Rackwick, Hoy
On deck on the Swan on a choppy grey morning, sitting by a bucket of mackerel caught just now by our engineer Ian. We’re at Lyness in Hoy, waiting for the tide to turn before we head out through the race to sail to Kirkwall. Yesterday we walked up to the Old Man of Hoy, an astonishing exclamation mark of rock standing just offshore on the west of Hoy. We hung our legs over the cliff edge, watching two climbers make the slow vertical ascent up sheer iron-red walls and deep clefts, until the midges drove us back to the valley of Rackwick and its stone bothy in the bay. Down to the Dwarfie Stone, a huge hewn rock resting in bog below the hills; a chieftan’s burial tomb, the only one of its kind in Scotland, chipped hollow and resonating with our voices. 18 and 19thth century graffiti on its cold walls; the others who passed by and wondered. Some of them may have come back to a boat like the Swan.
Last night we sat knee to knee around the galley table, sharing stories, film, books, accounts of research and making relating to the sea and coastal communities. Ruth Maclennan’s haunting and disorientating underwater filming with marine scientists in the streaming Pentland Firth, Susana Baston’s studies of tidal velocity in the same waters, and early exploration of the potential impact of large scale energy extraction through tidal generation. It’s all so new here – the design, the economics, the impacts of the new technologies – Orcadians talk constantly about being on the edge, not just in physical terms but technologically, industrially, economically, culturally. The wave generation being trialled on the west coast, the tidal technologies still being imagined and designed for the Pentland Firth, these futuristic forms have the look of Leonardo’s sketches of flying machines and submarines – engineering on the edge of human imagination and technical possibility. If Scotland maintains its ambitious intention to deliver 100% renewable energy by 2020, then all these sources of generation will be called on at a large scale, but what effect might this have, this borrowing of the great sources of power and flow in the natural world, on seabed ecologies, on sediment transportation, on shorelines in this area?
Karine Polwart sang a song created out of her own research on the Isle of May, on Scotland’s east coast, walking and working beside marine scientists, ornithologists, fishers – the slow and careful monitoring of changing patterns, converging stresses, unearthed pasts and unspoken futures. ‘Listen to the isle…’ Her voice and words pull us all together into the living, shifting present. And the Unst Boat song, probably the oldest recorded song in Shetland, sung in Norn and harking back to the fear and and prayer of women waiting for their men to return from the sea…On this boat, on this night, its ancient plea sounds raw and close.
Bryony Lavery, Andy Crabb, James Brady
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