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What a popular subject the Tudors are all over Britain! Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth I – there seem to be just as many books about them in Waterstones in Edinburgh as in Waterstones in London. Not many people realise that we had members of the family in Orkney as well.

James V of Scotland was the nephew of Henry VIII of England. His mother was Henry’s sister, Margaret Tudor.  So genetically he was half-Tudor himself. James appears to have closely resembled his uncle in that he was a great man for the ladies, but unlike Henry, he was fertile, and managed to father not one but nine known illegitimate children by different noblewomen of his court, as well as his legitimate daughter and heir, Mary Queen of Scots. One of James’ natural children ended up in Orkney.

Robert Stewart (1533 – 1593) was the illegitimate son of James V and Euphemia Elphinstone, who had a brief fling with the king before going on to marry someone else. There is very little evidence about his youth and education, but it seems that after he left the nursery he was educated as a nobleman with several of his illegitimate half-brothers in St Andrews. All of James’ bastard sons were taken care of, usually by having them educated and given the revenues of various abbeys and priories as ‘commendators’. Commendators were laymen in charge of the administration of an abbey, who during the 16^th century increasingly took over the direction of these abbeys from the abbots themselves. Robert Stewart was made commendator of Holyrood Abbey in 1539 – i.e. when he was six years old. Hmmm… It must be supposed that he couldn’t have done anything to earn his money at that age.

His father died when he was nine years old, and his infant half-sister became queen. After a few years in France in his teens, completing his education, he returned to the Scottish court and took up the life of a minor noble. He seems to have made himself rather unpopular from the start.

Robert’s official connection with Orkney began in 1564, when his half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, made him sheriff of Orkney (the role was taken away from him shortly afterwards), and granted him lands in the islands. At this point he was not an earl, just plain Sir Robert Stewart of Strathdon. He arrived in Orkney for the first time in 1567, after his half-sister had lost her throne. He now took back the sheriff’s role, and seized both Kirkwall Castle and Noltland Castle on Westray. He consolidated his Orkney landholdings in 1568, when he forced the bishop of Orkney to exchange his estates in Orkney for the commendatorship of Holyrood.

This included the land in Birsay in West Mainland where Sir Robert built the ‘Earl’s Palace’ between 1569 and 1574. It lies close to the sea in Birsay village.  It had two storeys and was built around four sides of a central courtyard with a well. The kitchen and other domestic facilities were on the ground floor, while the bedrooms and great hall were upstairs. Although the upper storey had large windows, the ground floor had small ones and holes to fire muskets through, and there were three towers, so it was clearly built for defence as well as a palace for a Renaissance prince.

There is a 17^th century line drawing (see “Orkney A Historical Guide” Caroline Wickham-Jones 2015, page 162 figure 55, referenced The Stationary Office) with a plan of the palace, showing all the proper facilities for a nobleman’s residence of the time: walled flower, herb, kitchen and plant gardens on the east side of the palace buildings, as well as a bowling green, archery butts, rabbit warrens and a deer park to the north.

I wish there was more information about the gardens, especially the flower garden or pleasaunce. Earl Robert was following in the footsteps of his father, James V, and his grandfather, James IV, who embellished their palaces at Holyrood and Stirling Castle with formal gardens. Measured from the copy of the 17^th century plan given in Wickham-Jones, the flower garden appears to be approximately 50 feet by 35 feet, i.e. 0.04 acres, i.e. quite small.   Since it was walled, there were probably trees, as there are today in the walled gardens attached to Orkney gentry houses or in towns wherever there is shelter from the wind. Maybe it had gravelled walks, flower beds in geometric patterns, a stone sculpture or two, maybe a sundial and a fishpond, perhaps an arbour draped with honeysuckle or roses over a seat. One can imagine the earl, dressed in silk and velvet with gold embroidery, leaning against a tree sniffing at a flower, à la Nicholas Hilliard. Or exercising with a game of bowls or practicing his archery. Very suitable exercise for a semi-royal prince – both his sister Mary and his cousin Elizabeth enjoyed bowls and archery.

Sir Robert was a married man, with nearly 20 children. In 1561 he had married Lady Jean Kennedy, the daughter of the Earl of Cassilis. Contemporary comment was that he was really in love with her, and they had nine children. However, his wife never came to Orkney, preferring to stay in the centre of civilisation in Edinburgh, which didn’t please Robert at all. Following in the tradition of his royal father and great-uncle, he is also said to have had at least ten children out of wedlock.

