Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Elusive though the Picts are, they lived and died all around me here. At Gurness, on Aikerness, towards which I am now swimming: I can just make out the roof-ridge of the site museum. The great tower of the broch went out of use around the end of the first century AD, and its stone was cannibalized for Pictish houses between the fifth and eighth centuries. Their shamrock-shaped homes were inward-looking, walled with stone and roofed with turf. The people who lived at Gurness were literate, or at least exposed to literacy: someone owned a knife whose bone handle was inscribed in the Irish ogham script. The iron blade has rusted to shapelessness, but the handle is still perfect, gleaming where hands have gripped it and use has rubbed it smooth. The inscription reads ‘IN... IT... TEMOMN MATS’, but no one knows what that means.

  A few miles west along the shore from here, at Buckquoy in Birsay, a spindle whorl turned up. A little stone disc like a flat bagel, with a hole in the centre, designed to give balance and heft to the drop spindle. Around the curve of the disc there’s another ogham inscription: ‘ENDDACTANIM(f/lb)’. This has been brilliantly interpreted by Katherine Forsyth of the University of Glasgow as Old Irish: ‘Benddact anim L’.

  A blessing on the soul of L.

  Was it L’s spindle whorl? And was it an Irish visitor who carved the inscription? It may be Old Irish, but both blessing and soul are borrowings from Latin. An Irish churchman, visiting the Buckquoy settlement, scratching his benediction on to this very feminine object: it’s made of local stone; he didn’t bring it with him. I’m saying him because men travelled more, but it could conceivably have been a literate woman who incised the blessing. And surely L, the owner of the spindle, was a woman – the lady of the house, plausibly an aristocrat. Could she read? Did she understand Old Irish, or perhaps enough Latin to make sense of the words? I can see her, standing with her clump of wool in one hand, twisting the thread with the other, the spindle whorl twirling, activating the blessing like a Tibetan prayer wheel, spinning…

  A shallow wooden box, hollowed from a single block of alderwood and carved with abstract, flowing patterns very like those in the Book of Kells and on Pictish stones, was found in an Evie bog in 1885, when the men from Howe farm were cutting their peats and stacking them to dry over the summer. If I turn my head I can just see the hill above Howe. The primroses would still have been in bloom among the brown clumps of heather in peat-cutting season. Someone drives her tusker into the side of the peat bank, feeling rather than hearing the thud of solidity. The box – no bigger than a child’s shoe-box – contained bone-handled tools, and punches, and a lump of pumice, all suitable for working leather. If it was originally intended as a toolbox, it must be one of the most beautiful ever made. The carvings segue between breaking wave and flowering vine and wind-stirred barley, a harmonic geometry that both lures and soothes the gaze. The pumice probably came from the beach, having drifted in from volcanic Iceland. The box was treasured: the lost lid had originally been attached with metal strips, but these had been replaced with leather hinges. How did it get into the bog? It would be a funny thing to lose by accident, especially with its contents intact; and it wasn’t in a grave – to the perennial annoyance of archaeologists the Picts, whether pagan or Christian, didn’t put objects in their graves. Wood is a rare survival: this little box hints at the marvels we have lost.

  Knife and box are housed in Edinburgh now – you have to hunt for the box, it’s tucked away in the Early Peoples gallery of the National Museum, in a case so dark that if you didn’t know the sides of the box were carved you’d never notice – but the little stone spindle whorl is still in Orkney. I can’t help wondering what other secrets lurk in the unexcavated broch mounds along the Evie shoreline, the brown banks of peat on the hill, along the strand, in the seabed below me.

  For the first few strokes the cold makes it impossible to breathe, and then the pain eases, the iron bands burst, one after another. I have entered the water to the west of the breakwater, the lee side on this day of south-easterly wind. I swim in exploratory zigzags, knowing that this is still the difficult part, the bit when I have continually to tell myself, You can get out soon, you only have to stay in for a couple of minutes, honour has already been served. But that’s a consolatory lie, a way of tricking myself into believing that the worst is over. In truth I know full well that, in accordance with my own crazy rules, I cannot leave the water until I have put my head right under. Three times.

