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Well, yes, it may very well be an inside job. But not in the sense you are imagining. Those finds could quite well still be somewhere in the museum. It’s just that no-one knows where. Consider the following totally fictional narrative, fictional in the sense that I made it up. But it is based on my personal experience of what can happen any day in any museum somewhere in Britain. And I do mean any, I have personal experience of several so this isn't aimed at any particular museum.

…Once upon a time, in the 19^th century, there was a British soldier. He went to India to serve his queen and country, and before he came home again he bought a little gold ring with a ruby set in it. It was a very thin circle of low-carat gold, and the ruby was no more than a tiny chip because he didn’t have much money. However, his sweetheart was delighted with it and they got married and lived happily ever after, and so did their daughter and her daughter after her. The ring passed from mother to daughter until the early 21^st century and then things changed. The current holder of the ring didn’t want to wear an old cheap ring. Her husband was rich enough to buy her an expensive and stylish modern one. However it seemed disrespectful to just sell the family ring on EBay or give it to the charity shop, so they decided to donate it to the local museum.

The museum didn’t really want it, but the family had lived in the area since the soldier went to India so it had local associations, and they didn’t want to offend a pillar of the local Rotary Club, and anyway it was very tiny and wouldn’t take up much room. So they accepted it. The couple brought the ring to the museum on the appointed day, and filled in the forms with the person on the front desk and handed the ring over and went home. The person on the front desk filed the paperwork in the proper file, and put the ring, wrapped in a screw of acid-free tissue inside a small plastic box inside a brown paper envelope, on the appropriate curator’s desk (their office was kept locked). The desk was cluttered with paperwork and objects awaiting attention. The curator was too busy to do anything with the ring that day, so it got moved to the edge of the pile. During the days that followed, everybody was totally wrapped up in the redisplay of one of the main galleries. And then there was a water leak in the main store. And then there was an urgent meeting about funding. And then…  well, you get the idea. So the ring got forgotten. It sat on that desk for a while and then got put on a shelf in the cupboard in the office along with a rusty box iron and a glazed brick and a George VI coronation mug and a piece of tasteless embroidery, because the curator had to tidy the desk for a visit by the leader of the Council. And then they left. The replacement curator knew nothing about it. The ring sat in the cupboard. For a number of years.

One day, though, the donor’s grandson was doing a school project about his ancestors and they had the idea of taking him to the museum to see the Indian ring. When they didn’t see it on display, they asked where it was. The new curator (a very new curator) got a bit flustered but assured them that it would be found. They did it by the book, or rather by the database. Every museum has a collections database listing all the objects which legally belong to the museum (loans and enquiries go in a different place). All the objects have a unique number. The new curator searched that collections database every which way: ‘ruby ring’, ‘ring’, ‘gold ring’, ‘Indian ring’ and by the name of the family and by the year that the family claimed to have handed it over. No joy.

The curator wondered if they were trying it on, so they went to the file with the entry records and searched through them. And there was the record for the ring. There was no question, that ring had entered the museum. So, where was it? Had someone stolen it? How? Who? Searching the entire museum for one tiny ring was an impossible job. Like most museums, the place was full of drawers and cupboards and shelves and niches and nooks and cardboard boxes, and although most of them contained exactly what they were supposed to contain, there was always the possibility of the ring getting into the wrong place by mistake. Human beings do make mistakes, especially when they are in a hurry. The staff did their best and searched all the most likely places and contacted the previous curator and the retired front-desk person, but they couldn’t find it.

The angry family wrote to the local newspaper and their MP and it got into the national news: “Ruby Ring Goes Missing from Museum”; “Who has Stolen Heirloom Jewellery?”; “Disgrace of Museum” etc. The fact that the ring was so small that it was barely worth stealing was of course not mentioned.

Just as things were getting really embarrassing, the curator finally got around to clearing out the last cupboard in their new office. And there was the ring, which of course had never got as far as being listed on the collections database. This was done in a great hurry and the ring was put on display in the Victorian gallery in a place of honour (which it would never otherwise have attained), and the local paper had a front page picture of the grandson proudly standing beside it.

