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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.

Some years ago I went to an exhibition at the British Museum in London about Ashurbanipal, ruler of the huge neo-Assyrian empire in the 7^th century BCE. Among the panels was part of the great king’s achievements, as declared by himself. It sounded just like a modern CV, or at least, the ones I was taught to write towards the end of my working life. Later I came across a similar declaration from the Norse period, by Rognald Kali Kollsson, Earl of Orkney in the mid-12th century CE. I was interested to see what the two leaders considered to be their qualifications for their jobs.

Ashurbanipal reigned between 669 – 631BCE. Although he was popular with his subjects, he was noted for his ruthlessness and cruelty to anyone who opposed him, even by the standards of his day. Some of the scenes recorded on the carved stone reliefs that decorated his palace at Nineveh record some nasty deeds. This one shows a peaceful scene where he is enjoying an al-fresco meal with his queen in a garden – until you notice the severed head hanging from the tree on the left.

He wasn’t shy about stating his qualifications for the job of king of Assyria. His CV proudly stated that he was good at maths, including complex multiplications and divisions – the Assyrians were advanced mathematicians. It’s nice to meet a head of state who considered being good at maths important for the job. He claimed to be good at ancient languages as well, (Greats at Oxford springs to mind) and could read difficult texts in both Akkadian and Sumerian. He himself would have spoken Assyrian, a Semitic language, for everyday use. Unusually for a monarch in those days, Ashurbanipal could read and write, and palace reliefs show him with long reed pens tucked into his belt, used for making the wedge-shaped impressions in soft clay of cuneiform, the earliest known writing in the world.  He was also good at sport, including archery, riding, throwing javelins and driving chariots.

The king had a passion for books and knowledge, and had a library which was famous for centuries afterwards, predating the famous library in Alexandria. He sent agents to temples all over his territory to collect copies of significant works on many subjects. These now form a priceless record of Assyrian civilisation, written at the time by the Assyrians themselves, among them the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the oldest known works of literature in the world. The texts were preserved when the fire which eventually destroyed the palace at Nineveh baked the clay tablets hard, and they were protected when the walls collapsed on top of them. They were excavated in the mid-19^th century and many are now in the British Museum.

Rognvald Kali Kolsson (1136-58) didn’t rule an empire but he controlled a substantial earldom. He was the nephew of St Magnus Erlundson and built St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall during a power struggle with his cousin for the earldom. He later obtained control of Caithness on mainland Scotland as well.

The earl boasted of having nine skills. Like Ashurbanipal, he was proud of being able to read and write (the Vikings used runes), and compose poetry. The Orkneyingasaga describes a number of places and people he visited on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1151. This included a famous visit to Ermengard, the beautiful princess of Narbonne, about whom he wrote a number of poems recorded in the Saga. He was clearly smitten with her, but did not accept an offer to stay and marry her and rule Narbonne with her.  

Rognvald was good at the courtly arts of 12^th century Europe, including chess and playing a musical instrument. Like Ashurbanipal, he was good at archery, and he could ski (he was born and brought up in Norway) and row, as a good Viking should. He doesn’t seem to have included advanced mathematics among his achievements though. Rognvald and his companions made it home to Orkney but he was killed in 1158, buried in St Magnus Cathedral and (probably) canonised in 1192 by Pope Celestine III.

So it appears that literacy and sport were important for a ruler hundreds or even thousands of years ago, but numeracy was an optional extra!