shewhomust | Old Houses

I started to write this post a month ago, while we were on Mainland in Orkney; then things intervened, and I didn't finish it. Which gives me the opportunity to complete it with more photos than I would have done, had I completed the original version. It was choosing the two photos that I originally planned to use which gave me the title, and then the more I wrote, the more I realised how many old houses there were in the story.

This was the day after that evening by the loch; we were staying at the Barony Hotel. That's not what made me think about old houses, though it is old enough (they have a display showing water colours by a lady who stayed there in 1902). The things that feel old-fashioned are not, of course, the old hotel, but what must be 1960s additions and improvements. But you won't hear any complaints from me about somewhere that gives me smoked haddock and a poached (duck) egg for breakfast!

Our morning visit, though, was to the seriously old houses of the stone age village at Skara Brae:

Always the same, always new: and there have been changes since we first came, including the construction of a car park, and a visitor centre in which, on a previous visit, we found shelter from the wind. There was no wind worth mentioning this morning, but warm sunshine, and many, many sparrows.

durham_rambler and I were both very impressed at the information board which told us that the people who built Skara Brae, five thousand years ago, had brought with them the midden - the rubbish, the discarded bones and shells and other waste, with which they packed around their houses for added solidity. We had assumed that it had simply accrued while the site was inhabited. So this was something new we had learned (or was it? I started having doubts. Had I read this before, and forgotten it? This, too, was possible.)

Since our admission tickets included a tour of Skaill House, we did that too; like any grand house, it has plenty of odds and ends to look at, even if you don't force yourself to study every last family tree and royal visit (the dining table is laid as it was for the Queen Mother's visit in 1983 - I think - and I admire the Copeland Spode service with 'rustic scenes' of farming, bordered with a garland of hops).

We lunched at the brewery at Quoyloo, after driving round in circles for a bit, trying to find it (this really shouldn't be difficult; maybe our mistake was asking the satnav). They weren't enthusiastic: at something after one o' clock, they were holding a long table empty against the arrival of a large party, but eventually conceded they could fit us in. I ate smoked fish, and drank a tasting paddle of Nimbus, Dark Island (still my favourite beer) and Skullsplitter. and waited to see if the party would arrive (they didn't). Then we went to the shop and bought beer to take home and a t-shirt with a puffin on it (the Skullsplitter may have had something to do with this - it is, as its name suggests - very strong - but I may just have wanted a t-shirt with a puffin on it).

We came to Kirbuster Farm Museum by accident. I wanted to visit Corrigall Farm Museum, where we had been on one of our first trips to the islands, and not returned since. I found it on the map, and the signpost to 'farm museum' indicated a turning where I wasn't expecting it, but minor roads and back ways are irresistible, and surely Mainland couldn't have two farm museums within ten miles of each other? Well, of course it could. At first sight, across the burn:

I thought that's not it! Then, immediately after: But it will do nicely! It was, say my notes, the classic Orkney experience: the museum is free, and you wander round unobstructed and look at things, and at a certain point the keeper turns up, ready for a long chat. He caught up with us in the 'firehoose':

the kitchen at the heart of the long, Norse-style farm building. In the centre is the fire (a peat fire, of course, and my t-shirt smelled of peat smoke for the rest of the day) with an opening in the roof above it to let out the smoke - and on this exceptionally sunny day, to let in the sunlight. The peat diggings are being worked out, explained the custodian, and they have to import peat from Caithness, where they quarry it, but it isn't proper Orcadian turf. THe top layer of peat, with all the roots in it, is "foggy peat", because it burns with so much smoke; below it is the good stuff, the "coal peat"

But compare the layout of this room with the house at Skara Brae: the central hearth, the box bed in the wall behind. Yet Kirbuster was lived in until the 1960s. They may not have cooked on the central hearth, and they may not have slept in the box bed (a bedroom had been created next door by matchboarding the stone walls, and covering them with wallpaper which might have come from Laura Ashley), but they'd have been at ease with the shape of the room. In the parlour there was a little organ, with sheet music: The Lord is my Shepherd and Nobody Knows de Trouble I See.

Outside there were bluebell woods (miniature woods, admittedly, this being Orkney) and a Victorian garden:

We often visit Orkney in the late spring, but this abundance of bluebells was new to me.

This being a farm museum, the outbuildings housed a collection of farm machinery, and I took many photographs, but will end my post with this one, for the pleasure of giving it the caption, 'Three Riddles':