ABOUT THAT DARK CHAMBER…🕳️
Stronsay Field Notes, a coda.
A carbonised hazelnut shell excavated in 2008 at Links House on Stronsay dates from the Mesolithic. The nut and the ruins in which it was found are 8,000 years old. This place is the oldest evidence of human habitation not only on Orkney but the whole of northern Scotland. If age begins with human stories, then this is perhaps the oldest place on Orkney.
Many of my revelations on Stronsay begin with something as small as a hazelnut shell, an old postcard, or a seal song on the wind.
Back on the mainland, I become obsessed with the abandoned croft on Dishes Road that I wrote about in the second instalment. I do some research, but there’s little information to give life or meaning to what I found there. The croft appears on an OS map in the 19th century. Archeological notes from the 1930s-1970s record Medieval midden heaps nearby, and that the cottage was uninhabited. I try to place the paintings hung on the mouldy walls, both by the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw. One was perhaps Glasgow, Saturday Night.
Grimshaw was a painter I loved as a teenager, having collected some postcards with his work reproduced on them—specifically his twilight fairy paintings, like Spirit of the Night and Lady of Shallot. Known for his haunted renderings of the gloaming and aqueous night-scapes, Grimshaw painted unearthly light of dead stars and a distant Lovecraftian moon. He used a camera obscura to sketch his seaside locales, moonlit styles on forlorn paths and suburbia by gaslamp, and his work has a dreamlike, otherworldly feeling despite his intense realism.
Camera obscura means dark chamber in Latin, and the abandoned croft in which I trespassed was indeed a dark chamber. A camera obscura projects the seen world through a small hole, revealing an image upside down and in reverse of the original: a a projection of the other world, a liminal, fairy place. In Scottish fairy lore, there is another, parallel unseen world—a dark copy existing opposite our own. Grimshaw’s contemporaries looked down on this method and considered use of the camera obscura cheating. In the 18th century these cameras were made portable in the shape of a book.
The best books I have read have acted like a camera obscura—rendering the known world, but a dyslexic* widdershins. What story of Stronsay might I tell through my own inverted projections, through the haunted lens of that dark croft? The painter Grimshaw takes on the qualities of the ghostly presence lingering in there, the prints of his work hung on the wall are windows to the otherworld.
In the first instalment on the Stronsay field notes I posted in October, I brought up the illegal culling of seals on Orkney. The hatred of the selkie runs parallel in folklore with a melancholy tenderness. Selkie stories are imbued with a terrible sense of loss. It’s often the same with the women called witches, but I have yet to untangle this knot. I carried this puzzle around for days while reading Jim Crumley’s extraordinary The Last Wolf. He follows a vanished wolf through the highland landscape while arguing for the reintroduction of wolves to Scotland. He comes up against much folkloric distortion and centuries long propaganda against the wolf, hunted to extinction in Scotland.
I talk about the Last Wolf/Last Witch syndrome in Ashes & Stones. Macho hunters can claim to have killed the last wolf or the last witch—but they can never be sure there isn’t another alive somewhere, eluding them. Crumley was also up against the ‘culling’ mentality of men who believe they are entitled to land, to the hunting/grazing grounds—what was once the commons—land we share with other animals. Crumley’s arguments reveal the human ‘management’ of nature to be riddled with the hubristic desire to be the sole alpha predator.
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes a convincing argument that the witch hunts laid the ground for the private ownership of the commons, the control of shared land. Culls are similarly motivated by the desire to control land shared with other animals. The witch hunts were a cull of a kind—of the old, the isolated and impoverished, the too-wise or opinionated, the friendless.
I didn’t see any seal pups on Stronsay, but while writing up these notes, I go out walking over a cliff on South Ronaldsay. I spot four pups and their mothers. One is very small and fluffy, laying in the tangled kelp. Others bask in the shallows. I crouch low in the grass and try to make as little noise as possible as I take out my monocular. I see a mother seal wounded and struggling. Blood pools beneath her, along the length of her pregnant belly as she writhes. Has she been attacked or shot? There is so much blood. She turns and looks me in the eye. My attempt to remain undetected fails, but I can’t look away. All at once I understand the courage it takes to look back at me. I hold privileged audience with her, an intimacy I don’t deserve. In that moment, I am one of her tribe, a liminal being. Such is the power of their more-than-human gaze. All else around me—the farms and one-lane road, the interpretation board at the head of the cliff path—are alien, another landscape entirely. And then I see it—a tiny, yellow slip of a pup wedged between the rocks beside her. She has given birth.
I’m to the trail head at the lay-by when I hear a mournful cry, half human and almost completely subsumed by the wind. It’s nothing—I have imagined it. I go away into my human life, yet there it is again at my back.
*I am dyslexic, so perhaps this is not only how I read but how I see the world.
FURTHER READING
Links house site report https://visitstronsay.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Links-House-Site-Report.pdf
Seal hunting in Orkney: (warning-graphic images) https://www.thedodo.com/uk-scotland-seal-cull-hunt-1085581537.html
So darkly beautiful, his works. He seems a lover of the Moon, as am I.
And fog and wet streets...and all things shrouded in mystery...
I never would have thought that seal pups would be in danger in the Orkneys, of all places...
Fear has no place there!
Have you read "If Women Rose Rooted" by Sharon Blackie? She has a section in it on women and selkies that may help untangle (or not) some of the connections between selkie and witch hunting. In any case, I think there are some connections around wildness, connection to the natural world, and belief in something other than Christianity, and the need for capitalist bodies to destroy those things.