IT IS 16 April, exactly 897 years since the martyrdom of Magnus,
Orkney’s patron saint, and the puffins, as if in acknowledgement of the
anniversary, have chosen this day to return to their sea stack off
Westray after months in the north Atlantic. Meanwhile, Captain Stuart
Linklater, a senior pilot with Loganair, lifts the nose of the small
plane known as the Islander from the runway at Kirkwall and plunges once
more into his own natural environment – the cool blue air above these
green islands.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he says. And it is.
Linklater
is one of three pilots who, between them, fly several times daily from
Kirkwall Airport, its name written in sharp steel runes above the main
entrance, to the North Isles, the remote and sometimes sparsely
populated islands beyond the Orkney mainland. The archipelago is spread
wide in every direction, as if God – or better, perhaps, to say Odin –
had dropped a landmass in the sea and, being pleased with the pattern of
its shattering, allowed the shards to remain and grow fertile.
Yet
while the islands of the south are linked to the mainland by causeway
and regular crossing, the North Isles are isolated. There may be just
one ferry each week, sailings to Kirkwall can take almost three hours,
and in winter – when the swell of the sea is more than any pier can
handle – the furthest islands can go three weeks without a boat being
able to land. In such circumstances, the plane, as Neil Rendall, a
farmer on Papa Westray, puts it, means “the difference between daylight
and darkness”. These flights are lifeline services without which it
would be difficult for the North Isles to sustain their populations. The
plane carries teachers to schools, commuters to and from Kirkwall, and,
on freight flights, food and bevvy to whomever has had the foresight –
and the drouth – to place an order.
Loganair, known as Scotland’s
airline, is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary. The Orkney
inter-island service began a little later, in 1967. There had been
flights between the islands from 1932, pioneered by Captain Ernest
Fresson, whose Highland Airways was funded in part through a deal that
saw The Scotsman being delivered to Orkney a day ahead of rival titles.
Those flights ended with the outbreak of war, but some North Isles
elders still remember Fresson and his little biplane – a visiting angel
with beret and pipe.
Flying
between the islands is a remarkable experience. These are short
journeys. The longest, Kirkwall to Stronsay, takes 25 minutes, and the
briefest, between Westray and Papa Westray, just two. This last is the
world’s shortest scheduled flight; passengers making the hop for the
first time are given a certificate and a whisky miniature, the latter
being a welcome restorative following exposure to gales howling across
the tiny island known to locals as Papay, a blotted punctuation mark
between ocean and sea.
The Islander is a versatile eight-seater
with two propellers. If cross-winds rule out the runway, it can land in
fields, where the wee black and white plane looks quite at home taxiing
among oystercatchers. Those seated at the front are closer to the pilot
than they would be to the driver in a black cab. “It can feel like
driving a bus,” says Linklater. “You get to know the passengers and
their foibles; the ones who are going to have difficulty fastening their
seatbelts. You have a chat and get the news.”
Linklater, 58, is
known as the Orcadian George Clooney on account of both a slight
physical resemblance (it’s the hair; maybe the eyes) and a certain wry
affability. He has been flying the Islander for 23 years and has made
around 60,000 take-offs and landings – “so I’m just about getting used
to it”. He has never had any interest in flying the big jets
internationally; he is happiest in the skies above Orkney, serving the
community to which he belongs.
As the great majority of his
passengers are regulars, the pilot’s safety demonstration appears to
consist of little more than advising against opening a window in flight
as “it’ll get very draughty”. One of the great joys of these flights is
in avoiding unbending security measures that assume everyone is a
potential terrorist and therefore deserving of interrogation. Captain
Linklater, however, is not afraid to pose tough questions when need be.
“So,” he asks one passenger while walking out to the plane, “how’s the
lambing going?”
It
is a bright afternoon when we take off for Sanday. As the plane climbs,
its cruciform shadow races across green fields then out over the water.
The sea is pale blue by the coast, darkening as it deepens. Islander
pilots fly by sight rather than relying on electronic navigational
equipment, keeping below the level of the clouds, sometimes as low as
350 feet. So the landscape never becomes abstract. It is, rather,
miniaturised: turbines are toy windmills; fish farms are hoopla.
