Spoots and Peats

(the beaches and moorland of Orphir)

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There are those who would kill for their peat-bank, and since the right to a peat-bank is often murky it’s a wonder that the heather is not littered with bodies. For a good peat-bank can provide fuel at only the cost of the work needed to get it, and for anyone who likes being out in the sunshine digging (once you have the right tool – the tuskar) and stacking at a steady pace the work is pretty pleasant; if your peats are of a good texture, well dried out and stacked properly at the back door, there is your year’s fuel, a huge freebie.

the joy of cutting peat

We were lucky enough to have acquired a peat-bank along with a big house in the middle of Orphir, with a fine outlook across the Flow. Somewhere up among the peat-banks was the boundary of the estate, marked not by any fence or wall but described in the old titles as the line of sight from a piece of Newcastle coal to Orphir schoolhouse, about three miles away. In vain did I look for the piece of coal; no doubt it had long since buried itself in the peat or formed part of someone’s fuel stack, and I wondered how that boundary could possibly be decided now. You might think that since it was only moorland it wouldn’t much matter, but you only have to see the red glow in the eyes of even the mildest man who thinks that a bit of land belongs to him to realise that it does matter. A lot.

spooters at Waulkmill

Another freebie, this one yielded up by the beach, is the spoot (razorfish) which, when disturbed, burrows down into the sand, causing a spurt of sandy water to squirt into the air. The spoot-hunter, armed with long knife and bucket, stalks his prey walking slowly backwards. Mr(s?) Spoot feels the tread of the stalker and, preferring flight to fight, wheechs away down to what he believes to be safety; sadly, this very strategy causes the spurt that reveals where he is: had he only lain perfectly still his assassin would have passed onwards, never knowing that he was lurking there. But now the spooter thrusts his long knife into the sand at the spot marked by the spurting of Mr Spoot, pinning him down; then with his free hand he howks Mr Spoot out into the bucket, and from there to the waiting frying pan.

Waulkmill beach

Perhaps one day a spoot will evolve that chooses to freeze instead of flee, and the practice of spooting will die out. But meantime, lightly fried, they are regarded as a delicacy by some, maybe the same people who gorge on snail porridge and jellyfish ice-cream. Personally I’d prefer a mackerel any day. 

Swanbister beach

A spoot ebb (low water during the big equinoctial tides) tempts the aficionados of spooting out onto beaches that are mostly deserted, for the temperature and wind strength are seldom such as to encourage one to lie about smeared with sunblock, reading about the fifty shades; but those of us who enjoy the emptiness of the rippled sand, the clear water, the distant horizons , the oystercatchers, the seals, the tepid shallow water of the Flow beaches, the breakers and intense blue of the oyster plant at Skaill, become Orkney-beach addicts.

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Marian, another ferrylouper, moved into the district not far from us, and we became friends; she was from the U.S.A., and was astonished to find that she couldn’t get bullets for her beretta, and worse, that she was expected not to carry it with her at all times. One evening she visited us when we were watching The Goodies; on screen Tim Brooke-Taylor spread the Union Jack over a table, sat down in a chair and put his feet up on the flag. Shocked to the core, Marian said “He’s put his feet on your flag!” “So?” said we, “it’s only a piece of cloth, it’ll wash.” But no. Feet on flag was desecration, and punishable by, er, what exactly? It remained unclear.

We were both keen bridge players, and would often travel into Stromness of an evening to make up a four with a colleague of mine, Ishbel, and her grandfather; Marian and I took turns of being driver for the evening, and it was a quite frightening experience being the passenger, for Marian’s soul was still in the U.S.A. and believed that here, in the 51st state, only ignorance and thrawnness kept us driving on the left. The road between Orphir and Stromness had very little traffic, and there were long straight stretches where one could relax, but as Marian swooped, well to the right, round the S-bends at the start of the Scorradale Road, extolling the superiority of the American number-plate system, it was impossible to pay attention to her words, for I was poised to make a grab for the steering-wheel if any oncoming vehicle should suddenly appear driving on the un-American side of the road. Anyway she was already off on a different theme – taxation: all citizens of the U.S.A. filed their tax returns honestly and timeously, it appeared, whereas “you-all” (viz my friends and I and all Brits) cheated and lied and paid no tax if we could possibly get away with it. Both parts of which seemed unlikely, but argument would perhaps turn her attention away from the road, so I buttoned the lip, watched the road, hoped to survive.

The grandfather, who had spent some time in U.S.A., got on famously with Marian, and one evening she brought him a tomato plant in a pot. The only place he could put it was at a small window with not much light and very little heat, but it would be a clear loss of face if tomatoes never appeared. In the course of time, when we arrived one evening we saw that the plant had produced large dark-red tomatoes; Marian was enormously pleased, and the grandfather was glad, for he had taken a lot of trouble buying the best tomatoes he could get hold of and pinning them invisibly to the plant.

