Authors: Amy Liptrot
It takes two to three days for the emissions from the sun to collide with the earth’s atmosphere. On NASA’s website I can see minutes’-old pictures of the sun’s surface taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory with white prominences – sunspots that could break off out into the solar system. There is aurora on other planets, I learn.
Just outside the front door of Rose Cottage, with the house lights turned out, is a perfect spot to watch the aurora: an unobscured northern vista. About 75 per cent of my view is sky, and when I tip my head back, 100 per cent. In my first couple of weeks on Papay, I see the Merry Dancers more clearly than I ever have before. I let my eyes adjust to the dark for the time it takes to smoke one cigarette then say, ‘Bloody hell,’ out loud. In the past I have seen a greenish-tinged, gently glowing arc, low across the north, but tonight the whole sky is alive with shapes: white ‘searchlights’ beaming from behind the horizon, dancing waves directly above and slowly, thrillingly, blood red blooms. It’s brighter than a full moon and the birds, curlews and geese, are noisier than they usually are at this time of night, awakened by a false dawn. There is static in the air and it’s an unusual kind of light, the
eerie glow of a floodlit stadium or a picnic eaten in car headlights.
Despite growing up here, I’d never taken the time to look for the Merry Dancers when I was younger. I remember my parents trying to get me to come outside on a winter night and wanting to stay in and watch
Super Ted
. I remember looking out north from the farmhouse to the sky over the Outrun, unsure if the white glow was what I was meant to be seeing. Tonight on Papay there can be no doubt.
I keep going out during the evening to see if the lights are still there, while following photos being posted online and talking with friends on the Orkney Mainland or in the south about what we are watching. I can see the aurora and so can Dad on the farm. I check the space-weather forecast – the aurora predictor. This is a geomagnetic storm of the highest order experienced in years. People on Papay ring each other up, telling their neighbours to go and look outside. The next day everyone at the coffee morning is talking about it in the excited way they would discuss unexpected good weather or a wedding.
I stay up reading about solar cycles and coronal mass ejections, about photons and poles. I read about the spacecraft and satellites monitoring the sun’s potentially dangerous activity, protecting us; and alarmist predictions that energy from a solar ejection could hit our electricity networks. The Northern Lights could be a warning.
Often at night I have sat up in bed circling my ex’s abandoned online profiles. On Google Streetview the branches are bare on the tree in front of the flat we used to share. I long for him to
know I’m doing better but I won’t be truly better until I no longer want him to know.
But tonight I’m wild on Northern Lights. I’m following a different obsession. When I visited Tom in Manchester, I walked past busy bars but didn’t glance inside because I was looking up for meteors. Now, on Papay, I’ve gone to the Muckle Supper, first footing and even done a little dancing. I’m feeling strong enough to stay out late.
There are more solar storms forecast over the coming weeks and I will go out – maybe even after midnight – just before bed and look up, turning off my screen light, throwing away my torch and walking north into the glow. Maybe things are not going to be so bad. I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by sixty-seven moons.
18
NORTH HILL
MOST OF PAPAY IS CULTIVATED
farmland and, like Orkney in general, is more fertile than its treeless and windswept first impression might suggest. The long hours of sunlight in the summer and good soil help to produce top-price cattle and high grass yields for winter fodder. But the north third of the island, the North Hill, an RSPB reserve, is different, wilder, not divided into fields and only lightly grazed at agreed times through the islanders’ communal grazing rights.
I walk here several times a week. It’s a similar sweep of wind-scoured, cliff-edged land to the Outrun – both are a type of habitat defined as ‘maritime heathland’ – and I feel at home. I am a teenager again, perched on a good lookout, writing in a notebook in fingerless gloves. These flat open coastal places are my natural habitat.
Once I get over the hill, which is a modest fifty metres above sea level and the highest point on the island, I can’t be seen
from any houses. I never see another person on the North Hill and I’m surrounded by ocean to the west, north and east. This winter, the heath is mine.
