Farm museums – Moonshine Mohair at Keldaby Farm

The Gods Are Not Exactly with Us!

Sun, May 6

Awake this morning to a much windier, greyer and colder Stromness. Michael’s cold is worse so he opts out of any planned trips. We start out with the idea that we should buy tickets to Maeshowe for later in the week, Tuesday perhaps, although we aren’t at all sure whether we really want to revisit this neolithic burial mound. Of course Jen needs to see it but we have pretty vivid memories of the place and the stories that accompany it.

https://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/

Tickets are no longer sold on site–the old mill that housed a small museum and gift shop as well as ticket window has been closed– and we know there is no point going to the visitors’ centre near Stenness because tickets can only be purchased ahead of time online (and we don’t want to use credit cards if we don’t need to) or by chance just before a tour begins. This seems pretty crazy but there you are. Can’t argue with inflexible rules.

So off we go to Dounby where we hear there is a tag sale in the local school. We arrive there at 10:30 and are told it doesn’t open until noon. Well, we say, let’s go to Corrigall Farm: Ha! that doesn’t open until noon either.

Lynn and I had both bought beautiful painted silk scarves at a gallery not listed as part of the Crafts Trail back in 2014 so we decide to go see if we can find it again. We are quite sure it was just a mile or two up the road from Kirbister Farm. It’s not there anymore–or we have somehow gotten ourselves in the wrong place. There is nothing to do but return to #18 for a quick lunch and hope that the afternoon will prove more fruitful.

Back in Dounby at 2 o’clock we find that the tag sale is now over; there are just a few stragglers packing up their wares. Oh, says one, you should have come in at 10:30! Ahh…

It’s off to Corrigall again where our guide Sue takes us through all the buildings and we learn a lot more about peat and peat-burning.

https://independentstitch.typepad.com/the_independent_stitch/2013/10/orkney-corrigall-farm-museum.html

In the barn

This cupboard is not so different from Skara Brae’s!

Is this the better mousetrap?

A double oil lamp with a reed wick

Jen sits by the peat fire

It is obvious that indeed yes, Puss the beguiling cat, is no more. The place seems a bit empty without him.

We mention the rhubarb that is growing near the house and ask where we might find some growing wild. Sue picks us an armful and off we head to Kirkwall.

It’s time for cappuccinos and scones with clotted cream and jam at Judith Glue’s.

https://www.judithglue.com/pages/orkney-shop

They have no clotted cream today! We settle for whipped cream; it’s not the same. Cold and wind-whipped we decide to go home where we while away the rest of the afternoon knitting.

Pretty soon the delicious smell of tonight’s (Lynn’s) lamb stew which has been slow cooking all day in the crock pot draws us to the table for dinner. It’s the high point of this rather dismal day. More knitting and then we’re all off to an early bedtime.

Sea Hames & Kirbister Farm

Sat, April 29th

We’re doing well. No hour-long deep sleep to awaken wondering what day it was, not like last time when we had to call the desk to ask. We know it’s Saturday and we’re ready to hit the road! We order the full Orkney breakfast minus the haigis, a mistake as it turns out to be really good and spicy, and black sausage. Still it’s a full plate of fried tomatoes, good Scottish bacon, eggs, toast, fruit and coffee. The car repacked we head to Dounby where we learn that there will be a performance today of something called Sea Hames and that it will happen at noon at the Corrigal Farm Museum. Not so, it will be at the other farm museum, in Kirbister, and then with trepidation we ask whether Puss the very friendly tuxedo cat who was sixteen when we met him is still alive. He is not. During the winter he had curled up in a favorite place one evening and simply gone to sleep. We are told that he has left many many offspring and that he can’t and therefore won’t be replaced.

. Puss in 2014

We drive north to Kirbister and revisit this wonderful example of a three hundred year old farm. Michael hadn’t been with us before and of course Jen hasn’t seen it. A peat fire is burning in the open hearth in the kitchen, the smoke more or less rising up to the lum. We meet Tom Muir author of The Mermaid Bride and Orkney Folk Tales.