This,
then, is the ideal air service for voyeurs and gossips – types in
which, one is told, Orkney abounds. “You can see the washing on people’s
lines,” says Linklater. “You can see the silage being cut, the
different crops growing and when they’re starting to harvest. You get a
feel for the season and the change in the light. It doesn’t feel like
you are flying above the country, it feels like you are flying through
it. You’re still part of it. There’s a sense, too, that you’re flying
through history.”
The pilot notes, as he flies, points of interest
below. Balfour Castle on Egilsay, where Robert Louis Stevenson stayed
and which is said to have inspired parts of Kidnapped. Carrick House on
Eday, where you can still see the stains of blood spilled during the
capture of a notorious pirate. The small island of Gairsay, once home,
says Linklater, to “the last real Viking”, Svein Asleifarson, whose
plunderings with axe and fire are chronicled in the Orkneyinga Saga.
Orkney,
with its many ancient homes and bones and stones, is a place where
temporal barriers seem porous, in which past and present coexist, and
from an aerial perspective the sense of collapsed history is even more
acute. It is easy to imagine that pirate, Viking and writer are still
down there somewhere; that life goes on at Skara Brae and POWs observe
an eternal mass in the Italian Chapel.
From
the cockpit, Sanday appears first as a dark hump on the horizon, a
surfacing whale. One of the larger Northern Isles, with a population of
around 600, it is known for its beaches, great white arcs, a coastline
strung with crescent moons. The descent feels fast. The gritty track of
the landing strip runs out amid daisies and dandelions. The plane halts,
a door opens and a wooden box is shoved down as a makeshift step. Jim
Lennie, the airfield manager, offers a hand. He is a retired farmer, big
and strong at 71, with a handshake that could choke a heifer. “Bonny
day,” he declares, brooking no argument.
Jim has looked after the
Sanday airfield since 1967. His wife Mary is one of the firefighters.
His duties include making sure the runway is fit for purpose, meaning
free of geese. How, precisely, does he do this? “Shoot to kill,” he
replies. “Have them for tea. That maks them stay away mibbe.”
Lennie
is the ideal man to have in charge of an airfield. Heathrow could do
worse. He is calm in a crisis and has a similar approach to life as he
does to his whisky: “Tak it as it comes.” He has a reputation as a
wind-up merchant and an accomplished spinner of yarns. Kirsty Walter, a
member of Loganair’s cabin crew, sums him up fondly as “a yap o’ shite” –
a description in which he glories, enjoying perhaps the way the phrase
identifies him with other stalwart features of the Orkney landscape: the
Point o’ the Scurroes; the Knap of Howar; the Yap o’ Shite.
Jim
and Mary have been married since 1969 and have six children. They met
while working the harvest together. It must be love, he says, because
she came originally from an island – Shapinsay – that had electricity
and mains water but nevertheless settled in Sanday, which had neither.
In
her time as airfield firefighter, Mary has never had to fight a fire.
There was once a crash, however – over 20 years ago now. “It was like it
happened in slow motion,” Jim recalls. “The plane came doon in the
field and went right through two fences. The tail rudder was knocked
off. Mary was in the bedroom with our twins – just peedie bairns. I just
saw this plane coming straight at oor hoose. I could hardly move. Then
it hit a bump and it turned and there were nobody hurt.”
He
pauses, relishing his punchline. “The folk in the plane were interviewed
and said they saw very little difference fae a normal landing.”
The
passengers on these inter-island flights are various. Itinerant
teachers, farmers, hairdressers, health visitors, tourists, vets,
hard-hatted workies out to fix the power cut on Papay. Passengers are
allowed to take their dogs on the plane, so it’s not unusual to see a
wet nose peeping out from beneath the seat. One woman, alighting on
gale-scoured North Ronaldsay, buttons her poodle tight inside her duffle
coat lest it be gusted off to doggie Valhalla.
There are times
when life at Loganair seems rather like The High Life, as scripted by
George Mackay Brown. Jackie Delaney, station manager at Kirkwall
Airport, moved to Orkney from England four years ago and is still
getting to grips with the local dialect. Once, when she was quite new to
the job, the phone rang and an elderly woman asked whether the “toe
wife” was on the flight to Eday. “Who on earth is the toe wife?” Jackie
whispered to her colleague in the office. “That’ll be the chiropodist,”
Inga explained.
