Longread – Vee Walker writes…

To Swona – June 2026

For bigger birthdays, I like to buck the trend, dodging the horrific ‘surprise’ party bullet in favour of a small adventure, often alone, or at least away from my nearest and dearest.

I have worked in Iceland (50), climbed Ben Wyvis (55) and explored Bennachie and the archaeology/history of Aberdeenshire (mid-Lockdown, 60).

This time it turned out to be another island which beckoned.

I was already in Orkney for the magnificent 50th Anniversary St Magnus Festival (well done Alasdair Nicolson and team) but I found I wanted a wilder moment to mark turning 65.

John Cordock of OrcaVentures, skipper of the well-appointed 12-passenger tour vessel Boy Ryan, offers fabulous wildlife cruises (which happen most days, sea conditions permitting) – but – given that we have our own trips to see bottlenose dolphins and often whales here in the coastal waters around the Black Isle, I was hoping for something a wee bit more challenging.

It was then I noticed John was offering a longer trip (though trip is not really the right word for this adventure!) – a longer exploration of the remote island of Swona. It is costly, but this is a riskier, more complicated exercise than the bog standard oh look, a seal of a wildlife tour. Plus a large chunk of the fee goes to support the hard work of the Swona Heritage Group (see link at end), and as I was to discover that is money very well spent. And if sea conditions prevent the trip from happening, then you are refunded in full.

I am so glad I went.

If you have ever taken the Orkney ferry from Gills Bay in Caithness to St Margaret’s Hope in Orkney, you’ll have passed two islands nearer the mainland than the archipeligo en route – Stroma, dotted with houses, which is still farmed – and then wilder Swona, with only scattered buildings, which now has no permanent residents other than its herd of extraordinary wild cattle. These were turned loose when their last owners, siblings James and Violet Rosie, left the island for medical reasons, intending to return but never doing so, thus bringing to an end the era of permanent human habitation on Swona.

I had read about the evolution back to feral of the Swona cattle in Cal Flyn’s remarkable collection of essays Islands of Abandonment (2021) but I never imagined I could travel there to see them for myself.

And I so nearly didn’t. The booking conditions require a signed disclaimer, and (rightly) warn off anyone with mobility issues. If you are prone to tripping or stumbling, this may not be the island for you. Aging is a cruelly insidious process, however, and if I had listened to my own inner demons – it might be too much for you… you’ll be the oldest… the slowest… you’ll spoil it for everyone else – I would have bottled it. I have my daughters to thank for encouraging me, even paying half the cost ❤.

There aren’t many trips to Swona so if you get the chance, grab it! The tides and the weather have to be exactly right. Our midsummer trip left at 13.00 and arrived back about 20.15, so later than scheduled, for reasons I will explain. I wore a dryrobe over jeans and a fleece, then tossed up over wellies or walking boots. The latter won, and I took a thumbstick too, both good calls.

As Boy Ryan bobbed across a remarkably calm and increasingly sunny Pentland Firth (thanks for the pic Eleanor), it became obvious that six of the passengers were Orcadians, several of whom knew each other, and a few of whom had strong connections to the island already. Swona is sometimes known as Orkney’s St Kilda due to its dicey seas, isolation and state of abandonment, so clearly it has a special place in the hearts and minds of local people and is not ‘just for the tourists’. Other than a friendly South African lady (wearing unfortunate footwear about which more later) who was lending John a hand in the onboard catering front, I was the only outsider. I found I felt a wee bit shy, like a new girl in the classroom.

As we approached Swona, John told us there were just two possible places to land a tender on the island (we had been towing a small orange dinghy which was now brought alongside).

Getting onboard this was quite interesting (an undignified scrabble over shipside rails then a drop into the tender while hanging on to a vertical handrail) but with John keeping me right I managed it fine. We were lucky and landed without incident in the preferred northwest inlet known as The Haven, closest to the greatest concentration of former island homes.

The buildings on Swona are not subsistence-farming blackhoose ruins, they are solid, stolid and often two-storey houses, several still in a reasonable state of repair (with the Heritage Group determined to improve on this). Others are being allowed to become roofless winter shelters for the wild cattle.

Before the collapse of the fishing which sustained its wealth, this was a thriving island community with modern farm machinery and even its own school. Swona folk lived off fishing, farming and anything salvaged from the many shipwrecks around the coast. The northeast part was the most densely inhabited.

It was really sunny by the time I landed and I was already regretting the hot dryrobe, so Lindsay – retired firefighter, diver, self-confessed Swona addict and our expert guide for the day – allowed some of us to leave surplus kit in Norhead Cottage.

This was in good repair with a surprising amount of timber inside – some bought and brought to Swona no doubt, but some salvaged shipwreck timber too. This is used as a base by visiting specialist groups (Gordonstoun School regularly brings field trips to Swona) so had camp chairs and a lived-in feel, as well as a photograph of the late Queen and Duke of Edinburgh in their glamorous youth, setting the time-stands-still tone of the place.

We walked onwards and upwards, Lindsay wisely leading us up the steepest terrain while we were still fresh. Carpets of orchids (mainly northern marsh), ragged robin and cats-ear had me gasping, with here and there a bright blue dab of late vernal squill, a tiny flowering bulb related to our garden scylla. I was able to be useful in tentative identification of most species we found, including the fluffy seeds of creeping willow – a ground-level shrub, if not an actual Swonan tree.

I wondered if a small patch of unexpected primroses found in the cliff edge could be a deliberate planting as they looked so outbof place.

We admired the fearsome gloup, a collapsed sea cave, now a nesting place for shags. I read later that this was also the perfect hiding place for the island’s illicit whisky still.

This is more a shelfy/ledgy coastline than a cliffy one but plenty of seabirds were scolding us from nests or roosts in the Caithness flag nooks and crannies, notably puffin, fulmar and shags and we watched seals from the clifftop.

We had to watch our feet (and heads!) as a few late bonxie chicks were huddled into the grassland – we walked on quickly to avoid parental skua indignation. The entirety of the north ‘head’ of Swona is a ternery and wisely put out of bounds in spring/summer as tern chicks are tiny and fragile and their parents understandably fierce in their defence.

In the south of the island Lindsay led us to an idyllic spot for a snack near carpets of rare blue and grey oysterplant, a plant very dear to my late mother’s heart. I would love to return and paint it.

