Islay's Scotland

 

Mellow from Angola, busking on Buchanan Street, Glasgow

 

We're enjoying the

deep darkness, and the

light from the stars

 

Howie Firth

 

I
'The Arctic girl is out tonight,' wrote George Mackay Brown in a poem in 1983.
     (Come to the doors.)
     She dances
     In a coat of yellow and green patches.
     And indeed Orcadians have been going to the doors these past few days to see her, as the aurora ripples and glows in the fine frosty winter evenings.
     There's a new excitement about this traditional sight, and the social media are definitely a factor. Facebook pages are full of beautiful images, showing how the night outside is looking right now, and the call to go and look is ringing out across several thousand northern screens.
     There's also a growing awareness of the value of the dark northern skies. There was a time in the 1980s when having a streetlight outside your door was regarded as an essential part of modern life, and those who lived just beyond their extent would write to the island council with words like 'children's safety' suitably prominent. The resulting glow around the towns and villages has reached out to the stage when those who missed out are realising the benefit and enjoying the deep darkness, where you can go outdoors on a frosty night and see the light from the stars pouring down. Suddenly a part of the old Orkney is becoming a treasure in the modern world.

II
The Orkney writer Ernest W Marwick said that we are a winter people, and indeed although we love the long summer evenings when the sun hardly sets, there is something like a homecoming with the arrival of winter, with firesides to gather round, and for many of us, books to read. Orcadians have traditionally featured at the top of library book-borrowing statistics, and winter is the time to sit down and travel the world, past and present. We agree with Thoreau, when he said that 'the winter is thrown to us like a bone to famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it', and so we gnaw down deep into books.
     Earl Rognvald of Orkney, who founded St Magnus Cathedral in the heart of Kirkwall in 1137, took two years away from the cares of government to travel to Jerusalem, and on the way stayed for a time at one of the courts of the troubadours, where his poems were acclaimed. The bishop of Orkney who had him canonised, Bjarni Kolbeinsson, was also a fine poet.
     A later bishop in Orkney, Robert Reid, was one of the lights of learning in Scotland. In his previous duties as Abbot of Kinloss, he turned the abbey into a centre of scholarship, to which students at Aberdeen University would travel for lectures. At Kirkwall, he reformed the structure of the cathedral management to firmly stamp out all the practices that were being criticised by the Protestant reformers. Each post had qualifications, such as a specific degree, and precise duties that had to be carried out, with other supervising. Reid had an academic training and a legal one, and a practical skill in identifying the faults in an organisation structure and finding ways to put them right.
     But he died in Dieppe, while on his way home from carrying out the negotiations for the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots, and his death left a gap that was never filled. When she came to Scotland to rule, two years later, there was no one of that stature to guide and assist her, and the tragedy unravelled.
     'There indeed is a proper queen for the high hills, snow-covered, with the sunlight a blinding gleam in the corries, and blue shadows on the dappled snow,' wrote the Orkney author Eric Linklater, 'for Scotland in the gipsy colours of autumn, of silver birch and discoloured leaf and the solid black-hearted green of the pines; Scotland of swift amber streams and silver firths that take the knees of the mountains in their arms; of the island that float on the western sea under sails of indigo and pearl and the vapour of gold…'.

 

III
I was thinking back tonight to the days when North Sea oil arrived in Orkney, and the buzz of development as the long slow post-war decline of the island had ended and the so-called 'drift from the isles' – the emigration of talented young families – could end. The income from the oil industry provided the resources for a transformation of the Orkney economy – new fishing boats, food factories, restaurants, hotel renovations, leisure centres, craft businesses, arts festivals – and above all a kind of feeling that comes in the air when spring arrives after a long winter.
     Today there are signs that something like this is happening again. Engineering companies are gathering in Orkney, bringing with them the latest wave and tidal power devices, and Orcadians with specialist skills are being recruited by local engineering and environmental companies. There's a feeling of being at the frontier, and young Orcadians are in the middle of it, tackling complex designs for underwater turbine blades or analysing wave tank calculations.
     One factor in the development has been Orkney renewable energy forum, where everyone involved with renewables, whether keen to develop new projects or concerned to preserve the environment, can meet round a table and work together.
     Another factor has been the strong community involvement. The first few wind turbines were put up by outside companies, but for some time now the developments have been owned by the community or by individual farmers. It's been estimated that such locally-owned developments have about 20 times the benefit to the Orkney economy as those owned from outside. That indeed is the model which has worked so successfully to the west of Scotland, on Gigha – and which can provide an island with a significant flow of capital to invest in social and economic development.
     Why, I wonder, have not more areas in Scotland gone down the community route? All credit to HIE for forming the organisation that is now Highland Community Energy. But why in so many areas are all the profits from the turbines going to the big landowners? Is there scope for some kind of Scottish planning requirement, that a certain proportion of the wind generating units in any area have to be community-owned?

 

Howie Firth is by training a mathematical physicist, and by experience a teacher, writer and broadcaster who was one of the pioneers of community radio in Scotland