  And I’ve got to do it quickly. I can feel the back of my neck getting stiff and cold, and I don’t want too much disparity of temperature to build up between my head and the rest of my body. It takes some courage though. I stall, swim in a circle, look around me for surfacing seals, take in the view. The winter sun is rising: a glint of purple-orange alights on Costa, shifts over to Westness, catches Midhowe on the Rousay shore: another broch reused by the Picts long after the tower had tumbled.

  Pictish culture is best known in the popular imagination for its system of symbols, incised into stone with exquisite draughtsmanship, profoundly mysterious and much reproduced on modern souvenirs and as tattoos. Some of the symbols are animals, easily recognized; others are angular or curvilinear patterns, given such prosaic descriptors as ‘crescent and V-rod’ or ‘double-disc and Z-rod’. These may be abstracted images of real objects, or simply abstract. The art of the twentieth century gives us concepts which help in understanding the complexity of early medieval visual imagery: Cubism, Surrealism, the conceptual. There’s nothing so post-modern as the Middle Ages.

  The Pictish symbol repertoire is depicted consistently on stones found along Scotland’s eastern seaboard from Shetland to the Firth of Forth; pairs of symbols are often added like labels to already-ancient standing stones. Best guess is that they refer to individuals: commemorating the dead, maybe, or recording a marriage, or a gift of land, or a boundary. They pre-date the conversion to Christianity, but the Christian Picts went on using them.

  Fragmentary symbol stones have turned up both at the Broch of Gurness and here on the Sands of Evie, at sites only an easy walk apart, separated by a few hundred yards of dunes. The one from Gurness was found in 1935, and it carries the symbol known as a ‘mirror-case’, a rectangle topped with a disc, flanked by two decorated rectangles. The symbols are scratched, and comparatively irregular. It’s odd to have three symbols: they usually turn up in pairs, and this stone may be broken. Perhaps it’s a trial piece. Or it may be an exception: we deduce the rules from what survives but we don’t know the rules that were in the minds of the makers of these stones, or where and when they were allowed to break them.

  Whatever they called that symbol, it wasn’t a mirror-case. That’s a modern descriptor. The Picts didn’t have such things, even though they did – probably – have mirrors.

  The Sands of Evie stone is certainly fragmentary: discovered in 1967, it shows the handle and part of the disc of a mirror. Every time I wander along the fringe of the dunes, looking for coral and cowries and sea-washed china, I keep half an eye out for the rest of the stone. In the catalogue of Pictish symbols this one is an oddity: as we’ve just seen most are either animal or abstract, but this is very clearly an artefact, literally depicted: an actual mirror, albeit of a kind that was fashionable in Roman Britain, centuries before this stone was made. Mirrors are usually paired with combs in the Picts’ visual language, and the mirror–comb combination isn’t used alone; it turns up next to, and apparently modifying, other symbol pairs. On the Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab from Easter Ross a small mirror–comb combination is carved next to an image of a woman on horseback, and it has been suggested that if – as seems likely – the symbols refer to individuals by name, the mirror-and-comb mark that name as female, Lady So-and-So, a hint that women could own land and claim elite status using the same terminology as men. The idea that the mirror-and-comb are specifically female may sound like modern sexism predicated on our own notions of female vanity, but in the seventh century a pope wrote to the Northumbrian queen, Ethelb
urga, asking for her support and offering her ‘a silver mirror, and a gilded ivory comb’ as a gift; and of the Romano-British metal mirrors found in context three-quarters were in female burials. So one of the individuals laying claim to Evie in life or death may have been a woman (or just possibly a mermaid).

  There’s a mystery here. The metal Romano-British mirrors that survive look just like the ones carved on the Pictish stones, but none has yet been found in eastern Scotland, and they pre-date the Picts by a couple of centuries. Made of bronze, with decorative handles, one face of the disc is highly ornamented, the other polished smooth. Maybe the image of the mirror on Pictish stones also tells us something about their attitudes to the past, to rare, expensive metal objects, and to the Roman-conquered territories to the south. Why are the mirror and comb the only recognizable artefacts in the symbol repertoire?