The older archaeological features of the island are concentrated in the south, with the stones of the chambered cairn offering dramatic views. More excavation work is planned here soon.

There are also fish-drying sk-yeos, walled enclosures where sea harvests could be air-dried.

A giant rock pool lured many of our group down to it but no-one was quite brave enough to take a dip, though Lindsay has done so in the past.

The modern lighthouse still keeps vessels clear of this treacherous coastline, fringed with shipwrecks and tragic tales of loss. I read in the late John S. Findlay’s epic Swona Revisited (2014) how one Norwegian vessel came ashore and the only survivor was a big dog, who led the islanders to the wreck. Later the Norwegian ambassador sent an urgent message from the captain’s brother with a description of the captain and an assurance that all repatriation and quarantine costs would be met for the dog, but alas, the animal had already been shot: possibly inconsolable at the loss of its master, and too great a risk to have a non-local dog among free range livestock. Still very sad!

A modern lighthouse shed has been knocked over by the wind like a stack of playing cards.

In this area I noticed there were fewer northern marsh orchids and more early purple orchids (unless they are the same and it is simply a strong colour variation – I am no orchid expert?). If the cattle concentrate in this wetter area, their dung will be gradually enriching the soil, so this may explain the variation.

One of the planticrues, shelters for growing vegetables.

The vegetation around Rose Cottage, the home of the Rosies, showed surviving potato haulmes and stands of.rhubarb, with camomile, Scots lovage and sorrel also present (nice to know the youngsters from Gordonstoun won’t go hungry, providing they can dig and forage!). The Rosie family barns are full of useful flotsam and jetsam found while beachcombing.

The South African lady stepped into a giant cowpat up to her ankles at this point – Swona is no place to explore in slip-on loafers.

The island cattle were vigilant, not aggressive, and moved as we did, always at a cautious distance. It can be a rather different story if there is a taurine power struggle taking place, as newly-deposed bulls can be feisty and sullen.

Ordinary farmed cattle associate humans with food and tend to approach out of greed or just dull curiosity. Not so these. I counted about 30 in all, maybe 20 cows, 6 calves and four bulls. They watched us closely as we plodded across the flat area known as Dyke End, the hardest walking, as the terrain is dried into rigid ruts made by hooves and these ruts are masked by longer vegetation. I was glad of my stick here.

Three deposed bulls – each a former clan chief – watched their former consorts longingly from the periphery of the herd. Here and there, a winter-bleached and wind- and bird-picked skull augured their future. We saw one long dead animal and a healthy-looking calf lying freshly dead in different parts of the island. Why they died will never be known, as this is a truly wild herd (some descriptions of Swona have suggested that a vet keeps an occasional eye on the herd but that is not the case).

This is not sad, but natural. What is on Swona stays on Swona.

The same goes for the old coastguard/lighthousekeeper records, which seemed in good condition. From a curatorial point of view it would be wise, I think, to make digital photographic copies of everything paper-based on the island for duplication to Orkney Archives, just as a safeguard. This could be done in situ. It is astonishing that anyone should sail as far as the dangerous skerries of Swona in order to steal or vandalise these old homes, but bampots abound, and it has already happened 💔.

All accessible buildings are now kept padlocked as a result.

By the time we got to the school and North-houses, back at The Haven, my legs were wobbly, but I felt cleansed by the air and the exercise and all the wonders I had seen. I had had a very tough spring and felt like I laid down a heavy burden, somehow.

Being on Swona reminds you of what matters in life.

John came back to pick us up, in two groups again, in the wee orange dinghy. I always save the best till last! he grinned and promptly turned the bow not for Boy Ryan but for the cliffs to the south of The Haven. I won’t spoil John’s surprise by telling you where we ended up, but it was an exciting moment at the end of a fabulous day!

John exudes an air of total confidence and is obviously a man happy in his life and work, but when he mentioned a bit of a swell with studied nonchalance I thought oh-oh. This is the Pentland Firth, a place where the tides change, the winds can rise and a whirlpool can appear out of nowhere.

Our first attempt to board was aborted as the swell was slapping the dinghy against the side of the boat. I got soaked as the dryrobe was deemed too hazardous to wear in the tender. Not happy with this, says John, and we pulled away again. A clever manoeuvre then saw us moving parallel with the ship on the opposite side and boarding as both vessels moved through the water. We all scrambled aboard, some of us less elegantly than others, hearts thudding and gleeful. John’s seamanship meant we felt safe the whole time. We sailed for home through rougher seas and a whirlpool.

Thank you again to Lindsay and to John for this wonderful experience.

Timings on all Swona trips are of necessity approximate. On the way back I found I had missed my bus by half an hour, so begged a lift from lovely Ruth (who kindly allowed me to use her orchid and pool and puffin shots for this blog as they were much better than my own) who was also heading for Kirkwall. Thanks to her accelerator pedal made it back in time for almost all the Voces Thules concert in St Magnus Cathedral.

A more-than-just memorable experience. So much more than a boat trip too, a true adventure. Afterwards I was able to identify 21 plant species and send the list over to Lindsay for future fine-tuning and use. Nice to give something back to the island.

If you’re coming to Orkney, do try to go to Swona – but maybe leave those leather loafers at home…

Vee Walker

June 2026

Vee stayed at Feolquoy Farmhouse in Harray 👇

Airbnb https://share.google/0wt82ElQ2m4b2ePNF

Vee travelled with Pentland Ferries 👇

Pentland Ferries https://share.google/15EkVJLl3HFJ63BdF

Book your adventure to Swona with John at OrcaVentures (he does wildlife tours and even seafood cruises with an onboard hot-tub too!) 👇

Orca Ventures https://share.google/nqwuVah5XOQBY2NH7

More on the magnificent work of Swona Heritage Group here 👇

Swona Heritage https://share.google/c6uuMptgZTYkVa0nf

It’s 1810 Marmalade week!

Back in 2011, my first ever publication (long since out of print alas) was The 1810 Cookbook, a new edition of a recipe collection pulled together by Jane Onslow, my 4 x great grandmother, on the occasion of her marriage to Edward Winnington-Ingram in 1810. It is long since out of print but I still use the original to cook from. And one of the best recipes it contains is for this Seville Orange marmalade. Jars of pure sunlight.

