The sea shapes almost everything in Orkney. For a start, you’re never far from it. On a winter’s night in many homes, there’s the distant roar of waves on the shore, amidst the bluster of the storm and the rattle of windows and doors and roof tiles. An old lady who lived in a waterfront [...]
There’s a storm howling outside and the wind roars down the chimney as the flames lick the birch burning, the heat touching the cold in the room, hailstones dancing on the window. Silver birch, Betula pendula, thrives here. So much heathland for it to colonise, and that burning in my hearth is locally grown and [...]
A time of morning mists and still pools, of roaring winds and falling apples, swirling leaves of fiery hue, of dark nights full of stars and screeching owls. Times of dew-covered cobwebs glistening in the dawn light, mysteriously hanging through railing and gorse. A time when gravestones loom out of the hollows of graveyards, their [...]
Water, the elemental essence of life, of our bodies. A visceral trickle running down the flank of a hill. Yet walking in drought and the bare bones of the hills creak under foot, the brittle and brown grasses, the dusty streams holding no life-giving juice. Parched lips and hard land. Without water, we are and [...]
About 15 years ago I was living and working in Dubai. A desert with the world’s biggest buildings on it, and a high street which is an eight-lane motorway, where public ‘gardens’ are created and removed overnight, trees in huge pots and incredibly realistic astro-turf. It was here I had a dream, a big dream, [...]
I once saw a wildcat. I was approaching a bare heather clad summit, about 900 metres above sea level, when it started out of the heather a few metres ahead and flowed away up the path, over the summit, gone. I grew up in cities. I’d been walking in hills a while. I had no [...]
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 skywards. I soar with them, for a moment. I can see their eyes as they hold a position just teetering [...]
After a bad forecast came a grey Sunday, the first of October. White waves were on the loch and clouds passed swiftly. Tones of gold and crimson lay over the swamp, and the trees were changing; there were drifts of leaves in Finstown although gardens were still bright. A black duck swam in the bay. [...]
My father, John Somerville, was sent to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at the age of 13, and joined the Royal Navy when he was 17 years old,” writes Christopher Somerville in the introduction to his book The January Man. “He served in a destroyer in the Mediterranean through some of the worst and [...]
You’ll know it when you see it, with its delicate mauve petals and yellow centre, its short stalk rising from the little rosette of green leaves. It’s a little distance back from the sea-cliffs, tucked down in the transition zone between maritime heath and the grassy sward with sea pinks that lies behind. It occurs [...]
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