On the Edge of Britain

The Orkney Islands are such an isolated community that they have facilities which you not normally find provided for such a small population. Only 21,000 people live on all the islands combined. Kirkwall, the capital, has only 8,000 residents. Yet it has a hospital, a cinema, a theatre, a BBC radio station, an airport, a cathedral, other fine churches, two supermarkets, a good selection of interesting shops, a beautiful large modern library, several sporting facilities, including a golf course, and a fair number of restaurants and museums. Though playing any outdoor ball games such as golf, tennis or soccer in the Orkney wind would be a challenging exercise to say the least.

A modern travel centre in Kirkwall is the hub for bus services around the “mainland”, the largest single island in the group. But the information sheets in this attractive terminus make it all too obvious how isolated you are. The bus services are far less frequent than in a large town or city, so unless you have a car you are seriously handicapped in moving around. The climate is a disincentive to walking or cycling. And if you want to get to another island or the Scottish mainland you are restricted by the limited services and heavily out of pocket for the boat or air fare. It is great having your own local hospital, but of course in a real medical emergency, where the local hospital could not cope, the next better hospital is a long way to the south and on the Scottish mainland – either in Inverness or Aberdeen. So you are talking helicopter transfer (weather permitting) if you want to save the patient.

The isolation and dreadful weather might drive you to drink. There are at least two distilleries on the “mainland” and I checked out the Highland Park distillery on the south edge of Kirkwall. It is a surprisingly large industrial sprawl for such a small town, but most of the buildings are the storehouses where the whisky matures over many years. They boast that they make the finest single malt whisky in the world. As the prices range from £27 to £185 ($54 to $370) for a 0.7 litre bottle, the customers obviously believe it. The $370 is for the 30 year old malt. And if you think that is pricey, they are about to launch a 40 year malt, at £899 ($1,800) for 0.7 litre.

The best guided tours I have had in my life have all been around breweries – the Carlsberg one in Copenhagen, Heineken in Amsterdam and Courage in Reading. This tour lived up to the high standards set by those much bigger establishments. The charming and enthusiastic young lady who guided our group explained all the steps in the process, from the soaking and germination of the barley to the long term maturation in storage (in special oak casks, already flavoured by sherry storage, imported from Spain) and the final bottling. The barley is not grown locally – it would be destroyed by the wind. But at least it is Scottish, shipped in from Aberdeenshire. She claimed that part of the secret of Highland Park’s special flavour is the peat used – Orkney peat is different from Scottish or Irish peat because there are no trees contributing to the compacted vegetable matter.

At the end of the tour we had samples of the product, though I must confess any fine distinctions of sweetness, maltiness or peatiness are lost on me. Definitely a case of casting pearls before swine.

The tiny Wireless Museum in Kirkwall is enthralling and is easily the smallest museum I have ever visited – we are talking one room, about 18 by twelve feet, crammed on all sides with home entertainment gear, including old gramophones. It is just the sort of place I seek out eagerly, obviously run as a labour of love by a husband and wife team. It reminded me of the Michigan Military Museum in Frankenmuth, or the tiny Telephone Museum in Budapest. It has one of the oldest working radio sets in the world, dating from 1912. The progress of radio development from 1920 to the 1980s is charted in a wonderful collection of mostly British equipment, with a few American and European examples also on display. It is mostly domestic gear, but some military examples are on display also.

The museum also houses car entertainment products from the 1930s onwards, including the old 8 track cassettes from the early 1970s. The very first British car radios in 1932 cost around £32 or $160 at the rate of exchange at that time. This was around 12 weeks pay for the average working Joe –that is assuming that he had a job in the middle of the great depression. But then he could not have afforded a car to put the radio in anyway. Even more recent and more mundane radios were startlingly expensive, bearing in mind people’s purchasing power. A very ordinary domestic radio from the 1960s cost most of a week’s average pay at that time. A splendid late 1940s set, clad in polished wood like a cocktail cabinet and taking up almost as much space, would have cost many weeks labour; more than a modern 40 inch flat screen TV.

There is scope for adding more to their collection. In Cologne City Museum they have two samples of the cheap radios mass produced in the Hitler era so the population could have easy access to Nazi propaganda broadcasts. In the superb Technology Museum in Berlin they have two very sophisticated 1930s radios with maps of Europe on the front. As you tuned into a particular station (Paris, Brussels, Hamburg or whatever) that city lit up on the map. The 1938 model showed Austria as a separate country; the 1939 model merged Austria into the Reich.

There are other fascinating features all over Orkney. Ancient stone remains older than the Pyramids show that people have long found ways of surviving here. On the north-west corner, at Brough Head, an isolated lighthouse on a tiny island stands sentinel looking out across the Atlantic. The wind feels extra raw and violent here. The unmanned lighthouse is powered by a combination of solar panels, batteries and wind turbines. I wondered why the designers bothered with the solar panels and batteries, but maybe even here the wind drops occasionally.

But there are examples of carbon free power generation all over this area. I saw two large wind farms just across the water on the northern Scottish mainland and the huge nuclear power station at Dounreay – obviously remote from any large city, in case anything went Chernobyl-shaped. This particular station has had its share of bad publicity on leaks and the lid blowing off the cover of one pit containing a very nasty brew of radioactive gunge when the festering pressure got too high. The windfarms were extraordinary sights in the bleak scenery, especially towards sunset as their spinning blades chopped the sunlight coming through my windscreen. Much of the nuclear power is transmitted south, so you have a huge parade of pylons and cables marching across the empty countryside.