The W-Is were church gentry – and Jane, daughter of the Dean of Worcester, whose portrait suggests she enjoyed fine dining, moved with Edward into the family stately pile, Ribbesford House, which is currently for sale if you have a spare million and three times that as a restoration budget! 👇

Ribbesford House, Ribbesford, Bewdley | Property for sale | Savills https://share.google/T7QMse0KDveMhOcOG

Jane’s recipe collection shows how widely they sourced their food: macaroni ‘as at Naples’, Curaçao, curry powder, mock turtle soup, macarons and crême brulée for example.

To make this marmalade you will need a spare week, about 20 Seville oranges, an ample supply (3kg or so) of granulated sugar, plenty of good tapwater, a large preserving pan, a ladle, a spurtle or long wooden spoon (check it does not smell of onions), a jam funnel and a basin – or a handy clean bathtub!

In 1810 oranges from Seville would have been picked green and ripened in the holds of sailing vessels. Sevilles are small, rather dull fruits, never sold with the preservative wax which generally make an orange shiny today. This also means the fruits do not last as long, so marmalade season begins in December and will be over before the month of January is out.

A ship’s hold was probably not the cleanest of places, which is why the recipe begins with rather a strange instruction to modern eyes: to soak the fruit in a basin for three days, changing the water daily. I use our guest bath, well scrubbed before and after, for convenience! If you do this, the different layers of the orange soften and much of the bitterness gets washed away. Even in these modern times, it is remarkable how many tiny specks of grit get released from the skins during this three day process.

On day four, rinse the fruit one last time, drain and remove all the ‘eyes’ (where the stalk was connected) with a sharp pointed knife. You may need to clean or cut around this area.

Now chop each orange in half around its equator. Squeeze the juice into a bowl and set aside. Strain any pulp from the seedy discard and add to the juice bowl.

Lots of seeds. Some put these in a muslin bag and add them to the boil to aid setting but I don’t risk it.

Now chop the half oranges into quarters and place in a preserving pan. Cover with water and – yes, you’ve guessed it – leave to stand overnight. Taste this steeping water in the morning and it will still be bitter – these are not sweet oranges. Replace the water with fresh, covering the fruit. Bring to the boil, then simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes or until the zest yields to the tip of a knife but still has some resistance, but the pulp and pith are quite soft.

Place the quarters on trays and allow to cool and dry off overnight.

In the morning, scoop out all the pulp and strain it into the bowl of juice, then, with a sharp dessert spoon, scrape away and discard as much of the thick white pith as you can. You should now be able to see daylight through the skins.

Discarded bitter pith – taste it, it’s awful!

Either with a sharp knife or with a pair of sharp kitchen scissors, cut these translucent zests into thin strips of varying lengths.

I use a big measuring jug for the next bit. For every jug of shredded zest and every jug of juice, add a jugful of sugar to the preserving pan. Set aside to allow the sugar to dissolve, in theory overnight, but this particular corner I cut. Jane’s sugar would have been grated from a sugarloaf cone, so might have taken all night to break down. The main thing is to keep stirring it and not start to heat it until all the sugar has dissolved into the juice.

Now prepare your pots and lids. I like to use the commercial vacuum method, not faff around with circles of cellophane and elastic bands (sorry SWRI!), so good quality recycled jars like Bonne Maman are ideal. I made marmalade with 5kg of oranges this year and used 20 jars as shown. I run them through the dishwasher first, then pop them on a big baking tray with sides, along with my ladle and jam funnel, in the oven at 100 degrees.

Back to your jam pan. Mine is a giant stainless steel pressure cooker base. You want a nice heavy bottom! I inch up the heat bit by bit until, after an hour, it comes to a rolling boil on maximum heat. Heat too rapidly and it will burn. Don’t be tempted to stick a finger in it to taste it, either, you’ll end up in Casualty!

At this stage the marmalade will be quite pale in colour and all the zest will be floating on top. Stir mixture frequently – I use a porridge spurtle.

So hot it is difficult to get true colour because of steam!

Once a circle of yellow froth forms after about 20 minutes, skim off these impurities which will spoil the clarity of your marmalade (a good time to test the flavour, skimmings are delicious, impure or not!). Jane’s sugar probably had a few more impurities than Tate & Lyle does today.

After a final 20 minutes or so, watch for three magical signs: the liquid reduces and starts to set on the sides of the pan, the colour and sound of the mixture deepens, and the bubbles become more glossy. When a little of the liquid starts to wrinkle when dripped on to a cold plate and tilted, pull your pan off the heat right away.

Wearing washable or rubber gloves, ladle the hot marmalade into the hot jars. I added a nip of Scotch to part of my batch then poured the hot marmalade on to it. You can also add treacle and cut the skins more chunkily to make Dundee style marmalade.

Place lid on jar only loosely. Once all jars are filled and lidded, put tray of jars back in the oven for 15 minutes.

All that soaking makes sure the zest is distributed evenly

Tighten all the lids thoroughly and wipe any stickiness from jars. Allow to cool overnight – you’ll hear the pleasing ‘pop’ of the lids as the protective vacuum takes hold – then label and store. Will keep for a couple of years – if it gets the chance!

Guess who managed to label them all as Jan 2025 🤣

Thanks for reading this blog post. There are a few other recipes on here if you scroll back. Happy to answer queries and I would love to see pix of successful makes! I am on Threads as @veewalkerwrites and Facebook as Vee Walker.

You can still buy my novel Major Tom’s War (a WWI love and adventure story based on real people, including descendants of Jane and Edward W-I) and events in paperback or ereader from http://www.kashihouse.com.

Here’s Jane W-I’s (cook’s, probably) original recipe, by the way 👇.

Happy marmalade-making!

Vee x

Why is the Black Isle ‘black’?

Golden stubble, green oak, blue sky – Black Isle

This blog is prompted by a recent commercial post circulating on Facebook which gives one rather poor definition for the Black Isle’s ‘black’ nomenclature and then encourages folk to sign up for a tour with the company.

No thanks.

For those who have never visited my home turf, the Black Isle is not an island but a peninsula attached to the mainland Highlands by a narrow neck of land starting at the River Beauly and ending at the river Conon. To the north it is bounded by the Cromarty Firth, to the south the Beauly Firth and to the east the Moray Firth, opening into the North Sea. It is an area with a warmer microclimate than the mainland, resulting in fertile farmland with rich dark soil and pockets of ancient, lush and biodiverse woodland.

