In a horizontal landscape, light and land, sea, sky, stone and sand tend to settle into layers, no more so than on Sanday, one of the largest islands in the north of the Orkney archipelago.
Approaching Sanday from the south.
But there are concerns about the future for low-lying Sanday, a significant area of which (around 15%) already disappears beneath the twice-daily tides, which also cover the causeways to the Holms of Ire in the north-west and the lighthouse at Start Point in the north-east.
The photographer Gunnie Moberg called her first book about Orkney ‘Stone Built’, but Sanday lives up to its Viking name (‘sandr’ = sand and ‘ey’ = island) and is ‘sand built’, most obviously apparent in its sandy shorelines and shifting dunes.
Once very fertile and considered the ‘granary of Orkney’, Sanday even exported barley to Norway, but due to erosion by wind and sea the land is now known as ‘blawin’ and is no longer cultivated. The highest point is a hill called ‘The Wart’ which is a full 65m but the rest of the island is barely 15m above sea level. I wonder how much of the island will survive the rising sea levels due to global warming and melting arctic ice, and for how long?
Start Point lighthouse on the horizon.
The stone underlying Sanday is mainly Caithness flagstone with some red and yellow Orkney sandstone in the south but most stone structures visible now have been fashioned by human hands, with two possible (or impossible?) exceptions; the ‘Devil’s Clawmarks’ are scored deep into a sandstone block later used in a balustrade at the now ruined Lady Kirk, while the ‘Stone of Scar’, a 14-ton block of gneiss which is a glacial erratic left by the receding ice sheet to some, is to others a missile thrown in anger by a witch from the neighbouring island of Evie.
The archaeology of Sanday stretches back over 5000 years to include Neolithic remains, Viking boat burials, 16th century ruins, 19th century houses and abandoned villages. The various field boundaries, flagstone built crofts and roofs of many ruins, even tiled roofs of still occupied houses, are decorated with lichens, as are the memorials to the dead in the graveyards. The lichens survive and thrive in Sanday’s pollution-free air and, along with a profusion of wildflowers, provide a riot of colour all over the island. But the most prominent structural feature these days is the collection of five wind turbines that dominate the skyline of the southern approach to Sanday.
Meanwhile, out in the Bay of Lopness, the tides are gradually claiming the wreck of the WW1 German destroyer B98 and covering the wide expanses of silvery sands with reflected light until their horizons disappear between sky and sea.
