance has not been bred into me: I am tall and gangly.
Following the familiar coast, I’m trying not to feel unstable. It’s been more than a decade since I lived here and memories from my childhood are merging with more recent events: the things that brought me back to Orkney. As I struggle to open a wire gate, I remember what I repeated to my attacker: ‘I am stronger than you.’
At the end of a winter the land is brown and washed-out and the Outrun seems barren, but I know its secrets. A broken-down and overgrown boundary dyke was found to date back to the Neolithic Age and some of the stones that make up the Ring of Brodgar six miles away were from a quarry just north of