An-t-Eilean Dubh in Gaelic, there is some suggestion that Dubh, black, is just a corruption of Duthac. The Black Isle was on the popular Elgin to Tain pilgrimage route but St Duthac’s shrine was in Tain itself not at the Chanonry in Fortrose, so I find this one unconvincing.

Let’s explore some of the other reasoning (one added courtesy of Paul Johnson, thanks Paul!): 👇

The truth is no-one really knows why the Black Isle is called the Black Isle, but in this blog I will set out five explanations as told to me as a local at intervals over the past fifty or so years. They are geographical, supernatural, historical, social and natural, with some overlap between the five.

If you know of any others, please get in touch!

A contrasting foreground

The Black Isle in times past would not have been capped with today’s commercial coniferous pine forests, most of which are under 100 years old, and it was known as the Black Isle before that. The backbone, the Mulbuie, was, as the name suggests (buidhe means yellow in Gaelic), so at some point in the past it must have been a golden moorland ridge scattered with peat-moss heather and fragrant whin (gorse) bushes.

So why not the Golden Isle?

The answer is in the contrast with the startling bulk of Ben Wyvis behind and to the west of the Black Isle in winter. Travellers from the south who had slogged up the Slocht must have welcomed the sight of the dark bulk of the low-lying Black Isle (barely 1000′) across the water as they descended towards Inverness, contrasting with Ben Wyvis, our much higher (3000′ + Munro) and weather mountain. From the first frost in October to Easter and often later, ‘the Ben’ has a summit white with frost or snow. We look to Ben Wyvis to predict how the day will turn out weatherwise.

A traditional winter greeting hereabouts is ‘Snaw on the Ben’, usually said with doom-laden glee.

Or…

Black magic

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 swept away a now-forgotten Roman Catholic past. With it went carved wayside crosses like those you see on the continent and local religious tolerence of difference, of the old ways. A fearsome zeal for the new Protestant religion (which, ironically, had its roots in an English king’s lust as well as a desire to purge the Christian church of corruption) swept the Highlands like a brush fire. Standing stones were defaced and broken. Carved tombstones were reused as plainer slabs (see more on that at Kirkmichael).

Accusations of witchcraft became numerous in the 1600s, often aimed vindictively at decent, prosperous women as well as those vulnerable through deformity or madness. The outcome of any witch trial was generally a foregone conclusion, but not always.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, the eccentric genius laird of Cromarty, saved one young pair of Croms who had accused themselves of ‘consorting with demons’ – presumably in the grip of some kind of religious fervour whipped up by an enthusiastic witchfinder. Sir T had just returned from a grand tour of the continent and was having none of it. Rather than agree to ‘the cleansing fire’ he put the pair up overnight, got them merry and encouraged a couple of his servants to ‘dally’ with them. In the morning, sure enough, the accused claimed to have consorted with demons that very night. Sir T quickly saw these gullible souls married to their willing ‘demons’, the sacrament of marriage protecting them from further reprisals. Unsurprisingly the church hated Sir Thomas thereafter, and the feeling was mutual.

More about Sir Thomas Urquhart at Cromarty Courthouse!

Less fortunate was the Brahan Seer, one Coinneach ‘Odhar’ (Dun-headed Kenny) Mackenzie, a Lewis man with the second sight. He came unstuck by ‘seeing’ the husband of Isabella Countess Seaforth – the head of the politically powerful Mackenzie clan – up to no good in Paris, and unwisely sharing this insight with his wife publicly. Coinneach was accused of witchcraft and burned to death in a tar barrel (likely the ferry beacon for summoning the vessel from Ardersier) on the highest point of Chanonry Point, where a mediaeval cross base can still be seen today. Before his grim end he thoroughly and chillingly cursed the great House of Seaforth: he predicted the death of all male heirs before the last of the line himself died, and that this doomed chief would know this time had come when various other clan chiefs had a variety of gruesome disfigurements and disabilities.

Worst of all, Coinneach predicted that a ‘white-coiffed lassie from the East’ would then ‘kill her sister’. Sure enough, once all the male heirs had predeceased Francis Humberston Mackenzie, and he himself had died, his widowed daughter returned from India (and in India, white is the colour of mourning) to take up her inheritance. She was at the reins of a carriage one day when it overturned, killing her sister.

It is not uncommon still for local people to have strange presentiments, perhaps echoes of Coinneach Odhar’s ‘seeing’. It is particularly useful for avoiding Police speed traps.

From black magic to…

Black Raiders

It’s hard to shake off the image of Vikings as tall, blonde, handsome chaps with horned helmets, isn’t it (thank you, Uthred son of Uthred…) but this part of Scotland was colonised by dark haired Danes (because ‘there ain’t nuthin’ like a Daaaaane….’). Although the indigenous locals probably did not welcome these new arrivals with open arms, not all Viking settlement was about dark deeds, burning churches, rape and pillage and so forth. The canny seafarers whose ships once stole, terrifyingly, up the firth under cover of a sea-mist or haar (a fine Old Norse word) would eventually settle and embrace Christianity and intermarry and farm the land just like everyone else. Dingwall was the place of the Thing, the Viking parliament (believed to be under the monument car park near the old library building). And in the Black Isle we still have Udale bay, Old Norse for The Bay of the Yew Trees.

Black Islers who belive themselves to be true locals who do an Ancestry-type DNA test will often be surprised to find a high percentage of Scandinavian blood. Tsk. We were all incomers once!

Or…

Black smoke from many homes

We have forgotten what it is like to warm ourselves and cook solely with open fires. For centuries people in the Black Isle burned wood and ‘moss’ or peat – turf they cut and stacked to dry up on the common land along the Mulbuie Ridge or even from along the coast. Again, travellers from the south might have seen a pall of yellow-black smoke from hundreds of hearths hanging over the Black Isle, rising from the many coastal chimneys of Redcastle, North Kessock, Kilmuir, Munlochy, Avoch, Fortrose, Rosemarkie and Cromarty.

People disposed of rubbish the same way too. Stubblefields were burned off after harvest to nourish the ground for the next crop. I have a happy memory of being allowed to play in a burning stubblefield, jumping through the quick-burning fires of waste straw in the early 1970s!