Tom Muir

A kettle hangs above the peat fire

The wind has picked up and it is cold. At noon the performance begins–magical in its perfect setting. First the four musicians slowly emerge from one of the stone buildings followed by the four “horses” and a ninth figure, we’re not sure who he is meant to represent, The costumes are fantastic, the pace is slow, the music and singing seem both ancient and modern, the story is about two Clydesdales who jumped a fence in 1984 and danced on the beach at Billia Croo. This is from their website: Sea Hames – Dancing Horses:

Sea Hames is the latest outdoor performance project from leading site specific theatre company Oceanallover. Inspired by ‘The Festival of the Horse and Boys’ Ploughing Match’ this multi-disciplinary performance fuses sonic composition, compelling performance and intricate costume to explore the mythology and iconography of horse, plough and the sea.

…They stood up on their hind hooves and danced in the low mid-summer sun. This project begins with those two horses and the sea; about freedom and creativity, the persistence of memory, tradition and innovation, attention to detail and wild brush-strokes.
The rituals of horse, land and sea inspire the visual poetry of ‘Sea Hames’ and the choreography responds to sources of natural power and green spaces as a stimulus to frame the performances.

https://www.oceanallover.co.uk/Pages/Sea%20Hames.html

Back in Dounby we stop at the Dounby Butcher and buy meat for a couple of meals and plenty of the delicious local bacon for our BLTs we have all been pining for and then visit Alison Moore’s studio. Lynn and I had each bought a set of her rings four years ago and now we decide we each need to add a moonstone ring to our sets.

My rings before adding the moonstone

Our final stop before heading to our stone cottage is the Co-op where we buy all the necessities for several days. (We’ve set up our kitties: one for food, petrol and sites where we all want to go and one, mine and Michael’s, for wine and beer. Jen and Jill buy their own beer.) Jen makes her first foray up the main street with its five different names totally unfazed by the narrowness of this two-way street and we arrive at 18 South End.

. Harbor view

We’re in for a bit of a surprise. Number 4 South End (2014) had a large but cozy living room and fireplace where we sat knitting every evening; #18 has a narrow enclosed porch with a view out onto the harbor. (Yes, we will come to appreciate that view!) The lower suite is indeed separate from the rest of the house as described but with no interior connection; this takes us aback. Jill and Jen agree to claim it as theirs. The large dining room in #4 is replaced by a larger eat-in kitchen which needs rearranging to accommodate the five of us. And worst of all an odor, more than faintly reminiscent of sewage, pervades the lower suite. Opening the windows helps…some, but now it’s cold and turning on the heaters just exacerbates the smell. A frantic email to Rosemary (the owner who lives in South Africa) ensues. After we’ve all calmed down some and chosen our rooms–Michael has the first floor en suite room, Lynn and I each has a bedroom on the second floor with our own bathroom–and we’ve stashed all our baggage and provisions, we do begin to be charmed by our cottage. The kitchen has everything one could ever want including a complete supply of spices and herbs, table settings for a dozen diners, pots, pans, griddles, mixing bowls; toaster, microwave, convection oven which ironically we will never use (the oven didn’t work in #4 probably because we had failed to switch on the electric socket it was plugged into!), coffee maker, dishwasher, washer, dryer and an impressive array of teas, instant coffees and various condiments. Jen makes Shepherd’s Pie for dinner. Thus ends our first real day in Stromness. More tomorrow including how Verizon managed to screw up my only communication back home to Bob!

Michael Comes Through

For weeks I have been pleading with Michael to send me some of his many, many excellent photos from Orkney and lo and behold this morning I was rewarded! Some of these are just plain better shots than those Lynn or I took. (Jill as driver didn’t get a lot of time to take pictures.) Others show a location, an event, a piece of Orcadian life from a slightly different perspective. I was going to try to insert them into the earlier posts at their appropriate places but who has that much time? Really? So instead I will put them here with labels and if you haven’t previously read some or all of the posts, here’s your opportunity to visit…or revisit…the sites.

bright blue door Stromness seascape e night falls

Above are some scenes from Stromness–a vivid blue door and a periwinkle one–Michael and a curious puss, Michael and Lynn and a couple of seascapes. I’m not sure where the bas relief plaque was.