On the hillside there’s a telegraph pole converted into a coastguards’ lookout. I use the hand and footholds to climb and, as I rise, the view opens. Out to sea, white breaking waves mark the churning of the Bore, where the currents of the Atlantic meet those of the North Sea. I’m looking north, with nothing beyond the cliffs but ocean until the Arctic, and I feel like I’ve come to the edge of the world.
Clinging around the pole with my arms and legs, I’m in the crow’s nest on a whaling boat, dreaming of seeing rare things: a snowy owl or an orca. I’ve been told that on a clear day I will be able to see Fair Isle on the northern horizon, perhaps even Sumburgh Head or Foula in Shetland. Spotting these distant places is apparently more likely in winter than summer when, although it may not feel like it, a heat haze can obscure vision. As I scan the horizon my eyes, used to looking at a close, glowing screen, struggle to focus. The part of the sea before the horizon is called the offing; hence ships due to arrive soon are ‘in the offing’.
How far it is to the horizon depends on how high you are above sea level. If you put your eye right down to where the sea meets the beach you can’t see very far. I am six feet tall, so when I look out from sea level, the horizon is three miles away but from a fifty-metre hill, raised three metres up a pole, this could increase to twenty-six kilometres.
This calculation is made more complex when the object you
are looking at beyond the horizon is itself elevated above sea level. Ward Hill on Fair Isle is 217 metres, and an observer on North Hill should be able to see it as long as it is no more than 77.8 kilometres away. I consult Google Maps, which tells me the distance between the two points is 73.2 kilometres, so it is definitely possible, if not likely, that it could be seen on a clear day. But people on the island claim to have seen ‘the distinctive curved shape’ of Sheep Rock on Fair Isle, which, at 121 metres high and 74.6 kilometres away, is technically too low and distant to be seen. Are the people of Papa Westray having a collective hallucination? Are they just seeing what they want or expect? Perhaps the answers can be found when the calculations are made more complex again by atmospheric refraction.
At Hogmanay Jim, who has lived on Papa Westray all his life, tells me something strange. He says that, once, for about fifteen minutes, from his house, Cott, on the east shore, he saw North Ronaldsay – not unusual, we can see it most days – but on that occasion the island was upside down, the houses and lighthouse pointing downwards towards the sea.
What Jim saw could be explained by highly unusual and specific atmospheric conditions. There is a type of ‘superior mirage’, called Fata Morgana, in which light is bent as it passes through layers of air at different temperatures. If there is the unusual situation of thermal inversion – a layer of cooler air below a warmer layer – an atmospheric duct can form, acting like a refracting lens, inverting what we see, which accounts for Jim’s upside-down lighthouse.
Fata Morgana can result in different, changing, layers of images,
inverted and right side up appearing at once. It can cause ships to be seen floating in the air. Indeed, the name comes from the legend that Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay cast spells to create flying castles and false lands to lure sailors to their deaths.
Jim continues with a more amazing story. On another occasion he once saw Norway and he describes the Norwegian coastline of beautiful fjords. The closest point on the Norwegian coast is around 450 kilometres from Papa Westray. Atmospheric refraction can potentially allow you to see beyond the horizon because the mirage is an elevated reflection of the real object, but seeing Sheep Rock on Fair Isle seems more likely than Norway.
A Fata Morgana can be seen yet never approached. Like Hether Blether, it always remains on the strip of the horizon.
Walking on the North Hill, I touch and turn a replica of the Westray Wife – a four-centimetre-high Neolithic figurine unearthed recently on Westray – in my pocket. AA recommends meditation, which I find hard – I get distracted, upset or fall asleep – so instead I practise my own form of contemplation by walking on the hill and absorbing my surroundings. When I walk, I am soothed by being in motion. My body is occupied and my mind free. Like the Outrun, there is more here than at first it may seem. I find a starfish at the top of the cliff; it must have been dropped by a bird. There are archaeological remains on the hill: forty burial mounds. The piles of driftwood above
the high-water mark are already claimed by other islanders but I am free to collect any from below the tide line. After a westerly gale, I walk home with arms full.
