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Old Ways and New Journeys
“I’m nothing more than someone who is trying to gain an understanding of my past history through learning the skills that have enabled us all to be here standing on this earth today.” These words
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Living off the Land
Unless you are a forager, you might not know that the early leaves of the rowan tree taste like marzipan, that shoots from the pine tree can make an awesome spice, that the saponins in
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The great cartographer: Murdoch Mackenzie
The great cartographer: Murdoch Mackenzie One of the great names in cartography is Murdoch Mackenzie, whose charts of Orkney waters in the 18th century were a breakthrough. His story was told in a talk to
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Dreaming of Mars
Dreaming of Mars It’s just on fifty years since the first footstep on the Moon. At the time it seemed that the Moon landing would be the first of many journeys that would take us
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Kill or cure
A late spring can bring feelings of malaise and tiredness. One of the tonics common to Orkney last century involved catching snails late at night, when they have a quiet feed, suspending them on a
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Cape Wrath – What’s in a Name?
When Bob Tateson retired from teaching in Orkney he volunteered to help look after the bothies in the wild and lonely land below Cape Wrath. He has spent ten years here, working, walking and wild
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The darkness of the winter solstice
Winter stayed well into April, and as I dug holes for apple trees T. S. Eliot swirled in my head: “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and
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Eddington’s universe
Whenever the poet George Mackay Brown reorganised his library, getting rid of some of the overspill, some books from younger years would always remain. There was the first Penguin book from 1935, a biography of
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Music to reach to the stars
Sir William Rowan Hamilton was one of the greatest thinkers the world has seen. He created elegant mathematical forms that are today at the heart of modern physics, in the study of waves and the
“I’m nothing more than someone who is trying to gain an understanding of my past history through learning the skills that have enabled us all to be here standing on this earth today.” These words [...]
Soaring. That is the word. On top of the world, or so it seems, above the busy valleys below, side by side with the ravens as they soar on the up-blasts of winter blizzard rushing [...]
Whenever the poet George Mackay Brown reorganised his library, getting rid of some of the overspill, some books from younger years would always remain. There was the first Penguin book from 1935, a biography of [...]
Winter stayed well into April, and as I dug holes for apple trees T. S. Eliot swirled in my head: “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and [...]
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