Uncle Robert went on to ingratiate himself with his nephew James VI, who reinstated the earldom of Orkney for him in 1581, and also made him Lord of Shetland. He is therefore usually referred to as Earl Robert Stewart. However he later fell out with him. Earl Robert had several terms of imprisonment, on charges of treason and misuse of power, but he managed to duck out of them.  He had a bad reputation for untrustworthiness, land-grabbing, and mistreating the islanders. But he died peacefully in his bed in 1593. The earldom of Orkney was forfeited in 1614 when Robert’s son Earl Patrick, who built the even bigger and better Earl’s Palace in Kirkwall and was even more unpopular, overreached himself and was executed for treason.

By the mid-17^th century Earl Robert’s castle in Birsay had fallen into disrepair. The ruins still stand and are well worth a visit.

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!

Until recently, I had never heard of the Knowe of Moan, in West Mainland, Orkney. I was searching for something else online when an image of what had once been a rather beautiful gilded bronze mount popped up on my screen. It was labelled as coming from the Knowe of Moan. I liked it so much that I decided to make a drawing reconstruction of what it probably looked like before it lost most of its gilding and the insets dropped out. I enjoy doing that kind of drawing.

Further research (mostly online) revealed that in fact that particular mount did not come from the Knowe of Moan. According to a 2021 National Museum publication by Adrián Maldonado (“Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom”), it is unprovenanced, so it might not even have come from Orkney. But it is a rather attractive object. However there are a handful of other interesting objects from Moan, including a different mount or brooch. These finds do not come from an excavation where standard records were kept and deposited in a proper archive, nor was there a museum or university department in Orkney where people could report stray finds they had made and be asked relevant questions about the find at the time. They were made in the late 19^th century, before archaeology was an established profession but a time when scholarly gentlemen were starting to take an interest in finds from the past. So the records of who found what at Moan, when they found it, and exactly where they found it, are a bit confusing.

There are some facts which appear to be generally agreed, and others which are not.

1. Most sources agree that in 1886, a farmer called George Flett ploughed up a small stone cist on a hillock called the Knowe of Moan, in the parish of Harray on mainland Orkney. The hillock may originally have been a Bronze Age burial mound or barrow. Mr Flett had knocked the lid of the cist off, and squashed open the ends and sides, pushing them away from the filling of fine black earth.
2. Finds were collected at the site by Mr Flett himself and some local children over a short period of time.
3. They consisted of beads , a small cruciform metal object, a bronze spoon, 3 small bronze fragments, a small piece of slag, a piece of flint (which isn’t native to the area), and a white pebble.
4. Some of the beads were found inside the cist, some outside, and the other objects were all found outside. Whether they were ever inside is a matter of debate.
5. It is further agreed that no human remains, cremated or otherwise, were found. Whether this is because there weren’t any, or because an acid soil had destroyed them, or because the farmer and children didn’t notice little scattered pieces of burnt bone, is impossible to say for certain.
6. Mr Flett gave the finds to a friend of the antiquarian James Cursiter, authorising the friend to pass them on to Cursiter, who was making a collection of archaeological finds from the county.  Cursiter published them as part of a report in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1887(Notice of the Bronze Weapons of Orkney and Shetland, and of an Iron Age deposit found in a Cist at Moan, Harray’ PSAS 21, pp339-46).
7. These finds are now in the Hunterian Museum, with the rest of James Cursiter’s collection. The beads are really beautiful, and the metal object is also quite attractive. If you go to their collections website there are some good images of some of the beads.

From this point onwards, there are disagreements in the various accounts that I have found so far.

1. Some people consider that the cist was probably the cremation burial of a female Viking, and there were originally human remains that have not been recovered. Others consider that the deposit was a hoard, and cite other examples of Viking bead hoards.
2. The beads are stated to be made of glass and amber in most sources, but in the original 1887 publication Cursiter mentions only glass beads. The amber is said to come from the Baltic.
3. The number of beads varies from 55 in the 1887 report to 62-64 in later reports.
4. The cruciform metal object is variously described as a mount or a brooch or a mount recycled into a brooch. It is believed to originate in Ireland and is 9^th century.
5. And according to two separate exceedingly respectable websites, everything at Moan is Bronze Age!

Sorting all these contradictory accounts out is a fine way to spend a wet afternoon, as was drawing what I think the mount/brooches must have looked like originally. I should love to see the original objects one day.

