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Continued...Ritual Landscapes, Seabirds, Farms and Fiddlers: The Scotland Trip, 2006
The most awe-inspiring ancient ritual landscapes in northern Europe are found on the bare, windswept islands of northern Scotland, at latitudes equal to the northern tip of Labrador, or Anchorage, Alaska. Here, we have stone circles comparable to Stonehenge, massive stone-built tombs, and even buried villages and hamlets, all built around 5,000 years ago—before the pyramids—and all apparently related with each other by some array of alignments whose symbolism is almost entirely lost. About all we can say is that they involve communal burials, agriculture, and some connection to the heavens, and the seasons. For over 5,000 years, the Shetland and Orkney Islands were the northwesternmost outpost of the developing civilization of Northern Europe. It wasn’t until the Viking time of 700-800 AD that people moved beyond, into the Faeroes, Iceland, and across the North Atlantic. The ancient islanders, whose origins, language, and belief systems we do not know, are a constant presence during the two week long Sterling intensive course in the Northern Isles. |
For the past few years, we have based the first phase of the trip on the Island of Unst, whose offshore islets are the northernmost point in the British Isles. There are many advantages to returning to a place; we are no longer strangers, and we are invited to be participants in the local school system and in feeding the fish in the salmon pens. Unst is a hotbed of a revival of traditional fiddle music, and we have even supplied fiddlers for the last three years. Unst is also the site of one of the most spectacular seabird colonies in the world. At Hermaness, one walks for miles over the springy heath, visited by skylarks and skuas, then suddenly comes out on soaring cliffs and skerries, white with gannets and gulls, and set off by a lighthouse perched on a wild crag, built in the 19th Century by Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncles. We usually catch Hermaness on a good puffin day, which means students terrifying the faculty members by creeping to the edge of the cliffs in order to get within a couple of feet of these gaudy, sober birds. |
We travel by boat southward to the Orkneys, a much gentler landscape where fat beef cattle rub up against the ancient standing stones. This was the heart of Viking country in medieval times, and the great red sandstone cathedral of St. Magnus, begun in the 11 th century, still dominates the town of Kirkwall, which also house the northernmost whisky distillery in Scotland. The history and prehistory occurs at every turn, but Orkney is equally distinctive for some interesting forms of apparently sustainable agriculture, wildlife, bold sea cliffs, and some of the wildest terrain in the Scottish Isles. (Back to News and Views)
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