An Orcadian Travelogue | Photography | Ant Smith

19th - 24th June 2024

My (middle) brother rang and asked "Do you want to go on a cycling holiday round the Orkneys?"

I immediately thought 'No, that sounds horrible'.

I mean, I've never even owned a bike (although I had riden one for a couple of hours in Italy a quarter of a century ago) and I'm certainly not some kind of mountaineering super-lifer (NB, The Orkneys don't really have mountains, allegedly) - so I felt every fibre of my body screaming 'No, no, no, no, no, no, nooo'

BUT, I am least blessed with having brothers that ask very little of me. And so because he asked, I said 'yes'...

Not an unequivocal yes of course. More an "I'm pretty sure it'll turn out to be impossible, so let's at least show willing" kind of a yes.

BUT, it didn't turn out to be impossible at all! It turned out to be very possible - especially as my bro paid for all the accomodations. And quite frankly, I very much doubt I would ever have gotten around to holidaying on the Costa del North Atlantic otherwise; so I'm opening here with a genuine thanks to family, for asking me and enabling me to step out of my zone.

Plus, I think I came back with at least a few nice shots - especially the puffins. We saw puffins!

And here they are - I'll write a bit about them after you've had a chance to take a skeg:

Click into each album, then click an image for a full-screen view. Keyboard cursor keys cycle through the fullscreen images in an album

Orkney's Birds

Somehow, we all decided the very best plan immediately following the 18 hour journey to Orkney, would be to hop on another ferry (cycles fully laden) to another island (where we weren't staying) to look at a house that was for sale; before returning to then cycle 16 miles to our base in Stromness that very evening.

Remember, I'd never really ridden a bicycle before, so I'm not at all sure how we all came to think that was a great plan. But actually it was a great plan!

We'd hopped over to Westray which has basically one road for what seems to be the one motorised vehicle on the island. A perfect place to ride a bike for the first time, which in itself wasn't an unpleasant endeavour. The brother's couldn't keep up with me of course, or something like that, so they were totally out of sight once I'd wheeled the bike up the final rise of the blind summit. Electric bikes are great - until the motor can't cope and you have to push the damn thing uphill with all its heavy frame and battery et ál (and baggage). At least I had managed to kind of ride the contraption, which felt like the first hurdle sorted. So I took a long rest until they caught back up with me and then we rode back to where we started from to go and see the puffins.

The This Is Orkney website had said there was a good chance to see puffins on Westray, but one never really believes such intelligence will bear fruit. I'd brought the big lens (200-500mm zoom) specifically to try and shoot some puffins, so I was super glad they were there when we turned up. The shots I got ranged from distances of 15m to 30m, so even with the big lens I've had to crop in some way. The camera has a 46MP sensor though, so cropping is not a big problem. I never, ever, cropped with 12 and 24MP cameras but now (with 46MP) I often deliberately shoot from further away knowing I can crop. This gives more freedom in control of perspective than my prime lenses may otherwise permit. It's tempting to think "If only I had an even longer lens..." but honestly there's probably more success to be had from cropping a shorter lens' image than shooting with a longer lens since even just keeping things in frame becomes a challenge above 200mm. Providing you've got the spare pixels to throw away!

I shot the curlews later in the week around the old gun battery. The track to the site wanders through many fields and the birds must have been nesting (curlews ground nest) as they took off when I passed by and flew quite close all around me - to distract me away from the nest site. I only had the 105mm lens with me, but with judicious cropping and their proximity I'm happy to have captured them. I guess technically the quality could be better, but I can categorically state they are the finest curlew shots anyone took there that afternoon (well, like much of Stromness, the place was deserted). I had to dial up a stop or so of exposure compensation to capture the bird's dark details as it flew in the bright sky. I should have dropped the ISO to take advantage of the D850's wider dynamic range really, but things happen just so fast when you're trying to shoot birds!

The skylark turned up at Skara Brae, so it's worth being in the mindset to shoot ancient rocks AND birds if you visit. I was more thinking ancient rocks so ended up with pretty small images of the skylark but I think they make a nice collage showing how it does exactly lark about, in the sky...

Neolithic Orkney

First off, if you want some perspective on the Neolithic do take a look at the video my bro shot while we were out on Orkney (its only like 5 minutes!) - oh and if you do watch it, subscribe to the channel, he's probably one of the best free content makers you could give your time to..:

With the Skara Brae shots I wanted to try and show the interplay between the constructs and the land, as a graphic exercise. The Skara Brae structures are 'pit houses' (partially sunken into the ground) and so simultaneously are defined by and define the contour of the surface; or so it seems to me. I've used colour separation techniques to achieve the effect, darkening yellows and greens, desaturating oranges and blues. I wanted to try and give an impression of how the living arrangements are 'tucked' into the land.