  Did Tredwell contemplate her beautiful eyes in an heirloom mirror like this before she tore them out?

  Mirrors were expensive. Carved stones were expensive. Whether or not the mirror and comb symbols are really associated with women, they depict objects of power. But what might ownership of a mirror have meant in the seventh or eighth century? A mirror’s a tool for the perception and construction of the self. We have grown so accustomed to being surrounded by our own reflections, not just in mirrors but in shop windows, inverted in the bowls of silver spoons, on CCTV, self-portraits taken on our phones and disseminated worldwide in seconds. But the early medieval world didn’t have a concept of the portrait – the specific rather than the generic likeness – nor did it have mirrors that accurately reflected the detail or the colour of the world around them. If you wanted to know whether your eyes were green or brown, you had to ask someone. When St Paul speaks of perceiving God ‘per speculum in aenigmate’ – ‘through a glass, darkly’ – it is this kind of mirror he has in mind. Long before Alice went through the looking glass, mirrors were understood as portals to another world, one that not only reflected but commented on our own. Not just objects that helped with personal grooming, they may also have been used as surfaces to scry in, like a fortune-teller’s crystal ball.

  No metal mirrors have yet turned up from Pictland, but at Midhowe broch, over there on the Rousay shore, gleaming now in the shifting winter sunlight, the archaeologists found a whalebone handle shaped very like some metal mirror handles, a long triangle with a disc at the bottom, whose best parallel in sculpture is the Sands of Evie stone. Image and object together suggest that riddling mirrors were familiar to the Picts around Eynhallow Sound. There was a whalebone comb found at Midhowe, too: perhaps the same stranded cetacean provided the material to make both objects.

  Other Orkney stones have a different range of symbols: crescent and V-rod, eagle, double-disc and Z-rod, Pictish beast. The last is yet another mystery, and perhaps the most beguiling of all, although it is one of the commonest. I’ve used it to mark off the Facebook posts in this book. A long-snouted creature, apparently floating, drifting like a sleep-walker, benignly smiling, a pigtail or crest flowing down the back of its neck, its tapering legs terminating in little curls, a tail hanging down. The other animals deployed in the symbol system are stylized but realistic, and unambiguous: stag or eagle or snake or bull depicted in a few perfect lines. The very consistency of representation of the Pictish beast suggests it was a widely recognized – and easily recognizable – image. But of what? Even specialists don’t know what to make of it: sometimes we call it the kelpie, or the dead dolphin, or the elephant. But it can’t be a land animal, not with those legs. That benevolent, otherworldly smile is certainly reminiscent of a dolphin, or an orca, but the long, pointed jaws are nothing like the rounded rostrum of a living cetacean, although dolphin and orca skulls are a close fit for the elongated shape of the head. There’s nothing else skeletal about the beast, though. Could the pigtail be intended as an allusion to the spray from a blowhole, or a dorsal fin?

  Thinking about what the Pictish beast might be makes me realize how trapped I am by my own historical moment. My perception of the underwater environment is constructed by second-hand information about what seals and cetaceans look like, and how they experience their world. In reality, when I put my head underwater and swim for four, five, six long strokes, all I see is a green-grey-blue world, blurry and full of shadows. If I wear goggles it springs into focus, but the Picts didn’t have goggles. When I see an orca with my own eyes, I catch a fleeting glimpse of fin and arching back, but my imagination can supply the rest of the creature from photographs, and the documentaries I watch obsessively on YouTube. The Picts couldn’t. They salvaged whalebone from stranded animals, but a dead or dying cetacean on the beach is utterly different from the flashing being in the water.

  This raises a whole set of new questions about the relationship between the Picts who lived here and their perception of the waters of Eynhallow Sound. They certainly had boats, and must have been skilled in their use – how else would they get to Orkney, or travel around the wild waters of the archipelago? There is even a reference in one chronicle to a Pictish fleet. But they didn’t eat fish, despite that rich resource on their doorstep. Stable isotope analysis of their bones suggests little or no reliance on marine sources of food. This is so intriguing. Was there some technological barrier, or a cultural one? Was the sea sacred to the Picts, or taboo? (And what’s the difference?) The only realistic marine creature depicted on Pictish stones is the salmon, massive and sneering, depicted with the clarity of a portrait; but the leaping salmon is as much a creature of air and fresh water as it is of the sea.