Anne
Rendall, a banker with RBS, is the most frequent flyer. Based in
Kirkwall, she is 52 and has been travelling to the North Isles, visiting
a different island each day, offering cash withdrawals, deposits and
other services, for almost half her life. “I’ve been keeping a tally and
that’s over 9,000 flights now,” she says. Despite the unorthodox manner
of her commute, there is something pleasantly old-fashioned about
Rendall’s way of doing business, harking back to the days when people
actually had a relationship with their bank manager. The banker before
her, the late Maisie Muir, did the job for 22 years, right from the
start of the inter-island flights. Before Muir was Willie Groat, who
went by boat. For Rendall, the plane is part of her routine. Rain and
wind do not worry her. It takes a lightning storm to interfere with her
calculations of interest.
The weather in Orkney rarely takes its
ease. The Islander can fly in up to 50 knots of wind, which is getting
on for 60 miles an hour. During a flight from Kirkwall to North
Ronaldsay, the wind is blowing at 42 knots, and the sea below billows
and heaves. Spume froths into the geos of the jagged coast. Rain
cascades along the cockpit window. It feels, in some ways, more like
being on the waves than in the air. Indeed, Linklater’s navigation
methods are similar to those used by a seasoned skipper – he looks for
landmarks and shifts course appropriately. Flying directly above the
rusting wreck of the tanker Juniata, scuttled in Inganess Bay in 1939,
reassures him when haar shrouds Kirkwall that the airport is dead ahead.
We
begin our descent into North Ronaldsay, skimming in low over flat, dark
rocks that seem to ascend like steps from the sea. This is the
northernmost of the Orkney islands. Impressive from the air is the
13∫-mile encircling dyke that keeps the sheep on the shore, where they
subsist entirely on seaweed. There are roughly 3,000 sheep and only
around 70 people.
The Victorian lighthouse, a gigantic barber’s
pole, has 176 steps, the same number of verses in the 119th psalm.
Religion, one can imagine, might be a comfort here. We are right out on
the edge. Norway is due east. In 1916, when Bergen burned, the islanders
saw the horizon glow red.
The
plane is met, as it is three times each day, by Helen Swanney, the
airfield manager, a 76-year-old shopkeeper in deep pink headscarf and
Bible-black anorak. “You won’t meet anyone more North Ronaldsay than
Helen,” says Billy Muir, the lighthouse keeper. “She has lived here all
her life.”
Swanney has been manager for 16 years, taking over
following the death of her husband Ronnie, a crofter who had held the
office since 1968. For her it is not just a job, it’s a duty of care for
the place that has always been home. She remembers the days of the
horse-drawn plough. She has seen the coming of the car to her island,
the coming of television and electricity. Her father-in-law, Ken, ran
the airport during the Highland Airways years of the 1930s. The Swanneys
are a landing-strip dynasty. Swanney describes herself as a
“gatekeeper” – and indeed she does seem a sort of presiding spirit of
North Ron, a headscarfed idol to whom each traveller, alighting from the
plane, ought to pay proper homage. Still, it can be a cold, wet job.
Does she ever think of retirement? “Well, not yet,” she replies, softly.
“I enjoy this very much, and I’ll do it as long as I can.”
We
take off, before long, into ashen skies. The North Isles are spread
beneath us. Sunshine, breaking through cloud here and there, slants down
on to the water, creating islands of light, a radiant new archipelago
scattered among the existing headlands and holms. This is Orkney much as
it might have looked when observed in another age by a raven released
from its cage on board a longship. That was the great Viking trick: to
carry half-starved birds. Freed, they would fly in the direction of land
– and food – and the Norsemen, hungry for fresh conquest, would turn
the rudder to follow.
The Islander, therefore, gives a raven’s-eye
view of the North Isles, and they look as seductively verdant now as
they must have done then. Captain Linklater, for his part, counts it a
privilege to be able to survey daily this landscape he loves. Soon, he
will be unable to do so. Aviation rules mean that when he turns 60 next
year he will no longer be allowed to fly the Islander, a plane in which
he is the only member of crew. “I’m not looking forward to it one little
bit,” he admits.
He will be grounded, a caged raven. He could
work out of Glasgow airport and fly larger aircraft with a co-pilot, but
that would mean leaving behind the great sights to which he has grown
accustomed: the Westray waterfalls blown upwards by the wind; pods of
orcas in the North Ronaldsay Firth; the whole glorious, dolorous
presence of the islands and the sea.
“This is my home,” he says. “This is where I belong.”
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