It can happen. Many different kinds of find can appear to go missing for many different reasons. Boxes of medieval pottery can go missing because the member of staff who wanted to study them didn’t leave a note or fill in the right field on the database when they moved them out of the store to their office. They never leave the museum, they just get moved so nobody knows where they are. Of course sometimes they do leave. Boxfuls of bronze artefacts can disappear and only reappear again when the specialist to whom they have been sent for a report dies of old age and his next-of-kin finds them in the downstairs toilet. A PhD student who has been doing research on the collections might smuggle something out in their briefcase to use in their evening class, fully intending to return it next week. Records which have been digitised in a hurry in the past using an old database can be incomplete, so that you can’t find things when you search. For example, if you search for ‘urn’, how do you tell which of the 200 urns that come up are Roman burial urns and which Victorian garden furniture if no-one has filled in the necessary field? Keeping track of hundreds of thousands of objects (yes, literally) is no joke. Especially if there are not really enough staff to do the job properly.

So the next time you see a dramatic headline about objects going missing from a museum, yes, they may well be valuable pieces that really have been stolen. Or they may still be in there somewhere…

Toilets are a major interest of mine. I suppose it’s the result of so many years of analysing groups of medieval pottery thrown away in cesspits.  I have published a short account of the history of sanitation in St Albans, where I worked for many years, and recently gave a talk on the evidence for the history of sanitation in Orkney. So I am always on the lookout for interesting loos of any age. The Northern Isles have more than their fair share, it seems to me, of rather special toilets. I have already drawn attention to the delightful Hillswick community toilet in Shetland with its flowery forecourt. Nearer at hand is the salt water toilet on Shapinsay.

The island of Shapinsay is only a half-hour ferry ride from Kirkwall, Orkney’s principal town. It is noteworthy for its regular pattern of square, 4-hectare fields, the result of a mid-19^th century landowner’s agricultural improvements. David Balfour’s family owned the entire island by that point. In order to re-house some of the workers he displaced to build his ‘castle’, he reconstructed the nearby Shoreside village as a model village and re-named it Balfour village. The 19^th century public loo was just one of its features.

I have been going on occasional trips to Shapinsay since I arrived in Orkney twelve years ago, but somehow I never noticed the little stone building tucked down on the beach below the level of the pier, just as you get off the ferry. I suppose I must have been looking around for more conspicuous buildings, such as the Dishan Tower, also known as the Douche, a 17^th century dovecot converted into a salt water shower in the 19^th century, or the Gas House (gasometer), another 19^th century tower at the north end of the village. Or indeed the monstrous Scottish Baronial edifice known as Balfour Castle.

The Shapinsay salt water toilet is a single-storey stone building built at the top of the beach with a space below, so that at high tide the sea will wash underneath it and remove the waste. It has two rooms, each approached via a short passage on the landward side. (N.B. it is no longer in use as a working toilet; there is a modern facility nearby)

The design is extremely simple. Each room has a vertical wood-topped stone slab for sitting on, dividing the paved floor of the entrance area from the hole down to the beach.  There is room for two people to sit side by side.  The roof is made of stone slabs, and there is a tasteful if potentially damaging growth of ivy over the landward side. Although in fair condition, the building is on the At-Risk register, although it is unlisted. It doesn’t help that apparently no-one is quite sure who owns it.

Using the tides to remove sewage is a practical idea. The 12^th century bishop’s Palace in Kirkwall has a latrine chute which emptied onto what would have been a beach in those days. I wonder how many other loos there were in the past in the islands, which used the surrounding sea and its twice-daily tides to deal with their waste?

The Balfour Village salt water toilet is a worthy addition to my collection!

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.

I wonder how many people quite realise the number of remarkable archaeological finds that have been made in Orkney over the last 150 years. Many of them are not on display in Orkney museum and can easily be overlooked. In fact many of them are apparently not on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh either, although that is where they are kept (see their collections database). Some are objects of national significance, and some are there because Orkney Museum didn’t open until 1968 and it didn’t have a full-time curator until 1976. There was nowhere to safely store or display finds in the islands. The Treasure Trove laws also come into it, and they are different in Scotland from those in England. Among these special finds from Orkney is a group of silver dirhams, Arab coins found with a hoard of Viking silver.

