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It’s August, and many people are going on holiday. Some of them will be seeking sunshine, sea and sand in the countries south of Britain. Some of them will be culture vultures, visiting interesting historical sites and taking selfies in front of the ruins. Some of them will be having a staycation in Britain, seeking to calm their psyche by spending time in wild places and getting the benefits of fresh air and solitude, as counselled by many a celebrity blogger and women’s magazine.

Well, they are all out of luck. Planet Earth is groaning under the numbers of humans. The climate has changed and it isn’t safe to go out in the sun around the Mediterranean this summer. Cruise liners now disgorge thousands of passengers at a time at famous cities. Those who go ashore don't get to meet the locals, who are all staying at home to avoid the crowds. They have to shuffle shoulder to shoulder with their fellow sightseers for an hour to get close enough to the historic object to actually see it, let alone take a picture of it. And the wild spaces of places like Scotland are now stuffed full of camper vans (so are their town car parks).

Don’t blame me. I told you so. Fifty years ago. It was clear to me half a century ago, when I was in my twenties, that the world population was rising too fast to be safe. I joined a charity known as “Population Countdown” and we tried to get people to think about it, but to no avail. In 1973 the world population was 4 billion; in 2023 it is 8 billion. Or if you prefer it, in 1973 there were 26 people per km² and now there are 54 people per km².

The result is exactly as predicted: global warming, rising sea levels, changes in weather which are wrecking harvests, flooding low-lying areas and turning marginal farmlands into deserts. Famine, plagues and war over scarce resources are historical constants, only this time we have brought it on ourselves. Like the covid pandemic, we were told it was going to happen, but we refused to listen.

And people still refuse to listen. Not just those who are only concerned with short-term profit or who are simply so woefully ignorant that they cannot understand that yes, it really is happening. There are plenty of well-intentioned folk who believe that becoming vegans and turning down the heating two degrees will do the trick by itself. When I have raised the subject I have met with reactions ranging from an embarrassed silence to quivering hostility. It just isn’t done to speak of it in many respectable middle-class circles.

Eating more plants is a very good idea. Condoms are an even better one.

PS If you want to know more about it, Population Matters have a good website.

One of my favourite places in the world is a museum store. I love being in an ice-cold warehouse surrounded by shelves and shelves of exciting cardboard boxes labelled with tempting codes which entice you to open the box and view the goodies within.  Or not labelled so you have to open the box to see what’s inside. Or even more intriguing, different labels on the two ends of the box. Or glass-fronted cupboards full of almost complete pots or a stone coffin complete with skeleton or…. But perhaps you may ask, and rightly, why is all that stuff that never goes on display and the public never sees being kept there at the taxpayers’ expense?

Most of this stuff comes from archaeological excavations. When a dig takes place, the finds will initially go to the headquarters of whichever body is carrying out the dig. When they have done the necessary studies and the site has been published, the finds will usually be deposited in the county museum and the archive, plans, sections and paperwork will also be stored somewhere suitable. So any local authority museum is faced with an ever-increasing mass of finds, very few of which will ever go on display. Only a very few finds from excavations, things like the Scar plaque, are worth putting on display. It would be impossible to display fifteen tons of squashed sherds of Grooved Ware, or half a roomful of butchered cattle bones and they wouldn’t be very interesting to look at either. But that is not what they are there for. And you can’t throw them out to make space for new ones.

The important thing in any science is that any scientist can test conclusions that have been published and see if they are valid. If you are doing this in say, chemistry, you can just get hold of some apparatus and chemicals and do the experiment all over again and see if you get the same result. But in archaeology you can’t do this. Excavation destroys the evidence as you retrieve it. You have to have the original objects and the detailed records of how they related to each other if you wish to reconsider someone’s conclusions. A few years ago an archaeologist looked again at a collection of human bones in Kirkwall museum and came to a totally different conclusion to the original bone specialist. No doubt further study will extend the argument even further. This couldn’t have happened if the bones hadn’t been kept after the excavation was published.

New techniques are being developed all the time. Recently, in this same museum, two international projects have revisited the finds from excavations carried out years ago and published at the time. They were using newly-developed techniques on this material. One was looking at the particles trapped in dental calculus on 5,000 year old human teeth, which can tell you the most amazing things, for example which spring these people got their water from, and what they had been eating. The other was collecting residues from 5,000 year-old potsherds to use for enhanced methods of C14 dating. If those shelves and shelves of boxfuls of human skeletons and smashed potsherds had been discarded on the grounds that they were already fully published, all this new information would have been lost.