Being over 100m wide, it is difficult to portray a sense of the scale of the entire Ring of Brodgar in a single photographic frame. In fact the more stones you fit across the frame the less imposing they seem to be (and they are pretty darn imposing). So rather than shooting wide, I opted to shoot long (~400mm) isolating groups of stones composed against the grand landscape of the distant mountains (erm, not mountains). I've tried to give a sense of the wild place in which this thing was made, along with a sense of the community it represents (imagining the stones as proxies for those long departed peoples). The long focal length has allowed me to create compositions that are not readily apparent to the casual visitor. The immediate response to a thing like the Ring of Brodgar might be to shoot close and wide, but I think these long telephoto compositions work well in terms of giving a sense of the place. You'll only know if I've succeeded or not by visiting it yourself - but I think that would be a rewarded journey. Shooting long also helped me isolate parts of the scene from the other visitors at the site. It was quite busy so finding viewpoints and moments to shoot would have been a much greater challenge had I been shooting wide and close.

I meant to take a similar approach at Stennes to its standing stones as I did at the Ring of Brodgar. The first shot (taken at 440mm) shows this and is quite successful I think. I arrived at Stennes just as a tour bus group were wrapping up, so found I had the place entirely to myself for a good twenty minutes or so. This meant I was able to shoot closer (and wider) without interference, and that has led to images that speak more to the relationship between the stones rather than between groups of stones and the greater landscape. With a much more compact subject (than the Ring of Brodgar) this has worked out quite well, and shows how it is important to maintain a fluidity in any shooting plan. Preconceived notions can help as an 'in' to a new subject, but it is also important to react to whatever one is confronted with. I believe any work (or assignment) should take the artist on some kind of a journey, if the results are then to do the same for the audience; the work should stamp itself on the artist as much as the artist stamps themelves on the work... which might seem a little pompous, but that I think we can all be artists if we care to be - it ain't some mystical high status, it's just a presence aforethought. Anyways, I'm quite pleased in my exploration of the space at the Standing Stones of Stennes.

The Barnhouses settlement is a spit away from the stones, but the tour bus groups are clearly only given 5 minutes to snap a selfie on their Stennes stop - meaning that they don't ramble the tenth of a mile to the settlement. Barnhouses is not as extensive as Skara Brae, but it is quieter and every bit as edifying. That said, I found the reconstruction at Skara Brae added some real context to what is essentially piles of rocks in grassy divets, so I am glad to have visited both.

The books tell me that the population of Skara Brae will have been around 50-100 people. I guess Barnhouses would have been smaller than that looking at the place (60ish according to the AI I asked) which kind of helps get a sense of what living there may have been like. You can take the entire site (village) in at-a-glance, its such a small area, and certainly makes you think "man, you'd haveta get on well with the neighbours living here". The compactness of the site is actually quite striking. Obviously there are 'efficiency gains' in resource management when building close together, but that feels like a rationalisation through a modern lens. These settlements seem to have relatively small 'houses' arranged around a larger more communal structure, as though the individualisation of the family unit is as yet imcomplete (clan trumps family?). One does not live in houses in a village with a shared village hall - rather the entire settlement is 'home', the whole 'clan' is 'family', perhaps. The nature of 'community' must have been very different indeed. Certainly, there is no way I could live in such close proximity with my own neighbours (whom I actually quite like!). I don't think my shots really get these these thoughts across since I have approached them (both at Skara Brae and at Barnhouses) as images of individual structures, which doesn't feel like the whole and complete story.

Finally, halfway back to Stromness from Stennes, I called in at the Unstan Cairn. I'd been told by a taxi driver that if the more known Maeshowe Cairn was full (or closed) a visit to Unstan was well worth the (small) trouble. It's probably a smaller structure (I didn't go to Maeshowe) but you will likely be the only visitor when you arrive and it is free! I was on my own that day so spent a good while inside the cairn - I am no believer in spirits and such but as you sit inside this thing and start to contemplate the thousands of years of rest some soul(s) have had within (remains all now swept up and away) it does start to feel like a wrong place to be. Like an invasion of privacy. Your mind starts to find rational reasons for an underlying disquiet that mounts (will that gate swing shut and lock while I'm in here? Unlikely, but you know possible). So basically quite a spooky place even if you don't believe in spooks (which again, I don't).