Higher up among the heather, too, a paler, more mysterious smoke would once have drifted upwards, juniper wood burned to fuel dozens of illicit whisky stills. Winters in the past were longer and harsher than they are now, and a dram of uisge-beatha helped them pass more easily. One Statistical Account relates that there were more whisky stills in the Black Isle than anywhere else in the Highlands.

The first legal distillery was licensed to the Forbes clan in Ferintosh.

Or…

Ancient Woodland

My friend Paul Johnson points out that there are still legacy Caledonian-type Granny Pines all over the Black Isle, from Mount Eagle on top all the way down to sea-level. Many are hidden either singly or in small groups in the current forestry plantations (and Gallowhill, Blackhills and also on the Rosehaugh estate to name just a few) and also in more deciduous woods such as the Beechwood at Raddery and the natural Birchwoods at Gallowhill – even in the Oakwoods at Drummonreach and Tore.

Many of the plantations and other woods are included on the Ancient Woodland Inventory for Scotland, almost all in fact. The Black Isle was once (maybe still is) home to Capercaillie and still has many of the usual pinewood residents, from Pine Martens to Crossbills. We still have the Bog Woodland Monadh Mor which is not considered part of the Caledonian Pinewood Fragments inventory for some stupid bureaucratic reason, but it should be!

Mature pines are dark green that look black from a distance. Most of the Black Isle may well have been part of the Great Wood, but it was systematically felled for timber and to clear land for farming and housing over the last 1500 years or so. Perhaps there was always a moorland ‘top’ above the trees, covered in moorland and whin, hence the ‘Mulbuie’ ridge – looking a bit like a monk’s tonsure.

From a distance, a mass of ancient woodland would look black…

So…

.. landscape, witchcraft, Vikings, whisky or ancient pines could all explain why our Isle is known as Black today.

Which do you reckon? Or is it something else?

The Killing of ‘Ken’

It was all Barbie’s fault. She made me do it.

For many of us who were ten years old in the early 1970s, our darkest repressed memories of cruelty and mutilation, if not actual murder, have been stirred up by the phenomenon that is the Barbie movie.

I had always hated traditional dolls, especially their slow, sinister eye-closing when tilted backwards. When (at the Bogroy Inn aged about six) I was told to hold a baby doll and sing a lullaby, I dropped it on its head. People laughed, but it was an act of protest, not an accident.

Golden Slumbers kiss my ***.

Sindy was still too much of a fat-head for me and so I shunned her: but when my eyes met those of Skipper across a crowded toyshop, I knew she had to be mine.

Marketed as ‘Barbie’s kid sister’, Skipper was like me: mouse brown hair, flat chested and flat-footed; something of a relief after her long-legged, wasp-waisted, pointy-boobed and arch-footed blondie big sister. Also like me, Skipper wore a dull blue flannelette nighty with lacy bits at the neck and cuffs, plus a sensible quilted dressing-gown for the Highland winter.

At first she had long hair, which I forgave her, but like all those early Barbie locks it seemed to have strayed from the Oppenheimer movie set, radioactively charged. Eventually all their hairstyles became crackling mushroom clouds of static fuzz. I quietly swiped Mum’s nail scissors to deal with that and soon Skipper, like me, had short curly hair, the shorn evidence stuffed down the back of the sofa. It was at that moment of personalisation that she became unique and mine, so all my Barbies followed the same trend.

The only thing I disliked about Barbie and Skipper et al were their ridiculous names. This was a serious friendship and I knew they could not possibly like their ‘box names’. They might wear gold and silver lamé bathing costumes and Flower Power maxi coats but they weren’t American to me. They were born – or unboxed, rather – in Scotland.

It never occurred to me that Barbie was short for Barbara (and in any case the only real Barbara I knew used to torture me behind the school shed). Mum suggested I should just rename them, but that didn’t seem respectful. These weren’t gormless baby dolls after all. They were sentient, real. And they had been sold in a box with their name on, whether they liked it or not.

And so they became my eternally-nameless companions, whom I thought of collectively as ‘Them’. I had, at one point, about seven of the Them, of whom just two (my short-haired mouse-brown Skipper and a shorn blonde Barbie, the latter still wearing the Most Beautiful Dress In The World) survive today.

At Peak Barbiedom there were two Skippers and four Barbies: some had knees that bent with an arthritic succession of clicks; some, rubbery arms that bent like they were hefting a pint until they broke at the shoulder through overuse to dangle uselessly at their sides; some, like the Barbie I kept, had a daintily angled head turn.

I truly loved Them. They were my only utterly dependable friends. I have kept two of Them for over fifty years, through over seven house moves.

How could I not, given the secret we share?

All looked sideways. None made eye contact. Nor did I. So He should surely have suspected something. There was only ever the one Ken, and he didn’t last long.

He wasn’t really a Ken, either. That was the thing. He was either a ‘Big Jim’ or a ‘Mark Strong’, I can’t remember which it said on the box (Mark Strong was I suspect the meeker British branding of Big Jim. Perhaps the latter would grow up to wear a bow tie and direct the British Museum, although he would need to ease up on the testosterone to manage such a transformation).

The real Ken was originally intended for boys to play with, not girls, but boys turned out to be ‘brand-resistant’, as some ashen-faced marketeer at Mattel probably pointed out in front of a chart showing his bombing sales figures.

Then Ken was launched in the UK as ‘Barbie’s boyfriend’, and every girl in Primary 7 at Inchmore School wanted him. At ten we were beginning to be curious about, if not actually interested in, boys. Our paths didn’t cross much with the real thing. They even had a separate shelter in the swampy school playground, just in case they contaminated us. No, none of the scowling, grubby, football-obsessed boys of Inchmore looked at all like the marketing pictures of Ken.

What wisdom might Barbie’s tall, handsome and mysterious new boyfriend impart? I had to know.

Mum bought my compliance for a trip to the dentist in Inverness (up the echoey stairs beside the station for a painful encounter with Mr Robertson or Mr Allan) with the promise of a Ken. Alas, once in the toyshop (Melvens? Pentangle?) we found they were clean out of Kens. I was more than a bit wobbly-lipped. I had had a jag and a filling and everything and not made a fuss, after all, and a deal was a deal. We only went to Inverness on the ferry a few times a year. A wasted trip was not to be countenanced.

Moreover, I had told my friends Jennifer, Wilma, Yvonne et al that I was going to get a Ken, so a Ken I jolly well had to have.

