Plus ca change...

Thank you for your birthday wishes. I don't know why 65 seems so much more of a milestone than 60 did. Maybe it's because when I was 60 I was still working, my mother was still alive and I felt of more use to the world? Retirement is very pleasant but I often feel rather guilty at not working, especially as women only slightly younger than I are having to work much longer, with the new pension arrangements.

 

Anyway, back to Orkney.

 

 

This is St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, which was founded in 1137 and took about 300 years to build. After all the New Stone Age buildings, this seemed virtually new, but is pretty impressive for such a small place.

Kirkwall also features the Bishop's Palace, which dates from a mere 1600 but hasn't been so well looked after as the cathedral. Mr Life is standing in the great hall, which used to look more like -

- this. You have to use your imagination.

But there are older ruins - lots more - to enjoy. This is the Brough of Birsay, with Pictish and Norse buildings.

Again you can see how the builders used slabs of stone to build cupboards and beds and fireplaces.

This is where they got the stone from - the natural slab formations all around them.

This is what the buildings might have looked like.

Back in time again to the Neolithic (New Stone Age - 5000 years ago) period, here's the Unstan Chambered Cairn. Again, it has the stone stalls dividing it up inside, though there's also an extra chamber off to the side. Mr L decided not to go in because he's a bit tall, but I did. I have to say that I didn't stay in long. It was somewhat claustrophobic - not that I thought I was claustrophobic, but arrgghh. When it was opened up, they found lots of bones in the stalls and two complete crouching skeletons in the extra chamber.

Now, here's something really interesting - or at least, I thought so. We visited a croft (subsistence farm) house, which has been preserved as a museum. It's comparatively recent - dating from the eighteenth/nineteenth century. And look, above, at what they used for shelves. No trees on Orkney, so of course they used slabs of stone.

And this is the byre for the animals. Stone stalls, just like in the Neolithic houses and tombs. It's not really surprising - people just use what they have, and they didn't have wood apart from driftwood or imported wood.

A stone ? water tank in the garden, just like the ? fish tanks in the Neolithic houses at Skara Brae.

And a stone box bed, again, just like those in the Neolithic houses.

What particularly surprised me was that no one pointed the similarity out to us. I suppose it's all quite natural, especially to an Orcadian. But it made me very thoughtful. Time telescopes.

Flowers

I don't know if we picked a particularly floriferous time of year, but both on Orkney and on Shetland, the wild flowers were spectacular. Campion here...

... and a LOT of thrift, or sea pinks, together here with bird's foot trefoil.

Here combined with cow parsley or something of the sort.

I have more to say about Orkney and Shetland but not now because since we came home, we've had the children here a lot, since their parents are selling their house (they hope) and it's easier to have it looking neat without the small untidiers around. And as a result, I'm somewhat weary.

It's very difficult to get Grandson to smile naturally for the camera at the moment. He does try, by sticking on a huge cheesy grin for about one second before returning to whatever he's busy with.

It's much more successful with Granddaughter, who's at the easily amused stage.

How I love them. But they're exhausting. I can't think how I managed to look after my three, mainly by myself during the day, and then do lots of marking at night - I didn't work when they were tiny apart from teaching evening classes (which are fairly exhausting too). Possibly I was slightly younger then.

I had Zumba today, too, the first time for five weeks. Goodness, our young man teacher fairly bounces around. Again, age may have something to do with it - though I was never very supple even when young.

I'm going to have a nice soak in the bath with "John Aubrey and His Friends" by Anthony Powell. It's not the most wonderful biography I've ever read (I feel I'd enjoy it more if I knew more about John Aubrey - and I don't know that much, which is why I bought the book...) but it's nice and quiet and doesn't keep asking me "Why?"

Buildings

On one day of our Orkney holiday we visited the Italian Chapel. This was built round two Nissen huts out of cheap materials - plaster, concrete, driftwood, scrap iron - by Italian prisoners of war during World War 2. Various of them were tradesmen and one was an artist. It's amazingly lovely and touching.

This is just a trompe l'oeil window on flat plasterboard.

You can see the love, effort and faith that went into the building and decorating of the chapel, to make a reminder of their homeland.

 

And this is Skara Brae, a Neolithic village (5000 years old) that was (partly) uncovered in a storm in 1850 and subsequently excavated. There are Neolithic remains all over Orkney; this was the first we visited, but we saw quite a few more, and they share similar features. There are no trees to speak of on Orkney and so the people had no access to wood except perhaps driftwood. So they used stone, which is plentiful and which lends itself to being split into slabs (though without metal - this was still the Stone Age - it can't have been easy to do this).

 

 

Most of the houses have these "dressers" opposite the doors. Whether the people put ornamental things on them (it's so tempting to imagine that they might have put their favourite pot on the shelf, filled with some of the beautiful wild flowers that grow on Orkney) or simply used them for storage - or possibly some devotional objects - no one knows. The inhabitants also seem to have had stone beds - presumably filled with bedding made of heather or straw and covered with animal skins - and fireplaces in the middle of the rooms, and stone storage boxes and possibly stone fish tanks.

 

You do half-wonder if it's some elaborate hoax and you may see Barney Rubble driving along in his stone car... . But assuming that it's not, it's just so amazing to see how people might have lived so long ago. It makes you realise how like Neolithic people we must be... and how lucky we are in comparison.

 

 

 

This is a tomb, which bears some resemblance to the houses. We saw various tombs and they were all quite similar. The people seem to have put only bones in the tombs, on stone shelves - not whole bodies or even complete sets of bones. There's a theory that they may have moved bones in and out for some reason - maybe something to do with the stages of a journey to the afterlife, but no one knows.

 

 

The entrance to this tomb is very low, so a trolley is provided for you to lie on and push yourself backwards inside. Mr Life did this, though I, being shorter, just crawled.

 

These are the rocks just outside the tomb. I imagine they haven't changed a lot in the past 5000 years and you can see how they form natural slabs. It seems likely that the bodies were exposed on the rocks until the bones were picked clean by birds and animals.

 

 

And these are the Stones of Stenness, one of various henges (or at least bits of henges) on Orkney. Just as with Stonehenge, there are various theories about why they were erected, but no one actually knows.

 

It's all very humbling. We're here for a brief time and then we go. I'm not sure that our generation will leave anything so permanent behind.