Broad-leaved trees can grow almost anywhere sheep and deer are largely excluded. You can see natural regrowth on sheep-free hills, had to reach verges and central motorway reservations where deer fear to tread. But excluding tiny...
Frontiers 2022
OISF 2022
Sea and Land
The clock, the fax, and the genius from Watten
Alexander Bain Alexander Bain was one of the most prolific inventors of the 19th century, and is...
Painting Nordic musical landscapes
The concert Sagas and Seascapes by the group Nordic Viola featured a rich mix of images to...
The Horizontal Oak
The new book by naturalist/author Polly Pullar, The Horizontal Oak, is a personal one, looking at...
The wonder that is Slime Mould
We watched a television programme about Slime Mould titled The Blob: A Genius...
A lesson from the dandelions
Nature could well be our anchor over the next few months. Such a special time of year… it...
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:...
Haar
Low cloud is quite frequent in Orkney, especially in the winter. Coming from the West, it rolls in...
Deploy the drones
We are now all familiar with how the ROV, the remotely operated vehicle as it is called, is...
The Ram on the Rock
Like a Nordic port of old, the Faroese capital of Torshavn smells evocatively of salt and tar. As...
Riches from the sea
A mile or so up the coast from the farm, a whale corpse is decomposing in a ‘geo’ (the Orcadian...
Der Mond
I’ve been getting text messages from the moon. A note pops up on my phone asking if the moon can...
Following the Festival
Take out the carbon
There is both urgency and resignation in the voice of world-renowned oceanographer, polar ice...
Oh, starboard your helm!
This time it could be the big one. Fire on the Amazon, fire in Siberia, a dome of heat above the...
The Heart of the Land
2020 Orkney International Science Festival went online. Like many events this year, technology came...
The robots and the planets
What is the next step in exploring the solar system? Could robots go where we cannot? Could we and...
Linking towers for fire safety
Bill Graham, a chartered engineer and inventor with various patents to his name, has come up with...
Dreaming of Mars
It’s just on fifty years since the first footstep on the Moon. At the time it seemed that the Moon...