But the most remarkable features of this landscape belong to the shorter span of time between prehistory and the Victorians. I soon had vistas across the parish of Quandale, where old abandoned townships are sandwiched between the Atlantic and the hilly moorland called the Brae of Moan. It was only here that the true tragedy of the survival of Rousay’s archaeological heritage struck me. This landscape survives in historic forms because it was once emptied by force. The region I was now kayaking was the only part of Orkney subjected to large-scale clearances in the nineteenth century. It was never transformed by subsequent development, because it was rendered barren by the design of lairds. After its emptying, this became a spacious sheep run offering a few pounds a year for little effort and less responsibility. What remains is a tapestry of overgrown dykes, runrig and small kale yards from which remnants of ruined crofts and silhouettes of prehistoric earthworks loom.
This was once an ancestral landscape and a world formed round burial mounds: it was a sacred place. In the Bronze Age, barrows were built to be visible from dwellings so that the dead continued to occupy the world of the living. Burned mounds also punctuate the hillsides. These are large piles of stones that were heated to boil water (although, since food remains are not found with them, their ultimate function remains obscure). The placement and scale of those in Quandale shows that, like the burial mounds, they were part of the social landscape, acting perhaps to display wealth or status. And the remains of millennia are intertwined. Views from the doorways of eighteenth-century farmsteads were dominated by some of the biggest burned mounds in the world. On Eynhallow, crofts were even built into the ruins of a twelfth-century chapel. This clustering of buildings – sacred, ceremonial, domestic – is not just due to centuries of similar uses of land and sea, but also to active relationships with the past among later inhabitants: folk beliefs, cosmologies and identities were shaped by life in a Norse and Neolithic landscape.8 Quandale never ceased to be sacred.
To occupants of Northern Isles farmsteads, relics and monuments belonged as much to the present as the past. Ancient things were recycled into new buildings in ways that were ritualistic. Prehistoric axes were deposited in chimney stacks to protect houses from lightning strikes; Pictish symbol stones were built into thresholds and fireplaces, as were prehistoric cup-marks and spirals. Seasonal tasks, such as cutting peat, planting kale or bringing animals in for winter involved wandering different routes through the historic landscape. This resulted in a seasonally shifting geography of life that is sometimes called the ‘taskscape’.9 The farming cycle dictated which ruins were encountered day to day, encouraging seasonal repertoires of stories about the origins and meanings of ancient features. Communal memory was long, and stories that could explain how landscapes reached their present state were particularly resilient; since the end of the nineteenth century, Orkney has had an unrivalled number of folklorists, from Ernest Marwick to Tom Muir, who piece this scattered island memory back together.
Over time, townships expanded and the ancient features outside boundary dykes were drawn into the familiar and domestic world. These changes were never without meaning. Mounds, in particular, weren’t neutral features in the landscape: they were sites at which the world of humans intersected with that of supernatural creatures called trows and hogboon.10 The biggest mound in Quandale, the Knowe of Dale, figures in Orkney tales of human abduction by the trows. Throughout the British Isles, uncanny associations caused farm boundaries to be sharply diverted round prominent mounds. This is why, as I kayaked past, I was surprised to see farms and mounds in close conjunction: at least two Quandale farms were built with barrows at their entrances. One such farm is called Knapknowes, which in Old Norse means ‘Mound mound’. Even the Knowe of Dale is situated prominently within the township itself. The decision to do these things would not have been taken lightly: the barrows of Quandale, it seems, were given different meanings than those elsewhere. Because the long chain of Quandale memory was severed by the eviction of its people in 1848, even the most accomplished folklorists cannot reveal the nature of that difference.
Estate maps of this region around 1850 depict the area of the township, relabelled ‘Quandale Park’, as empty, showing nothing of the recently abandoned crofts or ancient sites. This was indicative of successive landowners’ attitude to the land: they took great pains to present it as a resource, not as a place with history, traditions and stories. When Quandale did, eventually, reappear as a focus of their interest it was as a playground for indulging antiquarian fads. Many Rousay mounds have indentations in the top where Edwardian landowners and wealthy tourists indulged their passion for relic-hunting. Yet this early excavation arrived later in Quandale than elsewhere: for two generations the land remained too contested for lairds to be willing to show interest in tradition. Walter Grant, the first new laird of the twentieth century, was one of a pair labelled ‘the broch boys’ for their efforts to recover Bronze Age monuments. To Grant, however, a mound was an object to be described in isolation: the subtlety of the sacred landscape, including the complex interplay of its remains from different eras, evaded him and those who followed. Only recently, in the hands of innovative archaeologists such as Antonia Thomas and Dan Lee has the full complexity of this island’s past begun to be understood. Today, the sacredness of Quandale is in its emptiness. The holiest sites, perhaps, are the nineteenth-century ruins: monuments to the victims of the lairds.
From Rousay I crossed to Eynhallow and wandered its short, circular coastline. The twelfth-century chapel here is another exceptionally atmospheric ruin. It is an intricate but crudely built holy place that looks out upon the fiercest tides. I climbed the chapel walls to view the terrifying overfalls that cut the island off from both sides. Folklore holds that Eynhallow was once enchanted and inaccessible to humans: its occupants were magical Finn-men. They called it Hildaland and were banished, by salt and the sign of the cross, only at the time the church was built. After its sanctification, Eynhallow earth was said to repel even mice and rats so that a bag of the island’s ground became a valuable commodity.
It’s still easy to believe that the fractious white water of the sounds is an enchantment made to hold Eynhallow at arm’s length from the human world. Fulmars and seals take advantage of the safety provided by the tides, patrolling every section of the shore like guardians. I hung around on a patch of still water in the island’s sheltered eastern bay, waiting for the tide to turn, as a group of tiny harbour seals swam repeatedly around and beneath. Glistening round heads came close enough for long whiskers to brush the kayak, their gentle breath audible as they surfaced (figure 3.5). With a warming sun and clear green water rippling over shell sand, this was the perfect tonic to trials by tide: my last moment within the sphere of the enchantment.
The contrast as I rounded the north-west mainland a little later couldn’t have been greater. The wind peaked at sunset, bringing untidy seas (figure 3.4) and forcing a crunching landing into a black, rocky shore. Swings in the weather didn’t let up until I left the islands. The next day, which took me down the western edge of the mainland, began in froth and sea spray. A scarred bull dolphin sped below, warning me away from its pod passing further offshore. Then I passed multitudes of rocky protuberances and crevices; these were bleak but colourful on an afternoon that truly was ‘a stark drama of light and darkness’ (figure 3.7). The day culminated in calm views over the final leg of the journey, including the most famous sandstone stack in Britain: the Old Man of Hoy. I turned inshore at dusk, with Hoy’s red cliffs reflected in the sea to starboard and to port the twinkling lights of Stromness. But before I could explore the bookshop, cafés and arts centre of the first substantial town on my kayak down the coasts, I had to face one of my biggest challenges: the journey between the unrelenting cliffs and tides of Hoy.
Hoy took me two attempts. On my first effort to breach this most treacherous stretch of waters, I tried to take the sting from the crossing by spending the night on Graemsay. I slept by a disused jetty on this small island in the centre of the sound, with Graemsay’s two lighthouses in sight and views across to the orange tinge of Stromness street lamps on the low blue clouds. Despite my precautions, I hit enormous overfalls at Hoy’s north-western corner and was forced back. Even the inglorious retreat to Stromness cost me all the energy, strength and composure I had. I couldn’t help but berate myself. On a sunny day with a gentle breeze my planning had been spectacularly