  I’m not sure I’d ever put this in print in an academic paper, but I see the Pictish beast as a guardian sea-spirit, not a dolphin exactly but the quintessence of cetacean. Something protecting those of us who are foolish enough to venture beyond the liminal ebb, to explore the boundaries between day and night, land and sea, salt water and fresh. Its blissful, slightly goofy smile is the expression of a creature that has gone through folly to the wisdom beyond. The beast eludes definition in the way that selkies do; it slips through your fingers; hard to think about, but good to think with; making most sense when seen with peripheral vision.

  *

  Amazing ice-storms pile-driving through, plunging the fields into veiled monochrome winter. And then the sun comes back and the white vanishes almost at once, and the world is supersaturated blue and gold and green again. Swim in super-choppy spray-pearled breakers, keeping a weather eye out for hail.

  *

  The first time I put my head right under it’s a hell of a shock, much worse than the initial forcing myself into the water: I duck and I’m up again, fast, eyes open. I’m briefly aware of the deep streaky-jade world beneath the surface, but much more alive to the rapid penetration of the water through my hair to my scalp, carrying cold with it. The sea makes me feel how I am put together. The water may stop at the surface, but the cold carries on, through the epidermis to the dermis, the subcutaneous layers. The chilly shockwave spreads seismically through the hard bone of my skull: the blood vessels in the multi-layered fibrous tissue of my meninges respond rapidly to the onset of cold, insulating my brain and spinal cord from harm. In the twelfth century the French natural philosopher William of Conches named the layers of the meninges the matres, mothers, because of the way that they protect the brain. He thought that the sensory neurons, taking information in, stem from the pia mater (devoted mother), and the motor neurons, pushing motion out, come from the dura mater (hard mother). I am grateful now for this maternal embrace, tough and tender, cradling my cognition from the shock of the cold.

  My mother died two years before I got married, five years before my daughter was born, six years before we moved to Orkney. She knew of my obsession with these islands, and we often talked about taking a trip up here together, but we never found the right time, and then it was too late. What if transmuted into If only when my back was turned.

  Like me, she didn’t marry until her mid-thirties and she had me, the
first of her two daughters, at thirty-nine. Her original professional training was in social work, although she had read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford: when I asked her why she had become a social worker, not a politician or a philosopher or an economist, she looked at me in some surprise. ‘It was 1949. The choices were social work, teaching or nursing.’ In her day, you were still expected to give up your university place if you got engaged: make room for some poor woman too unattractive to catch a man. She loathed housework and brought me and my sister up to despise it. She warned me never to learn shorthand or typing, and to this day I peck at the keys with two fingers. Also: ‘When you’re at a meeting with men, never offer to make the tea.’ I try to act on that one, too, and am surprised by how often I need to summon her ghost. But the housework still has to be done.

  It never occurred to me, growing up, that I would marry. Adulthood meant getting away from my father and his expectations: escaping from a man, not finding one. Weddings belonged elsewhere; they marked the end of the story, the bride gift-wrapped and given away. Fine if you liked that kind of thing – it wasn’t that I was consciously opposed to the institution, or that I envisaged a lifelong partnership of a different kind. I simply felt complete in myself, integral, sealed and intact long after the technical loss of my virginity. Relationships through my twenties and on into my thirties were often fun, but also a distraction, an irritation, an energy-drain. Why did the stimulus of intellectual companionship and sex dwindle into this stifling monogamy? The visceral reaction to threat is fight, flight, or freeze. As soon as friends started thinking of us, speaking of us, as a couple I began to jib, buck, take the bit between my teeth and, eventually, always, bolt. Before leaving one boyfriend I had nightmares of him pruning and pollarding me with garden shears, like the Scissorman in Struwwelpeter who cuts off the thumbs of the little boy who can’t stop sucking them, leaving bleeding stumps.