Then the kind lady said, ‘Ah, but these have just come in.’ She placed a plastic box on the counter. ‘Still Mattel, see?’ She pointed to the branding on the front.

‘Perfect,’ said Mum, lunging for him before I could really look. She hurriedly paid and handed the box over to me in the car with obvious relief. ‘See? Just the same. A Karate Ken.’ I tried to look enthusiastic, but I really wasn’t so sure. What I could see of ‘Karate Ken’ below his cheesy grin did not looked particularly enticing. And his name Wasn’t On The Box.

Would They take to him?

Kens and Barbies (I can’t quite say dolls – they were never dolls to me) were always held in place in their boxes by plastic-coated wires which it took a lifetime to undo. My ten-year-old self used to mutter ‘nearly there’ to reassure them as the fiddly process of release was brought about: I associated this with an awakening of sentience. But Ken/Mark/Jim or whoever he was looked positively delighted to be so confined and equally delighted to be released. I did not yet know or use the word vacuous but there it was in person.

He was wearing a white karate outfit surrounded by other manly karate accessories attached to the backing card with nylon threads as tough as cheesewire. It was never about the clothes for me, though. It was always a struggle to dress any of them in the garments they came with, the sleeves were so fiddly. Perhaps that is why so many shoebox outfits have survived in good nick for fifty-odd years.

I undressed him on the back seat of the car only to find that his rigid plastic hair was not the only thing welded on. So were his underpants. This was disappointing for some disturbing reason I could not yet pinpoint. His neck was bull-like and his head fitted over it, not on to it, so a hard seam showed. It looked rather as though he had been guillotined, then had his head stuck back on, but there was nothing of the suave French aristocrat about ‘Ken’. He was covered in very large, very rubbery muscles, had bizarrely articulated knees and a right arm that karate-chopped when you pressed a round panel in his back.

He was, to put it simply, gross.

Once home I wondered how I was going to introduce him to the massed ranks of my fun-loving tomboy Skippers and more glamorous and refined Barbies. I needn’t have worried. They took one look at him and my bedroom rocked with cruel laughter, for I had not spotted one last appalling detail in the car. This ‘fake Ken’ was for some mad Mattel reason made to a slightly smaller scale from the others. The Barbies were way taller than he was, and that wasn’t just because Barbie was strutting about on her impossible heels. I mean, everyone knew girls couldn’t ever ‘go with’ boys shorter than they were, for goodness sake! I could see They all hated him on sight.

Once Mum and I had started to watch Colditz, one of the meaner Barbies (who always wore the pink striped jumpsuit) pointed out that if I raised Ken’s arm above his head, then pressed the panel in his back, he gave a very creditable Nazi salute.

And that was the most interesting thing ‘Ken’ ever did. Almost.

I did take him to school once in the early days. Sharon (who had perfect hair and at least two real Kens) said, ‘That’s not a Ken.’

‘He is though!’ I blustered, knowing it was a lie.

‘No he’s not. He’s too short. And look, he’s all funny and lumpy. Yuck.’

I couldn’t really argue with that. I thought he was yuck too. ‘Ken’ was relegated to the bottom of my schoolbag. At home They began to pinch his dumbbells and try on his Karate gear, which fitted them rather better than it had him.

‘Ken’ lay abandoned in one corner of my toybox, his legs splayed at a vulgar angle. It was then that the plotting began in earnest. He might have cost my poor Mum hard-earned cash, but he was not one of Us. He had to go.

Our first attempt at permanent disposal was when I attached a home-made parachute to the naked-except-for-his-plastic-underpants ‘Ken’ with Sellotape and threw him up over the roof of our house. To my disappointment he failed to tumble down the chimney to become a writhing mass of hot plastic on the embers or to be snatched by a passing bird of prey. No, he made it right over the tiles, landing in an apple tree, from which my suspicious Mum disentangled his slowly spinning, still grinning form. When interrogated They – and I – said nothing.

Our final Wicker Ken moment came when Mum called us back down to the car. I looked at Them and They looked at me. We knew then without a word spoken that ‘Ken’ wasn’t coming home.

The final, fateful day of cold-blooded execution took place during a summer treat outing to a favourite burn referred to only as ‘up Strathconon,’ near a mighty bridge where sometimes we would swim. We loved to explore this burn. They would clamber up and up it, build dens in the heather, taking refreshing dips in the rockpools or sunbathing on the garnet-speckled granite outcrops wearing cool shades. Meanwhile Ken or Jim or Mark or whatever his bl**dy name was would just lie there, ape-like, in his plastic underpants, grinning at the sky.

As we walked back down the burn to Mum’s Morris Traveller, ‘Ken’, his arm still fixed in a Nazi salute, began to dive into the water just upstream of the many waterfalls en route. We would watch him plunge over and downwards into the depths, before bobbing to the surface with that repugnant smirk. Then, at the highest, deepest waterfall, We took him by one leg and threw him in a spiralling arc high into the air. The setting sun caught his face and I will swear to this day that there was the faintest tremor about his perky lips as he smacked the smooth, peaty water above the falls. The Barbies sniggered. We caught a flash of his red plastic underpants as he shot over the edge to plunge down, down, down into the darkly frothing water below.

He never came up again.

I looked at Them. They stared back in mute defiance. I gave a desultory poke about in the pool below the falls with a broken stick, just so I could say I had looked, but Mum was calling again. Collective feminism personified, we turned as one our backs on that smug plastic interloper – and condemned ‘Ken’ forever to his watery grave.

Perhaps someone else found and rescued him. Perhaps he is still down there somewhere, bravely leering through the slime. And although over the years I have returned to the same picnic spot up Strathconon many times, it is never, ever, without a tiny, thrilling, shiver of guilt.

Did you have a Barbie, a Skipper or a Ken? Feel free to share this post if so…

Vee Walker is an author and editor based in the Scottish Highlands. Her prizewinning archived-based novel of WWI, Major Tom’s War (an adventurous love story) is available in paperback and ereader editions from Kashi House 👇.

https://www.kashihouse.com/books/major-toms-war-paperback

https://www.kashihouse.com/books/major-toms-war-ebook

Locally Heroic psycho-geography

Hello. My name is Vee and for the past forty years or so – most of my adult life in fact – I have lived, part-time at least, in the village of Ferness.

