Around the world

In the middle of Scapa Flow in Orkney lies a small skerry known as the ‘Barrel of Butter’. It is a tiny rocky islet rising a few feet above sea level, topped by a navigation light. It gets its name from the annual rent paid to the laird who owned it by local fishermen. In return for permission to catch seals there, they paid him a barrel of butter every year. And around the shores of the Flow, there are still a few of the girnels or storehouses where the various landlords stored the grain paid by their tenants as rent.

Norse farmers in Orkney originally owned their own land under Udal law. By the 17C, the vast majority no longer did so. They were tenants of the church, the earl, and a handful of landowning lairds. Until the 19^th century they paid their rent not in money but in produce, which the ‘merchant lairds’ then sold on to places such as Norway. The main items paid as rent and taxes were grain (bere barley, malt and oatmeal); and butter. This was poor quality butter used for grease not eating. 

This 17C girnel or meal storehouse with its lovely crow-stepped gables is in St Marys Holm on the south shore of Orkney mainland. It is known as the “Auld Store”. It has two storeys and a loft, and an external staircase or forestair on the west end. It dates from 1608, and was used originally for storing rents paid to the Meill Estate, later known as the Graemeshall Estate.

The Meill estate had been acquired in the early 17C by Bishop George Graham. Graham had become Bishop of Orkney in 1615. The bishop was a wealthy man, and also owned two mansions in West Mainland, Skaill House (now much altered) near Scara Brae in Sandwick, and Breckness (now a ruin) near Stromness. Graham resigned his bishopric in 1638, a prudent move, as the Kirk, enraged by the ecclesiastical policies of King Charles I, abolished bishops at an assembly that year. His tact allowed him to escape excommunication and continue a peaceful existence as a private landowner. He passed the Meill estate to Patrick Smyth, who had been brought up in his family and married his daughter. George Graham and Patrick Smyth built a new house on the Meill property in 1626, replacing an earlier one. There have been a number of renovations and extensions to the building since then. Patrick Smyth’s son sold the house to his uncle, Patrick Graham, who changed its name to Graham’s Hall. Graham’s son changed the spelling of the family name to ‘Graeme’. During the 18C and early 19C there was a succession of absentee landlords until a branch of the family from Sutherland decided to live there. They did so until the mid-20C. (See “Pateas Amicis: The Story of the House of Graemeshall in Orkney” Patrick Sutherland Graeme 1936).

The Girnel, in Kirkwall, is another 17C storehouse beside the shore in Kirkwall. It was built for the grain and malt paid as rent to the Earldom Estate. It has two storeys, a basement and an attic and a double staircase to the first floor. There is a house for the girnel keeper next to it, built in 1643, gable-end on to the harbour.  The nearby slipway into the harbour, known as the ‘Corn Slip', was built to bring the corn ashore.

The Girnel is mentioned as one of the Kirkwall buildings seized by Earl Patrick Stewart’s illegitimate son Robert while trying to re-establish his father’s authority over the islands, an act of rebellion against the crown. (See “The New History of Orkney” William P.L. Thomson 2008  pp 294 & 297). Earl Patrick’s father, Robert Stewart, was an illegitimate half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots, who was given the earldom of Orkney in 1581 by his nephew James VI. Earl Patrick was therefore the grandson of a reigning king and inclined to make rather a thing of it, as well as being financially incompetent, and being brutal to the people of Orkney. Although initially on good terms with his royal cousin, his over-the-top behaviour led him into serious debt and to his imprisonment and death for treason. Young Robert was hanged for treason in the same year, 1615, as his father was beheaded. He was in his early twenties and said to be tall and good-looking, so he got some sympathy. Earl Patrick died without legitimate children and there were no more Stewart earls in Orkney.

Another 17th C storehouse at Westshore, Burray village, was probably built to hold meal for the Burray Estate. It also has two storeys and a loft, and a stair to the second storey, and is roofed with Caithness Flagstones. The date on the skew-putt is 1645. It is Grade B listed.