Silver dirhams were coins used throughout  the Islamic world at that time. They are a fascinating reminder of how far Viking contacts reached in the 10^th century. Vikings traded from Scandinavia to the Irish Sea, where the ircity of Dublin was probably the richest port in Western Britain at that time. They travelled to Russia and as far as Constantinople to the east and south, to Iceland and Greenland to the west. And Orkney lay in the middle of these, ruled by a Viking earl.

Several hoards of precious metal from this period have been found in Orkney. The Skaill hoard, which weighed 8kg, was found in March 1858 in sand dunes near St Peters Kirk at the Bay of Skaill. It was buried in a stone cist and contained not only hack-silver (chopped –up silver objects intended for recycling), but brooches, arm- and neck-rings, ingots, three Anglo-Saxon coins, and twenty-one Arab dirhams. Only one of the Arab coins is complete. The dates of the coins suggest that the hoard was buried in the 10^th century CE:  the latest of the dirhams was struck at Bagdad in 945CE, and the latest Anglo-Saxon coin was dated to c.925.

The hoard contained a number of silver brooches of probably Irish or Manx origin which have attracted much more attention. They are beautiful. But somehow I find these coins with their graceful writing even more beautiful, and coming from so much farther away, more exotic.

In the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, in the ‘Merchant Lairds’ gallery, there is a large lump of butter excavated from a bog. Records show that rents and taxes in the Northern Isles were often paid by tenant farmers in butter as well as grain. There is even a skerry in Scapa Flow named the “Barrel of Butter”. The butter was usually poor quality fat known as ‘grease butter’,  intended as a lubricant rather than for eating. The Merchant Lairds of the 17^th and 18^th centuries then sold it abroad, to the German merchants who visited Orkney and Shetland. It was a well-documented trade. Shetlanders also paid part of their rent in butter, storing it during the year until payment was due in early summer.

 ‘Bog butter’, a waxy substance which may be either actual butter or tallow, has been recovered from peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland. It was deliberately buried in wooden containers or wrapped in things like animal skins or bark. This is a good method of preservation, as peat bogs are highly acidic and low in oxygen and so bacterial growth is inhibited. The earliest examples known so far date back thousands of years ago to the early Bronze Age. Bog butter typically does not contain salt, and does contain cattle hairs.

Burying a valuable commodity may have been intended to keep it safe from robbers in unsettled times, or to accumulate enough for a rental payment at a later date, or even to hide it from the landlord. A number of writers suggest that the taste of butter intended for eating is improved by burial in a bog (I do NOT recommend trying this.) Several reports mention bog butter being used for waterproofing, for making candles or cement, for greasing wool, or possibly as ritual offerings.

 I have never so far found a reference to the need to grease the axles of carts in any of the publications which describe the wheeled wooden vehicles used in medieval and early post medieval Europe. Diaries describing the difficulties of travel talk about dreadful tracks, and wheels coming off carriages, but do not mention stopping for the wheels to be greased. Other wooden machinery such as windmills, or windlasses for lifting, where friction would also have been a problem, would probably have needed greasing as well. 

However, from archaeological sources it is known that the use of animal fats to grease the moving parts of wooden vehicles goes back to at least the third millennium BCE. A wheel from a sled belonging to an Egyptian pharaoh, which had been used to transport heavy goods, was found to have been greased with animal fat (tallow). So had some chariot wheels from a later Egyptian tomb. The ancient Greeks used animal fat to lubricate chariot wheels during the Olympic Games. The Romans in the early centuries AD are said to have  done the same and in the early middle ages, it was used to grease the wheels of royal carriages and the lifting gear for castle gates. Other lubricants in antiquity included plant and fish oils. By the 18^th and 19^th centuries CE moving parts were starting to be made of metal and mineral oils took over.

So when you next pile your slice of toast high with cholesterol, or pay the garage bill for lubricating the many moving parts of your car, think of the days when a humble crofter’s wife churned rather nasty butter to pay the rent and keep the wheels going. And if you find a reference to greasing cartwheels with butter in early modern Europe anywhere, please let me know.