I tried to create a little tour of the cairn, so the photos sweep clockwise around the interior to show the full space with its freshly gravelled floor and wet green rocks.

Skaill House

Whilst at Skara Brae we visited Skaill House which basically reeked of priviledge and colonialism (Queen Vic herself stayed there once, like that's important). Every nook was stuffed with the spoils of cultural appropriation, which I have appropriated for a few of the shots here.

There is a display of a beautifully drawn vast and overgrown family tree that stretches all the way back to Bishop George Graham (1565-1643) who built the house. I haven't found any documented evidence of any significant achievements of this Bishop, other than paying to have a house built. I'm not sure what Skaill House is for, its an ecclectic mix of stolen artifacts presented with little context or homogeneity. Mixed in is the tragic story of a young laird-not-to-be (Walter Scarth) with a press cutting of an obituary of the time (something to do with falling off of a horse). It is an utterly bizarre public display of private sorrow - which left me just, well confused really. Skaill House is a warren of confusion, fine china and battle cannons; truly a house of the dead. As though it is less remains and more possessions, clutter, nick-knacks that commemorate the fallen. It seems to be the antithesis of what we see in the cairns - but then we are looking back but a few hundred not thousands of years. How time flies.

Orkney Itself

We decided to make Stromness our base, so once we got back from visiting the puffins on Westray we had to get there from Kirkwall (just 16 miles or so). I had been happy enough riding the bike round Westray, well up and down it to an extent, but the traffic back on the mainland was much heavier. And my riding was particularly erratic. My brothers were most insistent that didn't matter, and of course being The Elders they were right and I was wrong. Except I wasn't wrong, but being the youngest, I was. All a little frustrating. So I pushed the bike through the town centre and, finding myself alone, had a little practice on a cycle path. Well sometimes on the path sometimes not so much. My riding really was erratic. I knew there was no way I could do that ride down to Stromness. I felt pretty wretched at that point, diminished and the cause of great trouble. My brothers though are pretty decent chaps and set about solving the issue in practical terms. We shot the bike in a Taxi and so I made it to Stromness by around 9pm. I checked us all in and sat out front of the hotel smoking fags and drinking coffee util they arrived. And I smoked more fags and drank more coffee until they arrived. I wanted to ensure there was hot water in the kettle and a friendly face when they rolled up. So I drank coffee and smoked fags... until around midnight, waiting for them. Apparently it was a hard ride (yeah, I could have told them that!) I felt somewhat vindicated. If it was that hard a ride for two seasoned cyclist of course it would have been nigh-on impossible for me. Taxiing the bike was the right thing to do. My brothers, they were delighted to have overcome such adversity. We are different people.

And I guess that is what is at the heart of family. Just about everything we are told in life is a lie (this is my Mantra #1 - everything 'they' tell you is a lie). Family isn't about shared values. Most family set-ups I've seen amongst friends are utterly dysfunctional. Frustrations arise because different world views crash together in the compressed, intense, emotional ties of 'family'. But, to my mind, the true value of family lies in the unconditional support offered even when one must seem like a wastrel and a weakling to The Elders! As brothers, I don't think we necessarily understand each other, or value the same things. BUT, we do understand each other's right to be different and we do support each other in our endeavours; if'n'when needed.

Orkney is a fascinating place to think about the nature of community, family and self. In the natural world, curlews bravely attracting your attention to distract from the nest. In the neolithic remains, the clues we get about the early formation of societal structures. In Skaill house, a view of the other end of the spectrum, at a culmination of the culmination of possessions. On the roads and in the fields, overcoming (or at least facing) the adversity of the elements - together, apart, but together.

TrancePortations

I used my images from the Orkney Neolithic sites to create videos from which I have synthesised musical soundtracks using my TrancePorter software instrument - an instrument that is played by images instead of keys and strings and such. I hope you enjoy them...

Standing Stones of Stennes

Erected around 3100BCE and standing at up to 6 meters tall, these 4 remaining stones are part of an original 'circle' of perhpaps a dozen monoliths. Back in 1814 Captain Mackay, who leased the land, set about toppling the stones and digging a trench to deter tourists from the site - which caused some outrage.

