In recent years our shop has benefited enormously from increased tourism. Almost every business in Orkney has had the opportunity to profit similarly, and many have made the most of the chance.

OIC figures show that tourism expenditure in Orkney grew from £31 million in 2013 to £67 million in 2019, a growth of 225% in six years. And that’s just the money spent directly by the visitors. There’s secondary spend too: all those tourists need places to eat and drink, and food, beer and spirits to consume while they’re there; most need accommodation in the shape of B&Bs, self-catering and hotels; they need guides to show them around; they need musicians to entertain them; they want craft, art and books as souvenirs.

There’s an army of people employed to look after the visitors, and their wages and profits are in turn fed back into the economy.

What happens when the tourists disappear? How will it affect us? Not this year – which is a disaster allowing little but survival – but in the longer term.

The historian WPL Thomson provides clues. Orkney has seen various booms and busts over the centuries: herring fishing, linen manufacture, even the remarkable egg boom of the mid-20th century which required over 800,000 poultry in 1950, at which point some farmers made more from eggs than cattle. By the start of this century, the number of hens kept had reduced to under 8,000.

The parallel that seems closest is the collapse of the kelp industry around 1830. Collecting and processing kelp for production of alkali and soap had boomed after 1770, and for several decades it provided a living for thousands. Some places were dangerously reliant on kelp: two generations of North Ronaldsay folk depended on it almost entirely, and when prices collapsed and starvation loomed, 32 families left the island in a planned emigration in 1836.

The downfall of kelp, due largely to new chemical processes, resulted in impoverishment of Orcadians in all walks of life. It affected the 3,000 directly involved with harvesting, but also suppliers of the vast numbers of horses needed to carry heavy kelp about, the cartwrights and many more.

*Available from all good local bookshops.*

It’s unlikely that tourism will disappear as completely as kelp did. But it won’t bounce back to its 2019 levels overnight. The success of tourism is the result of decades of planning and investment by the OIC and Visit Scotland as well as private firms. It’s been helped by the archaeological discoveries of recent years like the Ness of Brodgar – a dig now threatened by loss of income – and resultant press and TV coverage. It’s going to take years, if not decades, to make up the ground lost this bleak summer.

But we do have an opportunity now. The old model of tourism has been disrupted and maybe destroyed. And that gives us the chance to imagine a new version – greener, more manageable, maybe lower in volume but higher in spend.

What form exactly that might take is only beginning to be discussed. Orkney can lead the way, as it did at the start of the kelp boom, but also in devising ways to recover after kelp’s demise. As Willie Thomson wrote, ‘…the habit of thought which imagines that change comes to a ‘remote’ place like Orkney from a more ‘advanced’ centre is not necessarily correct.’

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 23rd April. Other diaries will appear weekly as long as the Covid-19 crisis goes on. I intend to post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 19th April