From the late 16C to the mid-18C the Bu of Burray was the main property of the Orkney Stewarts. The Stewarts of Burray were created baronets in 1687. The third baronet, Sir James Stewart (1694-1746) is best known for the murder by his servant of Captain James Moody, 7th laird of Melsetter, in a political quarrel in Broad Street, just opposite St Magnus cathedral, in 1725.  Moodie was a Hanoverian while Stewart was a Jacobite like many of the Orkney lairds. Captain Moodie’s spectacles, which he was wearing at the time, are on display in the Orkney Museum. Pardoned for this crime, James Stewart got into trouble again in 1739 after another violent crime, and was fined £200. The money was used to build the Kirkwall Tolbooth or town gaol. Stewart later ended up being held in this facility himself after his arrest for treason, having taken part in the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. He died in prison in Southwark in 1746. He left no children and the baronetcy became dormant. The estate went to his relative, the Earl of Galloway. (See “Orkney: an Illustrated Architectural Guide” Leslie Burgher 1991, pp 62 & 96)

Apart from his disreputable habit of brawling, Sir James also tried his hand at agricultural improvements. He held land in Flotta and South Ronaldsay as well as Burray. Sir James created a large rectangular enclosure in South Ronaldsay known as the Park of Cara. The Park of Cara was surrounded by stone dykes and seems to have contained rough grazing for cattle, possibly on their way to St Margaret’s Hope for export. He apparently experimented with 2- and 4-wheeled carts, at a time when wheeled vehicles were rare in Orkney, and possessed seven English ploughs, and with a turnip-drill plough, although there is no record of turnips in Orkney at this stage. (See “The New History of Orkney” William P.L. Thomson 2008  pp336-7)

Although you cannot go inside them, all three of these historic buildings are well worth a look from the outside. But to see the Barrel of Butter you will have to hire a boat.

Strangely enough, sometimes a gardener can enjoy the almost total absence of vegetation. As in karesansui, the Japanese Zen dry garden.

Karesansui are composed almost entirely of sand, carefully raked to give the effect of ripples on water, surrounding a few rocks. Occasionally there might be moss, a shrub, or a water feature. The gardens are small, and usually surrounded by buildings or a wall. The extreme simplicity and lack of colour are intended to be symbolic of the essence of nature and the world. They are intended to aid meditation or contemplation.

This is a very old form of garden, dating back to the 12^th to 14^th centuries, usually associated with Zen Buddhist temples and cared for as part of their duties by the monks. The outstanding example usually cited is the dry garden at the Ryoanji (‘Peaceful Dragon’) temple in Kyoto, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Here carefully raked sand is arranged around fifteen stones which are placed in small groups, each set in a small patch of moss. It is considered important that you cannot see all of the stones from any one viewpoint. The garden is surrounded by a wall on three sides and by one of the temple buildings on the fourth side.

Karesansui are popular outside Japan. There are a number in the UK, including one at Kew Gardens in London. They are even found in Scotland. The best known example is part of the Japanese Garden at Cowden castle near Dollar in Clackmannanshire. This garden was designed in the early 20^th century for a wealthy woman, Isabella Christie, a traveller and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. It was unusual in being designed by a Japanese woman designer, and was largely maintained by Japanese gardeners. Cowden’s Japanese garden was closed in 1955 after vandalism and neglect, but has been restored and is now open to the public again.

The natural world sometimes offers a similar ‘garden' experience. Around the cliffs and beaches of Orkney, a few dwarf plants often grow among the rocks and sand giving a very pleasing aesthetic effect, a spare beauty almost like a wild karesansui.

I tend to enjoy the simplest and most minimal in art of any kind. I find these gardens very peaceful and satisfying.

Earlier this year I read a book called “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans;  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” ⁽¹⁾ by a man called Derek Tait. I enjoyed it very much. The author spent several years of his early childhood in the 1960s living in Johore in Malaya and frequently visited the city of Singapore close by. I visited Singapore in 2017, so it was interesting to compare the city today with the city of half a century ago.

The Republic of Singapore consists of a group of islands off the southern tip of Malaysia in South-east Asia. There is one main island and a large number of smaller islets. Singapore lies only one degree north of the Equator and has a tropical climate. Tait mentions the heavy monsoon rains and violent thunderstorms. There is a long history of settlement on the site, but the modern city has its origins in 1819, when it was acquired by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles for the British East India Trading Company.  