A heart condition put Marian in hospital for a while; unable to believe that a hospital stay was free, she wanted a room to herself, with her favourite bottle of whisky, and was ready to pay for it; though she did get the whisky, the room was not possible, and she had to share with three others who, to her vocal disgust, were unwilling/unable to make up a bridge four. When I visited, the three seemed barely conscious, but they might have simply been in retreat.

She remained in Orkney, continuously amazed at the driving and taxation habits of us Brits, and envying our tomato-growing expertise, until her death. Generous and interesting, she left the neighbourhood the poorer for her going.  

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Stromness Academy had a nautical department which provided evening classes in navigation and seamanship. With a spouse who was producing a constant stream of sailing-dinghies, I thought it might be good to probe the inner secrets of how to find your way over the trackless sea, although my colleague in maths pointed out that nowadays all that old lore was useless because it had been overtaken by satellite communication; but then he also said that computers would shortly be able to produce accurate language translation, and I knew that was unlikely, so I reckoned the old navigational lore could easily be useful – especially as I had no satellite communication device.

Useful or not, navigation was immensely interesting, and I borrowed the sextant for a weekend, to see if I could put our house in its correct place on the chart by taking a sighting of the sun at noon from our bedroom window which had a view clear across the Flow to the low-lying north coast of Scotland. It was not easy. The house moved half a mile inland, then out onto the water; but after a while I got it in its true position, and was satisfied that if the day came that I was lost in mid-Atlantic I’d be able to pinpoint my position – so long as I had a chart, a sextant, a chronometer, and perhaps a compass, and so long as the waves didn’t heave about too much, and so long as I could see the sun or some recognisable star, and had the almanac … and a calculator … and some toast, and coffee … yes, I was dreaming, but it was very gripping.

Signal flags could be useful, I felt, for a wife trying to get a message across to a nautical-minded husband; the best one had to be X - stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals, failing which, perhaps L - you should stop, I have something important to communicate might work? would F - I am disabled, communicate with me be a tad too pleepy? was it worth flagging  J - I am going to send a message by semaphore and continue by holding wee flags and waving the arms about? no, that would mean having to remember another great heap of signals, and Morse was hard enough.

My Morse learning was by sound signals, and I became reasonably proficient, except that there were two pairs of letters that I often mixed up, making the message “luckqou” somehow lacking in bite. Came the exam, and it turned out that the Morse was done by winking light in a darkened room. I had been up most of the previous night, and after a day at work I saw only two or three flashes of the light in the dark room before I tipped over into a dreamless doze, and awoke unrefreshed and groggy, needing to write down the text of the message, and straight after that being given two pieces of rope and told to construct a bowline on a bight; um, a bowline, easy-peasy, that was how you tied on the climbing rope, but a bight? eh? a big, wide bay? how/what/why? In the middle of this wonderment time was up, a minion came round with a bag to collect the ropes, I did a swift bowline and hoped for the best.

Now at worst, lost in mid-Atlantic, not only could I find out where I was, but also signal passing vessels that LXF with  . . . -- -- -- . . .  for backup if they failed to notice. And luckqou if they steamed on regardless.

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canoe-eye view

In real life, meanwhile, we plootered about in the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow in our yawl, once camping at Pegal Burn in Hoy where we took a few cuttings of honeysuckle, visiting Cava, where two ladies of advancing years lived in isolated contentment with never a mod con, rowing across to Orphir when they needed to do their shopping. In our canoe I would often float along the shore in the evening to see the seals that lived on the nearby rocky headlands and listen to their song.

need to walk

In so many ways, Orphir was an idyllic environment, but it had a down side - the daily journey to work, with the children (for there was no school transport), and the increasing need to ferry the bairns about to visit their friends (mostly done patiently by the spouse). In winter, the road was often difficult; during one return home from Stromness the car ground to a halt in deep drifts on the Scorradale road; we started walking, but when we’d reached the foot of the hill we were most kindly taken in by the Orphir schoolmaster and his wife and given beds for the night. There was a day when it was impossible to get the car out onto the road, and I walked the 11 miles in to work, on a breathtakingly beautiful day utterly silent; no traffic was managing to get along the road until within a mile of the school. Dear me, too late for register class.

The other continual worry was a monster mortgage: by today’s standards, house prices were low, but interest rates were very high; Orkney house prices started to rise, as they had already done down south, and there came a point where we could sell our too-big Orphir house for enough to let us buy a smaller house in Stromness outright. Living in Stromness would mean that I could walk to work and that the bairns could see their friends whenever they wanted.

Stromness from the air

We were extraordinarily lucky: we got a house right on the shore, with a pier running out into the harbour, and before long our far too many belongings were in their new home.
A cutting from the Pegal honeysuckle came too, and is still flourishing: I can see it on Google Earth.