JOERG MODROW / LAIF

CIRCLE OF LIFE The standing stones of Stenness; Orcadians took binding vows nearby until the early 1800s

HARTMUT KRINITZ / LAIF

ROCKS OF AGES The Old Man of Hoy formation gazes out at the North Sea

Written In Stone

The austere, awe-inspiring Orkney Islands, off Scotland's northern coast, are a living museum, where for millenniums intrepid settlers have carved their life stories into the rocks

By JULIAN COPE

Orkney Islands, Britain

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The Orkney Islands, in all their fertile greenery, are the most spectacular of Britain's many archipelagos. Intriguingly visible from John O'Groats — close to mainland Britain's northernmost point — but accessible only by crossing the turbulent Pentland Firth, the Orkneys became a self-sufficient sanctuary for those intrepid few stockbreeders and early farmers who first made the journey around 7,000 years ago.

These islands are said to be over 70 in number, though most are no more than uninhabitable rocky islets known as skerries. And most modern Orcadians, like their ancient ancestors, live nowadays upon the low-lying Orkney Mainland, once euphoniously known as Pomona. It is from here that ferries or bridges are taken to the other inhabited islands like Eday, North and South Ronaldsay, Papa Westray, Rousay, Sanday and Westray; each one similarly green and low in the water. Each is formed of a hard black flagstone, whose strata break off into such precise linear forms that storms, winds and the ocean have created more impressive natural monuments than humanity could ever hope to achieve.

The natural power of these effects was certainly not lost on the ancients hereabouts, who clearly built their Isbister necropolis atop just such a rocky outcrop in order to impress — or intimidate — visitors arriving from the beach below. Moreover, the large scale of the Orkneys is such that — throughout the remote past — successive waves of incomers have been able to establish their own settlements, fortifications and temples by modifying rather than obliterating the activities of previous cultures. Around the time of Julius Caesar, some practically minded Iron Age settlers even appropriated forgotten Neolithic tombs for reuse as domestic dwellings. But if there was nothing available to be modified, brand-new buildings were often constructed right next to temples of the remote past, as can be seen on Rousay, where the massive Iron Age broch tower of Midhowe was placed right next to one of the Orkneys' largest Neolithic chambered tombs.

Storms, winds and the ocean have created more impressive natural monu ments on the Orkneys than humanity could ever hope to achieve

Luckily for the modern traveler, the Orkneys' lack of any real tree covering forced the ancients to fashion everything in stone, including such objects as furniture and household storage, precisely the type of temporary items that have long since perished elsewhere. And so, at the Knap of Howar settlement, on the northern island of Papa Westray, 5,000-year-old cooking pots, stone furniture and household containers remain in place while the Atlantic pounds the tough flagstone beach just 30 m below. I once sat in the "living room" at Knap of Howar, absent-mindedly rubbing my hands around the basin of a quernstone that had been used 5,000 years before to grind grain for bread.

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Staring out through the low Neolithic doorway on to the beach just below, and puzzling at the paradox of this seemingly eternal structure's precarious location at water's edge, I eventually ducked down under the low lintel and descended the 20 or so paces necessary to access the beach. There at my soaking feet lay a fine polished Neolithic tool, around 25 cm long, still glistening from the receding tide. I found it quite impossible to accept that this delightful relic — having been fashioned over five millenniums earlier — would within days have been taken by the currents of the Atlantic had I not been there to commandeer it. Never had cultural survival seemed so arbitrary as at that moment. How had these marvels survived in this raw coastal environment, and how much more had been taken by the Atlantic? I remembered the famous storm of 1850 that had, as it pounded the Bay Of Skaill far to the south, first revealed the lost Neolithic coastal village of Skara Brae. Would a similar storm return some day to reclaim its own?

To visit these islands is to become at peace with the concepts of both the recent and ancient past, as the Orkneys are a living museum whose relics confront even those making the briefest of journeys. At low tide, the rusting masts of sunken warships still break the surface at Scapa Flow, while the once solitary island of South Ronaldsay is nowadays accessible from the mainland via the Churchill Barriers — a bizarre artificial isthmus of factory-sized concrete blocks set in the water between the islands to block the path of German U-boats during World War II.

Elsewhere, Norse churches and houses roofed with the upturned hulls of fishing boats remind us that the Orkneys' ancestral roots lie not with the Scots but with Scandinavia's Vikings.

Indeed, it is to those heathen Vikings that we owe the survival of the Orkneys' most ancient monuments. The Vikings appropriated several ancestral tombs and stone circles for reuse as law centers, elevated areas of hallowed ground atop which lawman inaugurated new legislation. A great holed monolith known as the Stone of Odin, which stood next to the Stenness circle, became so popular a place of marriage vows and business deals that such covenants, known as the Oath of Odin, were still considered legally binding by Kirkwall magistrates as late as the early 1800s.

For the traveler from Scotland, the island of Hoy is the first of the Orkneys to greet us. But in context with the rest of the Orkneys, Hoy is the mysterious outsider, a black sheep whose geological form is entirely different to the rest of this archipelago. Was Hoy considered to be off-limits to the ancients of Orkney? Its lack of any of those great burial chambers that proliferate on all the other inhabited islands suggests this may have been the case.

Ironically, the broodingly inhospitable island of Hoy is the only landmass in the Orkneys to invoke a feeling of the eternal. But as that guarantee of eternity has been paid for by stark barrenness, perhaps the real underlying truth of the Orkneys is that fertility must always be temporary. These verdant and low-lying islands have always given me the impression of being newly emerged from below the surface of the North Atlantic, and that they soon may be sliding beneath the waves once more.

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Julian Cope is a musician and author of The Modern Antiquarian and Megalithic European

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FROM THE JULY 4/11, 2005 DOUBLE ISSUE OF TIME EUROPE MAGAZINE; POSTED SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2005.