I have a particular interest in the problem, as a piece of research I was once involved with at another museum came to something of a full stop because a large number of the finds I needed to look at had been thrown away. Someone had written a report on them which they considered adequate at the time and then discarded them, keeping only a few sample pieces. They were medieval glazed roof tiles, which of course are bulky (although rather pretty).

Of course it is impossible to keep indefinitely all the masses of broken brick, stone, and smashed up animal bone that come out of the ground on large excavations. Some of it has to be thrown away, preferably before it gets into the museum store. But you have to make sure that you throw away the right stuff, for example, most of the material from mixed or contaminated layers, where finds from many different periods or centuries have, by various processes, been jumbled up together. But it still means a large and ever-increasing quantity of finds in the store.

And of course there are all the social history finds which do not come from excavations but which have both their own historical value (or not) and their own problems. A faded postcard of the local artillery battalion during WWI doesn't take up much space. A small fishing boat with a hole in it does.

And somebody with the right training has to look after all that stuff. Someone has to know what is in that store and where it is, so that they can arrange access for people doing research on the objects. It’s no use having the best collection of spindle whorls in south-east England if nobody knows which of two hundred boxes they are stored in. Somebody has to make sure that the temperature and humidity of the store is suitable at all times. I once spent six months breathing in Rentokil fluid in a leaking amateur storage facility in England, repackaging pottery that had got loose when the cardboard boxes it was packed in had got damp and collapsed. Good job the sherds were individually marked (most of them). Someone has to see to the packaging of the objects, stacking them so that the ones underneath don’t get squashed by the ones on top. Someone has to prevent moths and beetles from eating the wood and the textiles. Someone has to make sure that the fire alarms and burglar alarms are working, and that PhD students who are studying material in the store don’t walk off with objects to use in their evening classes (yes, this was rumoured to have happened at a national museum when I was young). These are only a few of the things that have to be taken into account. And there are also the Health and Safety issues to consider.

It is right that the general public, whose taxes and donations keep many museums going, and the members of the local council who allocate funds, should ask why a museum needs both a bigger store and people with university degrees who earn a staggering 27K per year to look after it. We have to explain to them that many earth-shattering discoveries in archaeology are made, not outside on site, but inside an old warehouse, by someone taking another look at boxes of finds which have been carefully looked after by someone like me.

I have had to do with many human sanitary arrangements in my time, but I have never met quite such an enchanting one as the Hillswick public toilet. It started with the choice collection of 18C earthenware chamber pots I had to catalogue in a museum. At one point I collaborated with an artist to reconstruct a Roman public toilet from the excavated remains at Verulamium (see Hertfordshire Archaeology & History vol.17). Then there was the collection of plum and blackberry pips which had been tipped down a medieval cesspit in St Albans. I regularly walk past the stone outlet shaft of a medieval toilet in the Bishop’s Palace in Kirkwall. Before the reclamation of the foreshore it would have emptied onto the beach, cleaned up every high tide.

I have used an earth trench while working on an excavation in the French countryside, and taken my turn emptying the ghastly drum from a chemical toilet while working on another dig in the English countryside. The deal was that if the girls did their turn emptying the loo, they got a turn driving the dumper truck as well as the boys. During lockdown when there was a shortage of toilet paper, I investigated the ultra-modern Japanese toilet, which if correctly programmed (I understand foreigners often get it wrong) will automatically wash and dry your bottom for you. Or flood the cubicle.

But never have I met with such a charming bog-house as this community-run public toilet in Hillswick, Shetland, with its forecourt filled with lavatory pans used as planters. A flowery delight!

Recently I spent two days in Lerwick, the capital of Shetland. It’s an attractive old town, looking eastwards over the anchorage of Bressay Sound, and the museum is lovely. One of the most interesting walks is along the south end of Commercial Street. Here there is a row of picturesque old stone houses which front onto the street and project at the back into the sea. They have small private piers attached to them, known as ‘lodberries’, from an Old Norse word for a flat stone used as a natural quay. These houses were merchant’s dwellings with a landing place, later a built pier, where goods could be brought ashore from ships anchored in the Sound. During the late 17^th C to early 19^th C they lined the entire Lerwick seafront.

