Shetland and Orkney

March 2015

*SHETLAND AND ORKNEY 

By Mark Greig

I found myself in Winchester, in the summer of 2005, being practically homeless having just formally quit university and then also been kicked out of my dad’s house. I spent the night in the youth hostel in the town and I got an urge to volunteer and do so in Shetland. I had been contemplating what I should do with my life quite a lot and found myself going around in circles and so the time had come for radical action. Shetland would be a chance to go off and explore wilderness and remote lands, I suppose to try and gain some composure and find the right direction for my life.

I got out my wwoofing book and punched into my mobile the number of a organic farm on a tiny island off mainland shetland. Someone picked up the phone and we spoke for a while, I tried to sound capable and enthusiastic, they tried to make sure I was quite prepared to come and would accept the limitations of being so far away from everything as well as being a guest on a drug rehabilitation retreat. This meant it was possible I would be around drug addicts going cold turkey, who might be quite unstable. Anyway we agreed on plans and I then set off to make the 2 day journey up to shetland. The trip was full of new places, covering areas I’d always wanted to go to, like the train ride from inverness to wick and the bus along the very top of Scotland to Thurso and Scrabster. Then there was Orkney itself. The ferry across to the island was pretty rough, I always feel sick on ferries, but this must have been one of the choppiest stretches of sea and it seemed to go on forever. I do remember there was a quote by George Mackay Brown stensilled onto the ferry doors: “The essence of Orkney’s magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light”. Nothing captured my desires more at the time than these words, they were precisely what had brought me there.

From Orkney there is a further 8 hour overnight ferry to Shetland and luckily I had found the remedy for sea sickness towards the end of the last ferry trip, to just lie down and stay still. I employed this trick quite successfully for the next 8 hours and at 7am woke to find the ship coming into Lerwick harbour. My hosts were picking me up after church, and we met and drove north and east for a couple of hours, passing a countryside that was very much like the lake district, except on a much smaller scale. There were lakes, but just small ones, mountains but not quite as high. Finally we arrived at another harbour, this time taking the ferry to the island of Papa Stour. This island is about 4 miles across and contains about 50 inhabitants. This was going to be home for two weeks, I was again quite nervous of my ability to cope and fit in with these hardy island folk. They were blunt and direct when they spoke, talking of earlier days when they had donned wet suits and gone driving in Scapa flow, helping to build and maintain the area despite the terrible weather that you often get on the island.

We arrived at their house, which was at the end of a dirt track, and I was shown to my little annex, which consisted of a basic room and toilet facilities, but was totally mine for the time I was there. It was perfect, although a little lonely I suppose. Seeing the basic provisions, a fan heater, a collection of short paperback books, and a tatty rustic looking bed, it kickstarted my survival instincts afresh, I wondered to myself if the blankets would stave off the cold and whether my meager snacks would last me in case of hunger. I needn’t have worried. The hosts didn’t let me starve, we enjoyed a good breakfast, with a kind of second breakfast at 11am, followed by lunch at 2 and dinner with seconds in the evening.  Although this seems a lot to eat, when you are up and active on the farm, riding quad bikes, fixing gate posts, herding and shearing sheep, raking cut grass to make silage and generally getting about, the food was always welcome and a second breakfast of toast and jam made perfect sense.

The hosts had a house that was designed and built by themselves when they first moved to the island. It had modern features like an upper-storey lounge with panoramic views of the sea. Here we would sit in the evenings and read and talk, play pool and watch TV. I remember finding a book there that was fascinating, i read it all in one go. It was about a man who went to work at a school with children who had special needs. It told of his growing friendships with the children and the things he learned from working with them. One particular child he encountered was particularly disruptive, and came to learn that he saw himself as though through a shattered mirror, with many different distorted reflections, rather than a consistent and true reflection of reality.

Anyway, one evening they told me that a man was going to come who was a heroin addict, and who had got into trouble and was coming to the farm as rehab. This was fine, he came and while he looked extremely pale and ill, he didn’t cause too much of a problem. It was a few days into his radical detox that he started to become argumentative, refusing food and talking of leaving. This was not allowed by the rules, and he was persuaded to continue to keep within the guidelines or risk being sent back and facing the authorities. I think eventually after about 5 days, he had had enough and determined he was going to get back to Aberdeen where he could get a fix of heroin. It was a shame to see him go, as we had talked and gone on walks together and he seemed like a regular decent person, but that was his addiction calling.

I would recommend anyone to go to Orkney and Shetland. It is a place of wonder, somewhere which is very raw and natural, a distant place but one that inspires the imagination like no other.