For those who have never visited, Ferness is to be found simultaneously both on the east and the west coast of northern Scotland. It is a wee fishing community with one pub, one church and no school (there’s just the one baby…).

As a Fernessian, I love a ceilidh in the local drinking-hole. I have a weakness for red telephone boxes. Also for pimply biker boys named Ricky. I buy extra normal shampoo, occasionally have aspirations to mermaidhood and avoid menus which include rabbit.

Especially rabbits named Trudi.

Bill Forsyth’s extraordinary film Local Hero is forty years old and to celebrate this anniversary, author and journalist Jonathan Melville has written a book about its creation.

I appreciate after this interesting read that it could have been a very different film: it is only thanks to Forsyth’s genius in casting and then the subtleties of the process of editing that the nuanced scenes we love have been whittled into existence.

The book is structured by describing iconic scenes chronologically in each chapter (so impossible to avoid spoilers, but no-one who has not seen the film is likely to buy the book anyway). Each of these scenes is followed by a description of a different aspect of the making of the film, with many interesting crew and cast comments woven in.

Forsyth seems to feel he has said enough about Local Hero already, so was not interviewed for the book, although he did provide the author with some rare and wonderful photographs. Melville has done well to transcribe and blend 2013 directorial interviews with fresh material drawn from other members of the production team and cast.

And what a cast it is: Denis Lawson, Peter Riegert, Jenny Seagrove, Fulton Mackay, Jennifer Black, Peter Capaldi (then unknown) and the Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster among so many other familiar faces. The early discarded options for the casting of some of these key characters are hair-raising (I won’t spoil the discovery for you). Forsyth was particularly insistent on Riegert playing MacIntyre, saying that without him there would be no film.

Local Hero has a lot to answer for me personally. It evokes the oil boom cowboy Highlands of my 1970s//80s youth. And there was a turning point in my life 20 years ago when I faced a straight choice between moving from England to France or moving to back to the Scottish Highlands. By then I had seen the film so many times that I no longer needed to: Mark Knopfler’s seductive score – my desert island music for sure – wound itself into my subconscious to such a degree that the film played on a loop in my head whenever I heard it. I realised I was homesick down there, out of place in the brash England of the early noughties. I longed for Ferness – and I came home to the Black Isle (where I was brought up) to find it.

In a way, for the next few decades, I did.

I know this may sound a bitty pompous, but the thing about Ferness is the essential truth of the place. It is a decent representation of the less worldly Highlands I was raised in. Forty years on, there are still echoes of Ferness in Black Isle life. People who have never left (if they are not farmers or landowners) still manage somehow to exist, with good humour and with dignity, adapting to whatever it is life throws at them.

Scratch the surface however and both Ferness and the Black Isle are rather less Brigadoon and rather more Wicker Man. In Local Hero, the people of Ferness seem intent on becoming rich through an oil deal which they know, and yet do not understand, will destroy their homes and way of life: they will not let anyone, even one of their own, stand in the way.

The dark heart of my home became apparent during Lockdown as various toxic local grievances ignited (there is another screenplay there, Bill, if you’re reading this). While 2020 Black Islers sniped and snarled and vilified each other on Facebook until the pieces settled again into an altered normality, 1980s Ferness folk (when Felix Happer’s sanity, or possibly insanity prevails to ‘save’ their village) simply accept their change in community destiny with typical Highland fatalism.

Both communities emerge from their time of trial with everything and nothing changed: they can never go back, but not going forward is not an option either. Ach weel…

Much as I love Mark Knopfler’s music, I am not altogether sure about the wisdom of the musical version which opened before Lockdown and has not yet resurfaced. Perhaps Forsyth sensed the impending schmaltzification of his masterpiece and that was why he withdrew from further involvement.

Bill Forsyth is said now to be uncertain of his virtues as a director. What a shame, for the man is a genius. This could have been a rather different book had he been interviewed for it, but he seems now to have distanced himself from the film world, and for good reason. There is no place among the money- driven Hollywood-and-Netflix hot air for his special brand of quiet, clever creativity, more’s the pity.

To me Local Hero was, is and always will be the perfect film. It is tender and honest and steers clear of that saccharin twee-ness which is always the risk in film-making about northern Scotland.

Thank God there has never been any question of a remake…

An index for future film buffs would (in my view) have been the only useful addition to this very good tribute to a cherished piece of Scottish cinematography. Well done Mr Melville. It will enhance any Christmas stocking it happens to land in.

Happy reading!

Vee Walker is an author and editor from the Black Isle. Her first novel Major Tom’s War was a prizewinner at the 2019 SAHR Military History Fiction Awards: it is available in paperback and audiobook from http://www.kashihouse.com and all good booksellers.

Why not join her this Christmas for an escapist hour of seasonal art, stories and readings: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/473483370507

Local Hero – Making a Scottish Classic by Jonathan Melville is available from Polaris Publishing at £16.99.

‘Welcome’ said my 3 x great grandfather…

Interrupting Bishop Henry Pepys’ sermon-writing

Part Two of the Major Tom’s War April 2019 book tour blog, in which we visit Hartlebury Castle, Bewdley, Ribbesford House and Hagley Hall. Can you smell something burning..?

Arriving at Hartlebury Castle, former seat of the Bishops of Worcester, including Bishop Henry Pepys

After all the excitement of the London leg of the book tour it was good to arrive in the Welsh Borders and then, with my friend and fellow author Eleanor Bird, meander up through the familiarly-named and yet unknown villages and towns in England where my family once lived.

We began with what my mother would have called a ‘spiffing’ afternoon tea at Hartlebury Castle, once the seat of the Bishops of Worcester. Hartlebury is connected to the ancestors of those you will encounter in Major Tom’s War. It is an ancient building, more of a sprawling, comfortable manor house than a fairy-tale castle. Its pretty arched windows give it a slightly curious expression, as though it is peering at its visitors as if to say ‘Now. Who do we have here?’

It feels much more castle-like around the back where there is quite a drop to a proper moat, although I am not sure whether or not it ever surrounded the building completely.