As you go west from Scrabster, the tiny port where the ferry returns you to the Scottish mainland, you pass into some of the most glorious and varied scenery in Europe. You pass under an avenue of trees (the first that I’ve seen in days!!!!) and head along the A836 road.

“A” roads in Britain are traditionally the main arteries, or at least they were before the building of the “M” roads, the motorways. The lower the number, the more important the road. So the A1 runs north from London to Scotland, the A2 runs south-east from London to Dover (and thus France), the A3 runs south-west towards the major Atlantic port of Southampton and so on. So you can correctly guess that the A836 and the succeeding A838 road are way down the pecking order of British highways. But, even so, you imagine that they will be moderately good.

In fact they are the first “A” roads I have seen with cattle grids and passing places. You need the passing places, because for much of their length they are single track and you have to pull over to let the car coming the other way pass you without a head-on collision. This obviously encourages a high level of alertness, courtesy, cooperation, consideration and anticipation in most drivers. But some people, like the Land Rover driver who narrowly missed me, know that if they hit anything smaller than a bus the other guy will come off second best. And there just aren’t any buses up here. You could not safely operate big vehicles along these roads, which must add to the complexities of life in such communities as hang on here on the edge of Britain.

The tension of driving on these roads is magnified by the inconsistency of their standard. For quite a long way west of Scrabster, the A836 is a beautiful “A” road – wide enough to drive quickly and safely, with enough curves to keep you on your toes and avoid the tedium of so many straight American and Canadian roads. Then you plunge into a long stretch of single track, then a section of two-lane highway, usually going through a village, then back to single track. The pressure is amplified by steep gradients, sharp bends and the possibility of sheep wandering across the road whenever the spirit moves them. Many wander unfenced by the road, but most have enough wit to graze quietly off the tarmac.

But all the work is worth it for the magnificent landscapes. Mountains, lakes, seaviews, extraordinary variation in vegetation delight the eye round every bend. You could write a very fat book on the microclimates along these roads wrapping round the north-west corner of Scotland, where the Gulf Stream also wraps around the coast and warms the northern air enough to produce some very unexpected results.. On the high bleak ground you get sub-arctic flora (you can say that again). In little pockets like the hamlet of Tongue (clumsily Anglicised from the Gaelic Tonga) you have a picture postcard Mediterranean enclave of impossibly blue sea, white sand and lush green vegetation and trees. At least it looks Mediterranean until you get out of the car and feel the chill on your skin. Go over a high crest, dive down a bowel-loosening hill with a sharp bend at the bottom and you come to a sheltered spot with another little cluster of dense greenery which would not survive at the top of the hill.

You see Gaelic names all over the Highlands on signposts and town nameboards, duplicated below the English version. They are a reminder of the continuing survival of this ancient language which is still taught in many Scottish schools.

The problems of driving on the A836/A838 pale when you try going round the equally magnificent Isle of Skye. It is one of the few major Scottish islands linked by a bridge to the mainland. You would not believe the endless rows down the years over this splendid arched bridge; the financing, the building, the charging of tolls. I must have missed the most recent episodes in the row, because I was able to drive across it in both directions without paying anything. What an incredibly beautiful corner of the planet, deserving all the songs and poems written about it. The roads are good until you pass the ferry port of Uig (pronounced Weeg, I think), from where ships go to the Hebrides Islands well to the west of the mainland.

But then the good road, the A87, ends just after Uig and you have the A855 curling round the north end of the island. Yes, the bigger number denotes an even narrower and scarier road than the A838, with sheer drops into the Atlantic, tinier passing places and bigger vehicles coming the other way. Like the Mercedes mini-coach with the luggage trailer in tow. You Cannot Be Serious, Man, to quote John McEnroe. Or the motor caravans with their fibreglass flanks bulging beyond the normal width of a Ford delivery van. Are you totally insane taking such a vehicle along this road? Or the swarms of motorcyclists. No question, you are insane. In fact, both the A836/838 and the A855 attract more motor cyclists than I’ve seen anywhere in years, all eager to give their Hondas and Suzukis a good thrash along these, er, challenging roads and all looking old enough to know better. It must be a shock to the European drivers, like the Belgian-registered Peugeot pulled over in one passing place, who are used to decent roads back home.

Back on the mainland, the roads generally get better and the scenery less spectacular as you head south. But wherever you go you are reminded of the cultural and economic changes of globalization. It may be extra obvious to a visitor because you are using the restaurants and hotels so much. The second and third persons I spoke to in Scotland, at the Starfish restaurant in Lockerbie, were both Polish. The waitress who served my breakfast at the hotel in Grantown-on Spey was from Hungary. The young lady at the Pomona café, a long established favourite eating spot in Kirkwall, was from Warsaw. At the Aros arts centre (www.aros.co.uk) on the Isle of Skye, they were advertising a play set on the island. – with a Polish lady directing and producing it. The Aros program also advertised the recent Patrick Dempsey/Michelle Monaghan movie “Made of Honor”, which was partially filmed in that part of Scotland using 250 local people as extras. Given the population density of that part of the world, there was a good chance that the locals would see someone they knew if they turned up for the film. It was a reminder that even on the edge of Britain you are inevitably at the heart of the world.