Visually, I have chosen to show two images which mix through a pixellation effect. The pixellation gradually reduces detail revealing the essential geometery and colouration of the scenes - at the peaks of the pixellation I introduce a warping effect, in memory of Mackay's toppling shenanigans. I've also used colour phasing throughout the video, as a visual metaphore for the passing of the seasons.

Musically, I've used the image data in the video to create 10 seperate voices in 2 sets of 5. One set of voices creates notes pitched in relation to the overal hue of the video frames, the second creates notes pitched in relation to the overall brightness.

The piece has been arranged to a fixed tempo of 120bpm in 2/4 time and has been voiced in a 'modern jazz combo' style using guitars, piano, bass guitar, drum kit and brass. For me it has the feel of a kind of 'faltering quick-step', a 'whimsy' if you like - representing the tussel in Captain Mackay's beleagured life!

The Ring of Brodgar

Just up the way a bit from Stennes stands the Ring of Brodgar. Several hundred years younger (2500-2000BCE) than the Stennes circle much more of it survives today with 27 of 60 or so stones still standing. It is maybe Britain's second largest circle (at 104m versus Avebury's whopping 341m) - so I really wanted to show it in relation to the landscape.

Visually I've taken a very literal reading of the images with zooms and scans avoiding obvious 'narrative injections' of colour phasing, warping and pixellations (as I had used for Stennes). I have applied some (limited) dimming of the images in places as a representation of time passing - since time did pass while I was there, it's a big place!

In making the video I thought about Norse mythology and modern interpretations of celtic designs - I know these ideas are much later than the Neolithic period, but it is a frame of reference that is widely shared. I've used a strong warp at the stat and end which creates circular patterns reminiscent of celtic designs and evocative of the Midgard Serpent (Jörmungandr) which at the end seems to grow and encompass all... between I have used very literal readings of the images, such that order arises from chaos before chaos reigns again.

Musically I've chosen to avoid a strong beat track in order to create something "more chill than dance". I've used celeste and Irish harp at the top end in light tripping intervals, with celli and choir at the bottom end with long (breve and longa) drones. I imagine these pairings as representing the chatter of the stones versus that of the landscape.

The tempo is fixed at 120bpm in 4/4 time.

All 'TrancePortations' are a collaboration between the composer and the image data. Here, as the composer, I have given the data itself much more free reign than in the Stennes piece. I wanted to create something more 'primordial', or immersive, rather than something highly structured around modern musical concepts.

Skara Brae

A neolithic settlement of 8 dwellings circa 3200-2200BCE rediscovered in 1850. The video offers a tour around the site in 4 distinct views showing alleyway, entryway, passageway and interior. I wanted to create a feel of the 'busyness' of a community in the visual and musical treatment.

Visually I have used colour phasing to represent the passage of time (day to night and night to day) over relatively short (9 second) periods. Each view peaks with a moment of 'inversion' (or negative view) as if and as though we are suddenly 'on the other side' - a reminder that we are looking at artefacts in a museum, that only have the reality that we project onto them.

Musically I've used a similar jazz-combo type of arrangement that I used for Stennes. This time with a simpler set of 5 voices with hue based pitchings (with no brightness based counterpoint pitchings in this case). I wanted to emphasise that we inevitably look upon these things through a modern lens. The composition is in 3/4 time in C major with a fixed tempo of 120bpm.

Unstan Cairn

An Orkney-Cromarty style of chambered cairn - that is one with more complex sub-divisions than typical in other types of cairn. Sat on its own with no 'visitor center', and consequently few visitors, it is a very immersive experience. I immediately knew that I wanted a full-symphonic treatment, something epic and almost overpowering.

The video uses 9 seperate views of the cairn's exterior and interior. We are led into the cairn and then given a 360 degree tour before exiting. The detail of the cairn is scanned in close-up while the hue and brightness constantly fluctuates. Some warp effect is used around the smallest of the internal chambers as though the rock itself is bulging to admit more souls... Much of the visual effects are tied in lock-step to the tempo of the soundtrack which adds to the choreographed epic nature of the journey.

The soundtrack is composed at a fixed tempo of 90bpm in 2/4 time using a sombre A minor key. There are 9 voices with only the driving timpanic drum present throughout, representing the footsteps or heartbeats of those that went before. Violas pitched by hue and brightness sing in counterpoint as we scan across the cairn, with a clarinet in accompanyment. Tuba and piccolo sound on the peaks of visual change. A deep trombone plays as we pass into the smallest chamber. Celeste and Yangqin chime on drift and zoom of the images.