May 2022

In my reminiscence box, in the drawer marked 1960s, I am going to add a piece of rock. Maybe a piece of coal, maybe a piece of green serpentine, maybe a piece of Old Red Sandstone. This will be to remind me that it is during my lifetime that something tremendous was discovered, something that changed the way we all think about our planet, as totally as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection changed our view of ourselves. And I don’t mean the invention of computers.

When I was in the sixth form, I was studying for an A-level in Geography and an O-level in Geology and I had to learn about Wegener’s Theory of Continental Drift. The idea that the continents changed shape over time, and that the pieces moved into different positions all over the planet, was not a new one. Many people had suggested it over several hundred years. Alfred Wegener had published the most systematic version in 1912. However, it was not until the sixties that the fully-fledged theory of plate tectonics was developed, with an explanation of the mechanism by which the continents might behave like this. We now have maps showing the configurations of the landmasses at most periods in earth’s history.

This is why what is now  Scotland was once situated at the equator, home to rain forests that formed today’s coal, and why the beaches of Orkney are covered with bright red pebbles and St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall is built of red and yellow sandstone.  The bedrock over most of Orkney is Old Red Sandstone (well, not all of it is red), formed between around 420 to 360 million years ago, during the Devonian period, when the climate where Orkney then lay, 10 degrees south of the equator, was hot and dry with heavy seasonal rains.

Between 480 and 420 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, two continents moving across the surface of the Earth collided and part of the ocean floor was pushed to the surface. The piece of green serpentine I picked up on the island of Unst in Shetland was part of that ocean floor.

Today this is as much part of everyday knowledge as the reason for day and night, or the seasons, or why some people have blue eyes and some brown. It is as great a revolution as the invention of computers. I recently watched a TV programme in which David Attenborough talked about having the same experience – it was a new thing when he was going through university, too. My generation have seen a lot of new things.

The tourist season is upon us. The camper vans are rolling off the ferries, the cruise liners are disgorging thousands of passengers into the streets of Kirkwall, and the bus tours are heading for the World Heritage Sites. And the puffins have emerged again. Not only from their burrows in the cliffs of Marwick Head and Westray, but in every tourist shop in Orkney. In fact, puffins might be said to be one of the signature images of the Orkney tourist industry. Their brightly-coloured clown-like faces are easily recognizable by the most amateur of ornithologists, and lend themselves to small gift objects in every media from postcards to soft toys. There is not a gift shop or tourist attraction in Orkney that isn’t stuffed with images of puffins in one medium or another, to varying standards of artistic competence. For me, puffins rank in aesthetic appeal with those yellow plastic ducks. Give me an atmospheric row of cormorants on a wave-lashed rock any day.

However, I wish the birds themselves no harm. In particular, I have no desire to eat puffins any more than bonxies, although in the past puffins were regarded as food in many places from Ireland to Iceland by island families struggling to get enough food to survive. They are still eaten, fresh or smoked, in Iceland and the Faroe islands, although they are a protected species everywhere else in the world.

I wonder how many of our visitors know that seabirds of many species, including puffins, cormorants, fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots and eider ducks, were once a very common source of protein. For centuries, the poverty-stricken crofters of Orkney used to lower themselves over the cliffs on the end of straw ropes to gather seabirds and their eggs. There are early photographs showing men doing this. It was a dangerous business, and there were fatalities. The men used nets, nooses, fishing lines and their bare hands. Puffins were taken out of their burrows using hooked sticks or gloved hands (they pecked).

Seabirds were eaten fresh, or salted or smoked for winter. They do not sound very tasty to me. I do not fancy eating something that tastes better if it has been buried in soil for a few days to get rid of the fishy taste. Mind you, I don’t actually like the idea of eating pheasants that have been hung up to go slightly rotten for a week or so either. Some of the eggs and feathers were used by the men’s families; some eggs were sold in local shops. To get really fresh eggs, the men might go over the cliffs, destroy all the eggs in the nests, and then come back a few days later when the birds had laid more. Feathers were traded or sold to merchants from the continent for stuffing pillows and feather beds (“The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland”, Alexander Fenton 1978, Chapter 59, pp510 – 23).

I was intrigued to discover that in 18^th century Anglesey, puffins were preserved by pickling. Pickled puffins were not just eaten locally, but barrels of them were sent to be sold in London. And they were considered such a delicacy that one ‘lady of the manor', Elizabeth Morgan, boasted of having a recipe for making pickled pigeons look like puffins (“Portraits of an Island: Eighteenth Century Anglesey”, Helen Ramage 1987, pages 103-4). What a horrible thought!