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 [...]
North Ronaldsay sheep are an ancient breed, part of the family of Northern European short-tailed sheep. Other members include the Soay sheep and the Iceland sheep and other native breeds spread across the north from the Baltic to the North Atlantic. The sheep are small and hardy, with most of the males – and also [...]
Planting trees is an Orcadian labour of love. The salt winds of autumn are particularly destructive, and in a poor year they can blacken foliage and tear off the leaves before the various nutrients have been absorbed into the rest of the plant. Shelter is thus important, and you can see from the shapes of [...]
When I walked down the main street of Cromarty on a sunny August day at 1.15, I saw only two people. Save for the cry of seagulls, there was not a sound. Then, in the empty street, I heard the tinkle of knives on plates through an open window. I thought perhaps that later on [...]
Every Friday I would run from school and straight onto the M.V. Graemsay that would take me to the island of Hoy: my muddy childhood paradise. My family had a cottage on the island that sat high up on a hill. It was heated by peat that my Dad had dug up and dried earlier [...]
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