In 1867 Singapore came under direct rule from Britain. During World War II it was taken over by Japan between 1942 and 1945. It became self-governing in 1959, and from 1963 until 1965 was part of the Malaysian federation. Singapore became an independent city state in 1965, and Derek Tait’s family moved there that year. His father was in the British Navy. The Singapore River provides a natural harbour and it was an important naval base, with the British navy stationed there until 1971.

The first thing Derek Tait mentions about Singapore in the 1960s is the distinctive smell of rotting rubbish and raw sewage. A filthy canal ran down the centre of the city, and the Singapore River was full of rubbish, raw sewage and rats. When I visited, I was particularly struck by how clean the city was, far cleaner than London or Edinburgh. There were no bad smells at all and I noticed the large number of people employed as cleaners in public areas. I don’t remember seeing the canal, but the river mouth has been dammed and is being used as a freshwater reservoir for some of the city’s water supply. Tait mentions rats and dead dogs in the water; David Attenborough in his 2016 documentary about wildlife in big cities (part of Planet Earth II)  mentions the return of smooth-coated otters as a result of the cleaning of the waterways.

Tait’s photos show streets full of cars and rickshaws and rickety buses. In an effort to combat air pollution in the densely-populated city (7,797 people per square km), the authorities now discourage private car ownership and encourage people to travel using a very good modern bus and Metro (underground) service. I used the Metro all the time during my visit, it was clean, safe and easy to follow. None of my son’s friends drove cars, and neither of us can remember seeing a single rickshaw.

In the 1960s the mosquitos were so bad that people had to sleep under nets and burn coils of mosquito repellent at night. Mosquitos often carry dengue fever, a dangerous tropical disease, and the authorities are trying to control them. Posters on the walls of the Metro system urge people to get rid of stagnant water around their houses, where mosquitos breed. It seems to be a successful program. I only got bitten once in Singapore, on the Night Safari at the Zoo, and in the centre of town I never saw or heard a single mosquito.

Tait’s photographs show very few multi-storey buildings, but it is a city of skyscrapers today. To house the huge population, people not only have to live in small spaces, but homes and offices tend to be in tall tower blocks, except for the very wealthy indeed. One of the most expensive hotels is in two enormous slender towers linked by a roof platform containing a garden with palm trees and an infinity pool. My son lived in a shared flat in a gorgeous tower, one of a group of three towers set in a gated garden with a gym and a swimming pool. Out of the city centre there were tower blocks that looked more utilitarian, from the train at least. I did much of my shopping in excellent shopping malls, which weren’t there in the 1960s.

The authorities are committed to making it a green city.  The roads are lined with trees, grass and flowerbeds, and there are gardens everywhere, from the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to the rooftops of tower blocks. During Lockdown, I followed the Singapore National Parks Board on Twitter, and was fascinated by their program to encourage everybody to grow food, even if it was just a pot of salad greens beside their front door, to improve the city’s food security. It cheered me up all through Lockdown, and inspired my own micro-food-growing efforts.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the lively street life. Since accommodation even for the relatively well-off tends to be cramped and often has minimal cooking facilities, people eat out a lot at restaurants and food halls. Food halls are open areas with tables and chairs surrounded by stalls selling food and drinks. Sometimes vendors come round with carts offering drinks at your table. I personally found them great.

Given that the world is now drastically overpopulated and most of us are likely to end up living in places as densely populated as Singapore, it’s heartening to see a city making such a positive effort to make it a good place to live for humans and wildlife. How a tiny city-state with a no land or natural resources and a huge population has managed to evolve the sort of economy which can support all this is beyond me to understand. I am no economist. But from what I can pick up on an internet trawl they seem to have been rather clever.

And it’s fascinating to see how things have changed well within my lifetime. Thank you, Mr Tait.

⁽¹⁾ “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” Derek Tait 2006 Driftwood Coast Publishing PO Box 7, West Park, Plymouth, England, PL5 2YS ISBN 978-0-9554277-0-1

I have just returned from a short trip to the London area. While I was down there I caught a cold. Having tested myself every second day for a week, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t covid, so I felt safe to fly home. However, I decided to wear a mask on the journey, to protect my fellow-humans from any lingering common cold germs, especially as I was still coughing and blowing my nose rather more frequently than usual, and I didn’t want anyone to feel threatened. Masks, as everyone ought to know by now, don’t give much protection to the wearer unless they are hospital-grade, but they protect other people from the wearer’s germs. In the Far East it has long been considered ordinary good manners to wear a face mask in public spaces if you have a cold.

