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The Flotta altar front is one of my favourite Pictish carved stones from Orkney. It was found in 1871, re-used in the wall of a medieval church on the island of Flotta. The stone slab, broken in two halves, is carved with a simple but particularly beautiful cross with an interlaced pattern. It measures 165cm by 81 cm by 9cm. It is believed to be 8^th century in date and to come from the front of a Christian altar or a tomb.  There are slots on the back of the slab where side panels were fitted. A second slab with incised lines, found in the nearby churchyard in 2017, may have been the back of this altar/tomb.

The Picts produced very beautiful ‘symbol stones’: stone slabs carved with birds, fish and animals, and stylised symbols such as rods, mirrors and crescents. The meaning of these symbols remains undeciphered to date. Later carved stones include Christian symbols, like the Flotta stone. The Picts were the first Christians in Orkney.

Another altar stone from Orkney comes from the tiny island of Papa Stronsay which lies just off the island of Stronsay. The name “Papa Stronsay” suggests a settlement or monastery of Pictish monks, who were called “Papae” or “Fathers”. The sandstone slab was found during excavations in the nave of the 12C chapel of St Nicholas by Headland Archaeology in 1998. It had been re-used in the floor of the nave. Only part survives, and one corner is missing. It would have been about 30cm by 27cm and 4cm thick, probably part of a portable altar. It is decorated with a small compass-drawn circle in the centre and one in each of the surviving corners. Each circle contains a cross: the central cross and two of the corner crosses are saltire or diagonal crosses, the other surviving corner cross is a Roman or vertical cross.

The Flotta stone is on display in the National Museum of Scotland. Worth a visit.

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.

Just after Christmas I went to see the recent hieroglyphics exhibition at the British Museum. I enjoyed it very much. Although I have never formally studied the ancient Egyptians, I was involved in planning schools sessions to go with exhibitions in the museum where I worked for so many years. The museum had a small collection of artefacts brought back from Egypt by the usual Victorian traveller. We only needed to borrow a few more exhibits from other museums, such as a mummy +case, to make a temporary exhibition which fitted nicely with the National Curriculum of the time. I never became very interested in hieroglyphics and hieratic, although I knew what they were. I preferred the exquisite paintings of gardens and everyday life from the walls of rock-cut tombs, the house models and the jewellery. But the recent exhibition at the BM drew my attention to a form of statue that I had never noticed before – block statues. They had a showcase full of them.

Block statues were a plain cube of stone, with only the head, feet, arms or sometimes just hands sculpted. The person, almost always male, was portrayed sitting on the ground in a squatting position, draped with a long robe or cloak which retained the cube form. Sometimes as little of the person as the head and hands were portrayed, sometimes the square block was shaped to suggest the line of arms or legs under the robe, or the limbs might be fully portrayed although still part of the block. Because there were large flat areas, much of the block could be carved with hieroglyphic texts.

It sounds like a clumsy idea, very utilitarian, yet many of these statues seem to me to be well-proportioned and quite graceful. In fact, I prefer the very minimalist ones, where only the head and hands and feet are visible, to those where more of the limbs are shown.

Block statues first appear in temples in the Middle Kingdom/12^th dynasty. By the Late period they had become the most common type of statue portraying non-royal but important personages. They were memorials to people such as priests, high-ranked soldiers, and officials such as scribes and treasurers. The limestone statue shown above, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is of an official called Ankhwennefer (690 – 650 BCE), who was a sem-priest, associated with funerary rituals, and also a scribe and court official. CAVEAT INTERNET: he is not to be confused with the Ankhwennefer who was vizier to a pharaoh, probably Psamtik I (664 – 610BCE), and whose damaged statue, known only from a 1960 sighting on the art market in Cairo, showed a smaller statue of the god Ptah standing in front of him.  There was also a pharaoh called Ankhwennefer or Ankhmatis, who ruled Upper Egypt during the Ptolemaic period (200 – 186BCE) 

Sometimes there was a second head or a complete body carved into the same block. For example, the block statue of the architect and court official Senenmut in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin has a small head of Queen Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure, whose tutor he was, just in front of Senenmut’s own head. A statue of Senwosret-senebefny in the Brooklyn Museum has a tiny statuette of a woman, perhaps his wife, carved into the front of the block between his legs.

The statues were placed in temples where they could share in offerings and witness religious ceremonies. The posture may have been intended to represent a guardian at the temple gateway. The lap of the statue could have offerings placed on it, and the text might ask passers-bye to pray for the individual, thus safeguarding his immortality.

I once read a book written by Canadian zoologist and author, Farley Mowatt, who spent some time living in the Arctic with a group of Inuit just after WWII (Farley Mowatt, 1952 “People of the Deer”). At the beginning of chapter VII he described a meal in which his hosts presented boiled meat and gravy in a large communal tray. They ate the meat using fingers and knives, but conveyed the ‘soup’ to their mouths by using their cupped hands. It was apparently a messy procedure as lots of the soup dripped down the front of their clothes. I was much struck by this. It had never occurred to me that any human would attempt to eat soup without a spoon, or some substitute such as a seashell. It just goes to show that you cannot take anything for granted when studying human behaviour.

Most cultures use spoons for sloshy foods. So when did people start using them? There are apparently rare examples of spoons carved from antler and ivory which date back to the later part of the Ice Age, up to 20,000 years ago. They come from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer sites in Russia and France. Were they used for eating or serving or, as happened millennia later (think communion spoons), for religious rituals? Before the invention of pottery, how much food was cooked by boiling in liquid? There are methods of doing so, but were they used? (and how could you detect it if they were?).

There are many finds of spoons from the Neolithic, when farming and pottery were introduced, and people began to boil things in pottery vessels. Wooden spoons have been found in waterlogged sites such as the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, the lake villages of Egolzwil and Niederwil in Switzerland, the French lake village of Charavines, and the Danish bog of Christiansholms Mose near Copenhagen. There are ceramic spoons from Dikili Tash in Greece and bone ones from Barcin Hoyuk in Turkey.

But I think my favourite Neolithic spoons are the small bone spoons from the Balkans and Turkey which have been found to bear the tiny marks of baby’s milk teeth. They are considered to show that during the Neolithic, babies were weaned earlier than before, as their mothers could now boil up cereals to make porridge and feed it to them with a spoon. Cute!

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.