This interdisciplinary paper takes a multi-layered form, combining stylistically diverse texts and photographic images. It re-tells and reflects upon a collective journey undertaken in September 2019 to three rural locations in Orkney and the transitional spaces between them.
In part following the approach of the Situationists, we engaged in a one-day dérive undertaken in a spirit of ‘playful-constructive behavior’ (Guy Debord), with a group of Scottish archaeologists and artists from the research group #3M_DO_2019: a group that aims to contribute valuable interdisciplinary perspectives to the political, economic and environmental challenges currently facing Scotland. Visiting a number of contemporary eco-archaeological sites across Orkney’s Mainland, our recorded thoughts and responses (both photographic and textual) oscillate between concerns as to how artists and archaeologists interested in the material contemporary world, might describe and represent such politically charged, marginal locations, eco-environments and the experiential nature of encounter with such remote and physical places set between semi-wilderness and human appropriation.
The journey and this text begin in the small, almost inconspicuous, valley of the Russa Dale of Stenness where Edwin Harrold (d.2005), a former-forestry worker and employee of the Ministry of Works (now Historic Environment Scotland), among other things, made manifest his vision of a wooded glen with indigenous and ornamental trees. ‘Happy Valley’ as it came to be called was, in 1948, a denuded area and over a 40-year period Harrold transformed it into a small arboreal idyll. He harnessed the peaty burn to drive a self-built hydro-system man-enough to bring electricity to his rural and initially derelict croft named ‘Bankburn’, where he squatted and then took full occupation. ‘Happy Valley’ has since become a place both of the Romantic idyll and of retreat amid a complex array of social, political and ecological conundrums.
From here our narrative crosses the island to the high and bleak Birsay Moor where the Burgar Hill wind farm research site was established alongside an area of landscape demarcated for special environmental protection as an RSPB site. This was the location for the first multi-megawatt turbine, erected in 1987 and toppled in a controlled explosion towards the close of 2000. The concrete base is still very much in evidence, as are the six newer turbines established in its place to feed into the island’s electrical grid and, together, they act as a backdrop on the moorland to hen harriers and red-throated divers.
From Birsay we travel over an area of traditional peat workings, a fuel economy with its own complex social history, to the lonely coastal site of Billia Croo, just north of Stromness, where the internationally connected EMEC offshore research station was, at the time, in the process of, among other things, testing Microsoft’s 450 kW data storage capsule powered by renewables: the digital workings and storage of the Western world submerged and cooled by the northern Atlantic.
Through the combined disciplines of contemporary photography, art and archaeology, we consider how one might visualize and describe such sites, not as fixed locations, but as geo-poetic points and ambiences (Timothy Morton) within a larger continuum that has been termed, ecology.