As I progressed from bag-drop to security to the departure lounge, I don’t think I saw a single mask on a passenger, and precious few on the staff. A huge multinational airport, with people flying in from all over the world, is the likeliest place of all to encounter something nasty in the way of a virus from an exotic place. Haven’t people learned anything from the covid pandemic?

Over the past months I have seen a lot of little notices at the entrances to shops and public transport, asking people to help keep everyone safe by wearing a mask, sanitising hands and keeping their distance. The notices are usually small and inconspicuous and nobody is taking any notice of them at all. Why would shops, airports, public libraries etc. be asking people (timidly) to wear masks if we didn’t all secretly recognise that masks protected us from viruses? And why haven’t they got the courage to make the notices twice the size, and have someone standing beside them to encourage people to take some notice of them?

I am absolutely certain that it should still be a legal requirement, properly enforced, to wear them in public places – shops, cinemas, trains, buses and planes etc. The pandemic isn’t over. People may not be dying in such large numbers, hospitals may not have so many beds taken up with covid patients, but has no-one noticed how many shops, offices and schools have recently been closed for a day or so because there aren’t enough staff to run them? One person has come in with covid and infected enough of his fellow-workers to close them down. Isn’t that damaging the economy? And is there anyone in Britain who doesn’t know at least one person who is still off work with Long Covid weeks after contracting the disease?

And why are people in this country so bothered about being ordered to wear masks anyway? When I was young, there were no such things as seat-belts in cars. When it became a legal requirement, there was a storm of protest about civil liberties, the validity of the evidence that it did any good, people who would need to be exempted for medical reasons, etc. In the end people have accepted them. When smoking started being banned in most public spaces, there was an outcry. Now it is taken as normal.

Most people would now consider driving over the speed limit or driving when you have been drinking a disgrace, given that it is obvious you are endangering other people’s lives by doing so. Well, you are endangering them by not wearing a mask as well. Winter is now upon us. This is the season for colds, flu and noroviruses. And covid? We shall see…

The darkness was absolute. The air was cool and clammy. The small train rattled on, swaying as it went around curves, passengers clutching the rails of the open carriages. Suddenly it stopped. There was silence for a moment and then lights flashed on, dazzling us for a moment after the blackness, and our guide started speaking in heavily-accented English, asking us to leave the train.

We were far underground in the huge cave system of Rouffignac in SW France, sometimes called “La Grotte des Cent Mammouths” (the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths). We walked carefully through the roughly-levelled passages in dim light. From time to time the guide asked us to stop, and turned on lights to illuminate one side of the chamber we were passing through. The limestone walls were covered with drawings of animals, mostly mammoths, engravings or bold outlines in black made by prehistoric hunters of thirteen centuries ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

There have been suggestions that some or even all of the Rouffignac drawings are not authentic, although it seems that most are now accepted as genuine. The cave has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. It was used for clay extraction in the 15^th century, and a 16^th century writer mentioned that he saw paintings in several places there. It first drew the attention of archaeologists in the 19^th century.

There are frozen mammoths preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and North America so we know what they looked like, although they became extinct thousands of years ago. Most died out at the end of the last cold period of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, although a few small isolated populations survived until around 4,000 years ago.  The drawings at Rouffignac are accurate and give all the details of their adaptation to extreme cold: the humps of fat on the top of their heads and on their shoulders, the long sweeping hair of their outer coat, the two finger-like ends of their trunks, the massive tusks. They are so well drawn that they almost seem alive, especially if they had been seen by flickering torchlight by men who had crawled for ages through silent darkness to reach them.

To this day we do not know the reason for the drawings in Ice Age caves. How can we, since they were made millennia before the first writing? We cannot know what people believed unless they explain it in words. It seems likeliest that they were something to do with hunting magic.

I was lucky to see Rouffignac in the 1970s, before the flood of tourists had caused such damage to all of the prehistoric caves that the number of visits had to be restricted, or in some cases such as Lascaux, entirely discontinued. Increased light, heat and moisture encourage mould growth. If you want to see the mammoths today, you have to get up early and queue for tickets.