A good example is “The Lodberry” at 20 Commercial Street, also known as Robertson’s Lodberry after Baillie John Robertson. It is an A-listed 18C building or rather a group of buildings around a small courtyard, including a shop fronting onto the street, a two-storey house behind it, and a storehouse with a door to the lodberry and a wall crane.

Shetland’s main export for centuries, from the Norse period onwards, was dried and salted fish. Knitted woollen goods, particularly coarse woollen stockings, were another important commodity. “Grease butter” ie. butter of such poor quality that it could only be used for greasing carts was recorded as a trade item by German merchants in the 17C, who incidentally also bought it from Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Grease butter was one of the main items tenants paid as rent to the lairds. Never having used a wooden cart pulled by a horse, I had never considered that milking cows to provide axle grease could be so important. The Shetlanders got beer, meal, salt and linen cloth in return.

Shetland had close ties with Norway. The islands had been settled by Norwegian Vikings and were part of Norway until the late 15C. The Norwegian dialect, Norn, was spoken in Shetland until the 19C. Initially Shetland traded with Norway mainly through the city of Bergen. Bergen and Lerwick are both on virtually the same latitude (round about 60 degrees north) and are only 358km apart. For comparison,  Lerwick and Aberdeen are 361km apart, only 3km difference. Between the 15^th and 17^th centuries, trade around the North Sea was mainly in the hands of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of north German merchant cities, who, like multinational companies today, had more power than many sovereign states. One of their major trading centres or ‘kontors’ was in Bergen. After the mid 15C many German merchants started trading directly with Shetland rather than through the kontor at Bergen, against the rules of the Hanse. At the end of the 16C large numbers of Dutch fishing boats came to Shetland waters every year for herring. They anchored in Bressay Sound, living and processing the fish on board, held a fair every year near Lerwick, and traded with the Shetlanders for fresh food and woollen stockings. This is when Lerwick first started to become a town rather than a collection of shoreside booths.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 18C, climate changes associated with the Little Ice Age, plus major political changes had an adverse effect on Shetland’s trade with Scandinavia. The Shetland islands were by that time part of Scotland, and the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707 led to an increase in the tax on salt which was vital for the trade in fish, as well as increased customs dues. This was a difficult period for the ordinary folk in Shetland, as the merchant lairds took over foreign trade and their tenants became virtual serfs, until the 1886 crofters act. However, in the 19C Lerwick became a centre for the highly profitable herring fishery which reached its peak in the early days of the 20^th century before dying out as the over-exploited fish stocks dwindled in the 1920s.

Fishing and fish farming still contribute a third of Shetland’s economic output. The few surviving lodberries are a reminder of the long history of fishing in the islands.

Orkney has many very beautiful wildflowers, some of them quite famous, such as the Northern Marsh Orchid, and Primula Scotica, the Scottish primrose. But my favourite is the Creeping Willow, Salix repens. Its lemon yellow puffs in spring have an unsung beauty.

The first thing a visitor to Orkney notices is the lack of trees. This dates from prehistoric times, when agriculture and climate change combined to deforest the islands. The second thing is that various species of willow make up quite a large proportion of what trees there are. They can withstand the gales which lash the islands every winter, and are often used as windbreaks to allow taller trees to get started. But very few people are aware of a minute species of willow growing under their feet as they take a clifftop walk.

Walking along the cliff tops in South Ronaldsay in the cool morning sunlight, with skylarks singing far above in the infinite sky, violets and primroses grow along the cliff edge, the first of the spring flowers. And almost hidden among the dried stems of last year’s grasses are delicate little pale yellow puffs, the tiny catkins of creeping willow. Its weeny stems with their dark-green leaves lie flat along the ground, interwoven with the grass stems. Most of the plants along the cliff edge are miniaturised, I suppose because of the shallow layer of soil covering the stone, and the constant strong winds. It’s like a natural bonsai garden.

Creeping Willow is a shrub-like member of the willow family found in northern and western Europe especially on sand dunes, coastal heaths, and moorland. I had never heard of it before. I have one in a container in my garden now. It grows upright in the shelter of my house, but the catkins are the same fragile little yellow puffs.

The first tourists tend to arrive when the earliest spring flowers are over. In any case they do not usually walk on the wilder cliff tops of South Ronaldsay. So I don’t think these exquisite little flowers are going to be appearing on postcards or fridge magnets any time soon.