Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th February 2024

The tremendous snow falls of recent weeks have been unusual for their volume and persistence. For most of us they were an inconvenience rather than a cause for alarm. It’s winds that do the damage, rather than snow, and there was nothing to match the Great Storm of 1952, or other fabled years in the distant past. Nonetheless, there’s something discombobulating about seeing the landscape so transfigured.

Flying home on Thursday from my last wine tastings of the season, I became disoriented as we came in over the West Mainland. I peered out the porthole: snow blanketed everything, fields and moors and roads. Every farm had white duvet pulled up to its chin. It was impossible to know if rectangular black patches were houses or ruins or just hayfeeders with trampled mud around them. Swanbister Bay and Waulkmill seemed to have swapped places, and I was still trying to work out if I was looking down at Toab or Tankerness when we landed with a bump as gentle as a head hitting a pillow.

Half an hour later I was driving west out of Kirkwall, thinking of winter voyages in distant times, when the weather could easily kill and not just confuse. There were the Harray men who walked to the shore in Rendall, sometime in the 17th century, in a desperate attempt to find food for their families and avoid starvation. They were smoored in snow and are buried where they fell, below Fibla Fiold.

There were the Viking voyagers five hundred years earlier who broke into Maeshowe to shelter from storms. One party was on its way back from a Saga tour to Jerusalem, and another group was heading home to Firth after a staycation in Stromness. The tomb saved their lives, but if both groups had arrived at the same time there would have been no space for them all. This near miss is believed to have inspired the creation of the world’s first self-catering booking system, Ayrebandb.

A lesser known but equally dramatic tale unfolded on the outskirts of Kirkwall around 400 AD. Pickaquoy – literally ‘the enclosure of the Picts’ – is where it all happened. History on our doorstep! As I drove west out of town I glanced to my left and the scene transformed before my snow-dazzled eyes, as if I’d been carried back in time…

A dark night of cold and blizzards. A group of Picts, struggling home through the drifts after their evening class in advanced symbol carving. Half the party was heading to their lovely warm earth house at Grain, the other half to Rennibister. But as the snow fell heavier, and their feet went numb in their sealskin galoshes, one of the elders, Brude, spoke up: ‘If we do not find shelter soon, we will perish.’

Nechtan cursed. ‘Getting a taxi is hard these days. I wish we had Uber.’

Brude pointed through the whiteout. ‘Yonder, a bigging of some kind. Let us make haste. Whether there is company matters not: at least there will be a rooftree over our heads.’  

And so the Picts stumbled onwards, coming at last to a set of steps and an imposing double door. Some of them put their shoulders to it, and soon they were inside. Brude struck a flint and lit a flaming torch – or plicko, to use the Pictish word. At once a vast room was illuminated, a bright circle where they stood, flames flickering into dark shadows further out.

Their voices echoed and their boots squeaked on the floor. ‘Look,’ said Nechtan. ‘Strange markings at our feet.’

He was right. Straight lines and curved ones, boxes and circles, white and red and yellow.

‘They look like guidelines for the playing of various games,’ said Brude. ‘Perhaps you stand there with a small circular net on the end of a stick, and hit a feathery ball over an obstacle towards your competitor. He whacks it back, and the first to 21 is the winner.’

‘Bruck,’ grunted Nechtan. ‘These are stems for Ogham to be written onto. And who better than we, skilled carvers, to memorialise ourselves and our heroic exploits.’

And so it was that the greatest corpus of Pictish Ogham was created. Sadly, it is no longer visible, having been covered over during the construction of the sports centre. But records taken before the founds were poured reveal the poetry and wit of these Picts:

Nechtan rules okay.

Brude carved here, not much else to do.

I heart Domelch.

I think those were the translations, anyway. My plane was delayed by eight hours at Heathrow, and when I got to Aberdeen it was nearly midnight. Less than five hours sleep then a flight to…Sumburgh! By the time I finally landed in Orkney I was more than a little dumfoonert.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 15th February 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.

Duncan McLeanComment