It was lovely to be drinking tea from delicate tea-cups in a room where 250 years ago or so my family would have done so. Our hosts, Trustees Mary Arden-Davis and Paul West, encouraged us to explore the house which we did, albeit very quickly. As my ‘day job’ is in heritage interpretation I keep an eager eye out for innovations in the field. Imagine my disbelief and delight to be greeted by various members of my family as I made my way around the house. The Pepys family has been chosen as the interpretive medium, and they make a fine job of it. First, Maria Sullivan (3 x great grandmother) greeted me from a portrait in the entrance hall. She was a good fit for the family, dark hair, beautiful diction and a slightly disapproving expression. Then her husband, the affable Bishop Henry Pepys welcomed me from one in the drawing room next door. These talking portraits and the clever diorama further on were quite an experience for a genealogist!

I was especially touched to learn that these parents did not send their children away to school, not even Herbert their son, but had them educated with tutors at home instead. Perhaps as a Bishop Henry had concerns about the morality and harsh discipline of schools at the time.

The family is indirectly related to the London diarist Samuel Pepys (who had no children) but pronounces its name Pepiz not Peeps, allegedly because maiden ladies of the family did not like to be called Miss Peeps. Both parents are sorely tried (and frequently interrupted) by their younger daughter Emily, who left a delightful if brief diary of her life in the house in 1844 which has recently been republished. The original is on display upstairs in Emily’s bed-chamber.

Emily Pepys’s diary, a wonderful archive find (well done, Dee Cooper)

Emily Pepys up to mischief in her bed-chamber

I loved this juxtaposition of digital and historical storytelling. There is a wonderful upstairs room with a magic wardrobe which leads into Emily’s bedroom. I could have spent hours longer exploring.

One room had more impact than any other. The Great Hall with its vaulted roof smelled strongly of smoke, so much so that I wondered if I would be able to speak in there if that were the location (it wasn’t – I was in cosier premises next door). My eyes and throat prickled with it. I also had a strong feeling that it should be much darker in colour with some kind of wooden panelling on the walls. It was all very odd but it was only later that I realised that this was the scene of the fire witnessed by Maria, Henry, Emily and my own 2 x great grandmother Maria Louisa Pepys. It could have killed them all and although Emily’s account is that of a gleeful ten year old, for older Louisa and her parents it must have been terrifying. Genetic memory or an over-fertile imagination? I certainly felt a lot easier when I was out of the Great Hall!

From lovely Hartlebury we travelled on to Bewdley, where the main street also provided an element of deja vu. In Major Tom’s War there is a sad chapter called ‘Losing Bessie’, where I visualise a seven-year-old Evie (my grandmother) peeping through the door of the rectory and looking out – at a slight angle – down a short driveway to the cobbled street, which had straw spread over it to cushion the wheels of the carriages and reduce noise. There was the rectory and there was the driveway and the gate, with a yew tree beside it to boot, all exactly as imagined.

Bewdley main street with church – it should be cobbled! In my head it was…

The church nearby had beautiful pastel stained glass and again it all felt strangely familiar, although I suspected it might have felt a good deal warmer than it had been in the days of my grandma.

Onwards to Ribbesford House this time, where we peeped through the barriers at what had once been the family stately home.

Ribbesford House (the back bit we couldn’t see from the gate)

A kind groundsman took some quick photographs around the exterior for us. Ribbesford was never much enjoyed by the Winnington-Ingrams: it was let in the late 1800s which is how Bessie came to meet her end at Bewdley Rectory, and not at Ribbesford itself. They were still the ‘squiresons’ – a strange combination of parson and squire.

Ribbesford was sold with little regret in 1900.

Hats off to the young entrepreneurs with deep pockets who have taken it on the house, who are converting it into luxury apartments while keeping the grounds intact. I wish them luck with their courageous investment!

The collapsed greenhouses of Ribbesford Walled Garden

Almost more interesting than the house, for all its turrets and 20 bedrooms, was the walled garden, now privately owned and in the process of being lovingly restored. There were espaliered fruit trees and Simon Gooding the owner is busily tracing the trees (old varieties like Fragonelle pear) and putting them back. I suspect it will be a labour of more than one lifetime but a restored walled garden like that could become a wonderful place to visit. I have sent Simon one of the remaining few copies of the 1810 Cookbook which I printed a reproduction of few years back. Jane Onslow, daughter of the Dean of Worcester, loved her food and collected recipes and remedies in a leather-bound notebook. This proves that the gardens grew apricots and peaches, melons and cucumbers: costly to grow, delicious to consume, all of which may be useful information for Simon.

Jane would soon become the redoubtable mother-in-law of Maria Louisa Pepys, who married one of the succession of Edward W-Is and who in turn gave birth to Edward Winnington-Ingram (the Arch-Deacon) who appears in Major Tom’s War.

I wonder what the relationship between Jane and Maria Louisa was like!

Ribbesford Church, tucked around the corner from the big house, revealed some poignant corners, including stained glass windows commemorating both Bessie (knowing her story, her weeping angel was desperately moving) and Edward Winnington-Ingram, Evie’s parents. The windows were installed by all five children, a loving and respectful gesture.

Edward Winnington-Ingram’s memorial window, also erected by his children

Edward Winnington-Ingram with his children (clockwise from bottom left) Maud, Etty, Arthur, Evie, Tom Westmacott (my grandfather) and Teddy

Weeping angel detail, Elizabeth Winnington-Ingram (Bessie’s) window

Cross with calvary base and fleur-de-lys terminals

Against the back wall there was also an unexpected mediaeval fleur-de-lys stepped cross dating from about 1430, exactly the kind which are displayed in the restored mausoleum I worked on at Kirkmichael hundreds of miles to the north. No wonder they have always felt rather familiar!

Eleanor identified the carving over the Norman entrance doorway as Herefordshire School Romanesque. How did these designs in carving spread? We think of people staying put in the past but many clearly did not.

We ended this exploration with a flying visit to Hagley Hall, as Lady Lyttleton contributed one the the 1810 Cookbook recipes. We realised later that Emily marries her son and is buried in the church there, so that is why there is a connection. It was common for second or later sons to enter the church, and all these ecclesiastical families intermarried, understandably so, when the church for them was a seven day a week, 24 hour commitment. They can seldom have met anyone else.

At least it was a slight improvement on the intermarriage of cousins, also something of a habit in the family tree.

Imagine walking through this room and feeling that it was home. I touched the nose of the friendly plaster lion over the fireplace and wondered if one of my forebears had done the same…

Next – Part Three, With Evie in WWI – in Ross on Wye and Bridstow