February 2024

It’s been an unusual beginning to the year in Orkney. We have had the worst weather in years. In the middle of January we had five days of snow, a rapid thaw which flooded the fields and the roads, followed by strong gales. And power cuts of course. Mid-February and it’s more of the same. The snowdrops are out – under another 6 inches of snow which is due to last for 5 days.

Orkney is used to coping with winter. Everyone knows there will be power cuts lasting for hours, and that they need to have an alternative source of heat, either oil-fired central heating or a backup stove burning wood or coal. (Sorry, Environment, adequate affordable storage batteries are not available yet, I did enquire). Other essentials are a camping gas stove, tinned food, and an LED lantern or candles. A mobile phone is a must, plus a battery charger to call the emergency services when the internet and the landline phones go down. Tough luck, of course, if you have no mobile phone signal in your area, which many of us don't. Oh, and a battery-powered radio to keep in touch with the situation. People are very good about keeping an eye on elderly friends, relations and neighbours, and fetching milk and prescriptions for those who can’t get out. The council snow ploughs are pretty efficient up here, and the farmers are brilliant about helping out, using their tractors as snow ploughs, even taking the district nurse to an elderly patient in a tractor when her car got stuck.

There are problems, of course. When the weather is this bad the ferries and planes are unable to run, so essential medical supplies and visiting medical specialists can’t get here. People can’t get to hospital appointments for which they have been waiting for months, not just appointments at hospitals off-island, but appointments at the local hospital too. Fresh food can’t get through – the butcher in Stromness had to close at one point because their freezer was empty. Even Tesco has been running short of fresh fruit and vegetables, let alone the Outer Isles community shops. The ferries from the Outer Isles have to be cancelled, so do bus services during the worst periods, and the Churchill Barriers have been closed much more often than usual, so people who don’t live on Mainland haven’t been able to get to Kirkwall. Schools have to close, of course.

But think about what people had to put up with in the past. There was no electricity, and imported coal and oil did not arrive until the 19C. In the past most people in Orkney relied on peat, but the poorest people couldn’t afford it. They could only light a temporary fire to cook their food, and their homes went largely unheated throughout the coldest weather. Orkney has had no trees for millennia, and they scavenged brushwood, heather stems, and other bits and pieces such as seaweed and animal dung (see A. Fenton “Country Life in Scotland: our rural past” 2008 pp82-3).  Orkney in 2024 has one of the worst levels of fuel poverty in the UK, we pay far more for our electricity than most of the rest of Britain, and with the rise in fuel prices the poorest are already in dire trouble. Food banks have to supply electricity vouchers as well as the food itself. But most people do have electricity, even if many now have to be very careful with it.

In the past in the Highlands and Islands, the houses of even quite well-to-do people were built of unmortared stones with earth floors that quickly turned to mud when it was wet. Some houses were even built entirely of turf. In Orkney, stones were placed under the feet of furniture if the soil was damp to prevent rot (John Firth 1974 “Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish” p13). There were often no windows, and no chimneys. Men and women in Orkney sat in tall straw-backed chairs which protected them from draughts but were low to the ground. The smoke from the hearth escaped through a hole in the thatched roof, placed to one side of the fire so that rain or snow didn’t put it out. A lot of the smoke didn’t escape at all, but hung just above the level of people’s heads when they were sitting down. Sore eyes were very common. And the houses were very damp. In wet weather, liquid soot often ran down the walls and dropped off the roof (Firth 1974 p13). Nowadays big efforts are being made to insulate houses, but there are still many people living in picturesque old cottages without adequate insulation or heating. Even in modern insulated houses like mine, condensation and mould are constant problems. There’s a big market for de-humidifiers.

James Omand in “Orkney Eighty Years Ago” which describes life c.1830 talks about men wearing straw leggings. These were wound around their lower legs to keep them warmer and drier. There was no plastic for waterproof Wellington boots and macs. Samuel Johnson (page 41) talks of “brogues” made of rawhide or poorly-tanned leather, stitched so loosely that they protected the feet from stones but not from water. Presumably these are the same as the “rivlins” of the Northern Isles. Indeed, in 18^th and 19^th century Scotland many people went barefoot even in the worst weather (Dorothy Wordsworth “Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D.1803”).  Are we a load of wimps nowadays?

We may have problems getting our laundry dry in this sort of weather, but at least we can do it indoors and use a washing machine. Burt (“Letters from the North of Scotland 1794” page24) describes seeing women in Inverness doing laundry in freezing cold weather by stamping on it in tubs of water down by the river, barefoot and with their clothes tucked up, and their feet and legs red with cold. And we don’t have to go out to the cowshed or a hut at the bottom of the garden if we need the loo, either.

While supermarket shelves may be half empty for a few weeks and stocks of meat and fresh vegetables running low, at least we are not reduced to drinking the blood of our cattle. I.F.Grant (“Highland Folk Ways” 1961 p300) records that in a bad winter people used to bleed their stalled cattle and boil up the blood with oatmeal. Burt (pages 204-6) also records this practice, and says that bleeding combined with insufficient winter feeding weakened the cattle so much that they couldn’t stand up and had to be lifted by groups of neighbours.

When I think of conditions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the north of Scotland, I feel ashamed to have been grumbling about being stuck in a warm house for a week. Although it should not be forgotten that there is a fast-growing minority who are being forced back into these conditions by current economic policies, most of us should remember that things could be a lot worse.