The hill is studded with craters from when it was used by the Royal Navy for target practice in the Second World War and test shells were fired from ships onto the island. The holes are filled with rainwater in the winter and range from the size of a paddling pool to that of a Jacuzzi. It is said that one bomb came further south than intended and just missed a farmer’s wife but killed her cow. After the war, a sailor from one of the launch ships could not believe their target island had been inhabited.
The cliffs at the east of the reserve, known as Fowl Craig, are home to colonies of seabirds at breeding time: guillemots, razorbills, puffins, shags, fulmars and kittiwakes. As in the park in Hackney, where drinkers and families became segregated into distinct noisy areas, each species has their own level on the cliffs, the puffins near the top among the rabbit holes and pink tussocks of thrift, fulmars in the top ledges and cracks, shags in big nests constructed from kelp, guillemots – social birds – further below, shuffled in together to protect their eggs from predators, with razorbills dotted between them.
In the winter the seabirds have nearly all gone, the puffins and other species out at sea where they spend the whole winter. I’m allowed to walk anywhere on the hill in winter but in summer visitors are asked to stick to the coast, leaving the hill
for the colonies of Arctic terns, known locally as ‘pickie ternos’, that breed there. At breeding time, the terns will vigorously defend their nests, dive-bombing passers-by.
In the cottage, on the mantelpiece, there is an Arctic tern wing – it seems so small and fragile that it’s hard to believe the journey it has made. Arctic terns have the longest migration of any bird, travelling back from Antarctica to Papa Westray each spring, an incredible journey of up to ten thousand miles. Local people say that the terns arrive back during ‘the first fog of May’. The Arctic tern sees two summers per year and more daylight than any other creature on the planet.
The North Hill Arctic tern colony used to be one of the biggest in the UK, with up to nine thousand birds but the numbers have dropped dramatically. This summer just 213 pairs were counted on the reserve. They formed four colonies on the hill and laid eggs, but after a string of cold, windy days in June, two failed. On the two remaining, some birds managed to hatch eggs but by mid-July, both had been abandoned, with no chicks reaching fledgling age. The terns that swooped above my head as a child no longer return to the Outrun.
Arctic skuas and great skuas (bonxies) also nest on the hill. The skuas practise kleptoparasitism, harassing gulls and other birds to drop their food which they then claim. Unlike in other places, bonxies are a common sight here: Orkney and Shetland have 60 per cent of the global population. On the North Hill, twenty-two pairs of Arctic skuas were counted last year, down from forty-four in 2010.
Over the last twenty years, the number of seabirds around
Scottish coasts has dramatically declined. Like all the cliff colonies in Orkney, Fowl Craig is not as busy as it was during my childhood. The main reason for the decline is changes to the birds’ food supply. The temperature of the North Sea has increased by around one degree centigrade in the past twenty-five years and there has been a drop in the amount of plankton, and in turn sand eels, which feed on plankton. This has meant problems for the seabirds whose primary food is sand eels: Arctic terns, kittiwakes, guillemots and shags. Without enough sand eels, the terns lose strength and have to travel further to find food. They may fail to nest, or if they do, they may be unable to find enough food for themselves and their chicks.
The great auk, now extinct, was a relative of the razorbill and stood about a metre high. The last breeding great auk in Britain was shot in 1813 on Papay, ordered by a collector in London. In the nineties, Papay schoolkids performed a play about the bird:
Raiders of the Last Auk
. I take a picture of the sea arch at Fowl Craig, and when I look at it on my computer, I see that my shadow has been cast on the cliff, standing on a ledge, squat and inadvertently looking like a lonely great auk, two hundred years after its death.
But while some species are failing, others are doing well. The North Hill has one of the biggest colonies of Scottish primrose (
Primula scotica
) in the world. These special flowers only grow to about four centimetres, with the flowers about eight millimetres in diameter, and thrive in salty, wind-lashed environments where other flowers can’t. They are found only in a few coastal areas in the north of Scotland and need specific conditions to survive,
neither under- nor over-grazed. Every three years, a full count of every
Primula scotica
flower on the North Hill is undertaken and last summer the total count was 8,134. I counted 617, on my hands and knees crawling along roped-out lanes.