Diary of a Shopkeeper, 25th April
Things are looking up for the shopkeeper. Last year’s summer holiday was one day in Rackwick. This year it’s four days in Rackwick.
Admittedly, the end of April is a bit early for summer holidays, but you have to take them when you can. It’s not that I’m expecting the shop to be hoaching with tourists from now on, more that self-catering properties across the county seem to be thoroughly booked up for most of the summer.
So, here we are, and it’s gorgeous. And for the third diary in a row I find myself turning to George Mackay Brown, who did more to fix the image of Rackwick in the public imagination than anyone else:
‘The poignant thing about this beautiful valley is that, apart from Glen, farmed by Jack Rendall, it has been utterly abandoned. The floor of the valley and its fertile western slope are littered with half-ruined crofts – the windows blind, the roofs fallen in, the hearth-stones forever black. There was abundant life in Rackwick once; the life ebbed out rapidly through some flaw; the place is full of the ghosts of centuries.’
Rackwick is anything but abandoned now. Only a handful of ruins remain. Most have been restored and improved in an effort nearly as mighty as the one required to carve fields out of the moss, and raise up the original houses, a thousand years ago.
These past 12 months have offered a unique opportunity to experience Rackwick and many other parts of Orkney in a way that’s never usually possible. I mean, without folk fae aff. There are no camper vans in the Rackwick car park this weekend, and no tents pitched by the bothy.
It’s true, there’s a car at every cottage, and reek in many a lum – or from many a barbeque. But familiar faces glimpsed on the Hoy Head or along the beach confirm that those visitors have come no further than from Kirkwall and Stromness.
A few houses are lived in permanently, some by the week or weekend. Others are being restored or extended. It’s not the same as when there was a permanent crofting community here, but there’s no doubt that ‘abundant life’ has returned to Rackwick. George’s predictions that the hearth-stones would be ‘forever black’ turns out to be too pessimistic.
The very act of him writing those words was the crucial point in turning the tide for Rackwick. They created an image of the place as both beautiful and romantically desolate, and so enticed thousands of visitors to seek it out. By painting such a vivid picture of a dead valley, George helped bring it back to life. Who says writing doesn’t change anything?
His influential portrait appeared in the collection of essays, poems, biography and drama, An Orkney Tapestry. Originally published in 1969, George let it slip out of print after a few years and refused requests for new editions.
I’ve never understood why, as it’s one of his best-loved books. It’s also the book in which he reveals most about himself, and his beliefs and doubts. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he didn’t want it reprinted.
The good news is that a new edition is finally appearing this June, in George’s centenary year. A new generation of readers will be able to acquaint themselves with his portrait of Robert Rendall, his thoughts on language and history, the folklore of midsummer and midwinter, and of course his version of Rackwick.
Duncan Grant was one of the Grants of Rothiemurcus, but by 1908 was establishing himself in London as a painter and designer, one of the emerging Bloomsbury Group. In the summer of that year, he wrote to John Maynard Keynes, ‘I have just received an invitation to go and spend some time in the Orkney Islands with a millionaire who owns Hoy.’ This was leather-magnate and pioneering Alpinist Thomas Middlemore, who had bought Melsetter House and the vast estate associated with it ten years earlier.
After just two days in Melsetter, Grant was bored, and wrote to Keynes to join him instead in Rackwick: ‘Where the people are frequently mad from too frequent incest. There is no priest, no church and no policemen. Don’t you think we’d better go there at once?’
Being unable to find accommodation in Rackwick itself, the couple lodged at Orgill Farm, at the other end of the glen. They stayed two months, working in the morning and in the afternoon walking the hills and shore. In the evening their entertainment was to read Jane Austen to each other. (Now Hoy has broadband, so Netflix can provide the Austen.)
It’s a striking image: one of Britain’s most important modernist artists, and one of the world’s most influential economists, spending months in Hoy at a time when the authorised version – as laid out in An Orkney Tapestry – would have it an isolated, close-knit Eden of fishermen with ploughs.
George’s writing covered Orkney so extensively and persuasively that it has shaped how many of us see the islands and understand their history. His centenary year provides us with an ideal stimulus to look afresh – without diminishing George’s achievement – at scenes and stories that have been fixed for decades by his telling.
Rackwick may be full of the ‘ghosts of centuries’, but the ghosts include London aesthetes and philosophers as well as farmers and fishermen.
Duncan Grant (L) and John Maynard Keynes (R) , 1912
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 29th April. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.