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102 13 R The Orkneys I had left behind my friends at CalMac because Northlink provided ferry service between Scrabster and the Orkneys and Shetland Islands. Northlink’s ship was large and very comfortable, and I crossed in a quick ninety minutes . I had now traveled from one vast, sparsely populated area to the sparsely populated archipelago of seventy or so islands that comprise the Orkneys. It was time to reorient myself. The Orkneys are as close as ten miles from the Scottish mainland and are a part of Scotland, at least to most people living on the Scottish mainland. There are dissenters: “The place is no more Scottish than Wimbledon,” wrote the Englishman Charles Jennings. Gordon Donaldson, the late “historiographer royal” (an absolutely impeccable-sounding title), pointed out a few years ago that while the Northern Isles were clearly de facto parts of Scotland , “de jure there is less certainty.” Jennings, somewhat the cynic, added: “Orkney passed into Scottish hands at the end of the fifteenth century in compensation for the non-payment of the dowry of Margaret of Denmark. And before that it was all Norsemen and Danes. . . . The place is just too far north.” If you live in the Orkneys, however, you are an Orcadian, and a reference to the mainland is a reference to the largest island in this group and not to the Scottish mainland. It’s not a secessionist sort of thing, though, but as much as a fact of geography and history. The Orkneys are a long way from Edinburgh and Glasgow, although the islands are just over the horizon when you’re standing at John O’Groats (and wishing you weren’t). The Orkneys 103 Those populous centers of Scottish influence really don’t exert a lot of influence here because they are so far away, and because the history and geography have long pointed to other places, notably Scandinavia. There were Stone Age people here at 4000 b.c. and later some Christian settlements . It was a Pictish kingdom for a while, and then came the Vikings, warriors who arrived about the ninth century and created a formidable outpost that lasted for more than three hundred years. Norway then took over until 1468, when Christian I, the king of Norway and Denmark, mortgaged the islands to Scotland on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to King James III of Scotland. One of history’s earliest recorded cheapskates, Christian never paid off his debt, so there’s always been a little legal argument about who owns what, although it’s been generally quickly and fairly resolved over a beverage of some sort. No matter, the Orkneys have been mostly a Scottish preserve since, but the Norse and Danish influence remains much in evidence and helps impart a unique flavor to these islands. So much for history. The reality is that when you look at a map the Orkneys—and the Shetlands even farther to the north—are a long way away from most everywhere else. The explorer Martin Martin described them in 1695, but his words didn’t exactly prompt a tourist stampede to the islands. Boswell and Johnson never mentioned them, understandably. The construction of oil rigs in the North Sea brought important new commercial interests (albeit more to the Shetlands than to the Orkneys), but the rise of tourism as a major industry in these beautiful, sneakily seductive, fertile islands has been a relatively recent phenomenon, only a few decades old. “It’s a place you have to want to come to, not somewhere you come by accident,” an Orcadian native told me one sunny afternoon as we sat outside St. Magnus Cathedral in the city of Kirkwall. I had really wanted to come here. That old quest for the unusual was certainly part of the reason, but mostly it was the music that got me to these islands. Specifically it was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, one of the current generation’s finest classical composers, who was born in England but has lived in the Orkneys since 1971. Much of his music has been written here and written about places here. I had listened to his operas, symphonic and chamber scores for nearly thirty years, finding in them a deep satisfaction and refreshment that evoked an intense curiosity about the land that so inspired him. I know it sounds a tad daft to insist that music got me all the way here, but it’s...

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