“But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.“  Robert Louis Stevenson, “In the South Seas”, Chapter 1

Thus wrote the 19^th century author of ‘Treasure island’ in his account of his arrival in the south Pacific islands where he spent the last years of his life. It is something I have found myself thinking about recently. For much of my life, I lived and worked in an area (Hertfordshire) which had been under the control of Rome for four centuries after 43CE. I studied Latin at school there. I started in archaeology there. Travels in England and the continent introduced me to the rediscovery of Greece and Rome during the Renaissance. When in later life I visited Rome itself and stood among the ruins of the Forum, it was like coming home. I almost expected to see Horace or Pliny walking across the street. To me, having the Romans around was the natural order of things. But like Stevenson, I have come to realise how much living in the area of the former Roman Empire has conditioned my thinking.

Years ago, a letter from a fellow student at university who had gone on to become a museum curator in his native Pakistan, introduced me to the idea that there were Roman finds in the Indian subcontinent. During the early 1^st century CE the Romans learned to use the monsoon winds in summer to sail to what is now India and Pakistan, and the reverse winds in winter to bring them back. They imported luxury goods, such as spices and aromatics, especially various forms of pepper. They went crazy for pearls and Chinese silk. Exotic animals for the arena such as lions and tigers were another sought-after commodity in Rome. The Indians wanted, among many other things, gold coins, not as coinage but for the metal itself, and were keen on the bright red forms of coral that the Romans could supply. They also liked wine, transported in amphorae, glassware and high quality pottery. I found it interesting, as I wandered past the showcases full of stacks of Samian tableware in the Verulamium museum, to think of similar stacks somewhere on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a pioneering archaeologist of the years between the two world wars, who excavated at the Roman town of Verulamium and founded the museum where I worked for many years, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s. He worked at the South Indian town of Arikamedu, which produced many finds representing the trade with Rome, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, gems and pottery.

I am currently living outside the frontiers of the Roman empire. It is easy to forget that even in the British Isles there were areas where the Romans never penetrated. The far north of Scotland is one of them. Southern Scotland was controlled by the Roman army for short periods several times: under Agricola between 77 and 85 CE, again under Antoninus Pius between 142CE and c.165CE, and under Severus between 208 and 211CE. During Agricola’s campaign Roman military constructions were built as far north as Moray and Aberdeenshire. The Antonine Wall was built in the early 140s CE and ran for 60km, from the Firth of Clyde north-west of Glasgow, to the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh. It only lasted for about 20 years, and as it was made of turf on a stone foundation, there isn’t much of it left for viewing. This bit is in a Glasgow cemetery.

Orkney, where I live now, does not have a single Roman monument, nor is there any evidence that the Romans ever set foot here. They certainly knew it was there, from at least the time around Claudius’ invasion of southern England in 43CE, and they knew that it was an archipelago with many islands. Agricola’s fleet sailed round it in 80CE according to Tacitus. There are some extremely vague and unlikely claims by poets and a 4^th century historian that it became part of the empire, but that is all.  During the 1^st to the early 5^th centuries CE, the period when England and Wales were part of the empire, the people of Orkney were non-literate, prehistoric farmers, often living in or next to brochs, circular stone tower-like buildings with small clusters of houses around them. They had to wait until the Norse settlers in the 11th century for their first towns.

But sometimes Roman artefacts are found in Orkney, usually at broch sites. They are the sort of objects, few in number, which were likely to have been passed from person to person as occasional gifts or curiosities, rather than part of a regular trade in olive oil or high-quality tableware, as happened in the south of England. Things like the broken neck of an amphora which once held foodstuffs like olives or wine; fragments of Samian ware; a glass cup in a burial; a bronze patera (handled dish); glass beads; and small groups of coins. They mostly date from the late 1^st and the 2^nd centuries CE, the period when the Romans penetrated farthest north in Scotland.  My favourite object is the exquisite carnelian intaglio from the broch at Howe, a gemstone carved with the figure of an eagle, which would have been set in a ring. You can see this in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

I also like the fragment of a Samian mortarium (Dragendorf 45) with a lion-head spout from Oxtro broch. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but unfortunately their catalogue does not seem to have an image. There are also some objects which were probably not of Roman manufacture but were influenced by Roman design: tweezers, a sandstone lamp, and my third favourite object, a brooch in the form of an insect with outspread wings, made of tinned bronze and found at Howe broch, Stromness. This is also on display in Orkney Museum, along with several other Roman objects.

What the Iron Age inhabitants of Orkney had heard about the Romans, and what the Romans believed about them, apart from them being unfortunate barbarians who didn’t have the advantage of being civilised, we will probably never know. But I myself have had to look at history from a different perspective.

Many thanks to Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, for allowing me to use the two images from their collection

M