Boats in the Stromness harbor…and one that has been beached behind a house. We all took pictures of the turquoise hull, Michael’s I think is best. Quilters, take notice. Wouldn’t some of these brightly painted boats be wonderful subjects for piecing?

We certainly did a lot of knitting and if Michael had had his way we would have spent even more time at the cottage knitting! Many an afternoon around 3 o’clock he would wistfully say “We could go back to the cottage now and knit.” But we were unmoved by his pleas. No, we’d say. “We can knit later. There are too many sights to be seen!”

The real Jill having her excellent cuppa’ This picture more than any captures an elusive part of Jill’s psyche.

We did a lot of toasting–every meal provided an opportunity

The site of the infamous “Sunday morning ‘J…F…C..!’ fallen ice cream cone” scene in front of St Magnus Cathedral and across the street from Judith Glue’s

These three shots are at the Earl’s Palace in Kirkwall, right across the side street from St Magnus. Check out that beautiful stone spiral staircase

Finding the perfect cabbage at Tesco’s

From time to time Michael passed his camera to one of us to capture the essence of Michaelness–a long-distance, by proxy, selfie I guess you could say. The last is best; he looks about 14–and I have to say, endearingly cute!

Scenes too beautiful to miss. The middle one is from the entrance to the Cuween Hill cairn…and look at the light of the setting sun on those stone walls

These too were taken on Cuween Hill (remember…where Michael sang an aria). Jill coming out was one of our favorites!

Thank goodness Michael got the photo of the Dounby butcher with her award-winner’s plaque

Jill enjoys a contemplative moment by the cairn on the beach

Some of the inventory at the Harray Potter studio

A Kirkwall barrister returns from lunch or is he perhaps making a plea bargain deal ?

And finally the perfect shot of the gulls who came to grab the lamb chop remains

. . . . .

For those who perhaps wondered if I ever conquered netzpatent, if I…and even more, Michael…had had the patience to stick with it, here’s the proof. Jill made the excellent suggestion to finish up with something different so the scarf wouldn’t end abruptly with a blunt edge. Skeptical as I was, I added several rows of garter, then some stockinette, then doubled the number of stitches. It looked great so I picked up the stitches at the beginning and repeated, more or less, the same ruffled pattern I had created.

Today I suggested that we all begin to plan our 2016 trip to the Shetland Islands!

And so we come to the end…

Fri, May 29 It’s our last day in Orkney and I am trying really hard to stay cheerful. Tomorrow morning we will have to be up at 5, eat breakfast, wedge everything into our car–and our baggage has grown larger, we know because we’ve been practicing fitting everything into our luggage–and hit the road at 6 so we don’t miss our ferry. Michael is feeling a bit under the weather and we three leave him at the cottage and head off to the other farm museum at Kirbuster, not far from Birsay. We make a couple wrong turns, one which goes to Kirbister on the west coast, so we get to see some unexplored places and finally find the museum. Kirbuster turns out to be very interesting for a number of reasons. It is the only remaining farm in northern Europe with an open hearth with its fireback in the middle of the main room, the smoke escaping through the lum in the roof. In the photos below you can see the light coming in through the skylin. The smoke is directed out by the moveable wooden lum depending on wind direction. A peat fire has been laid and there is a group of visiting photography students (from Maine, we hear) who have set up their tripods and cameras. Kirbuster was built or refurbished in the early 18th c by a family of means. It was built with windows and from the beginning the animals were housed in separate buildings. In fact this house was lived in until 1961 and the newer parts are quite commodious in a very old-fashioned way. (I can remember visiting aged relatives in Orleans Co in upstate New York whose homes looked quite a bit like this.) The guide here, however, is definitely not the hands-on sort like our guide at Corrigall. He stays in his little building and sells Orkney ice cream (one more opportunity to indulge!).

The gardens are truly lovely with several ways in…a whalebone gate, an iron gate and a cut in the stone wall. From every angle the gardens are gorgeously in bloom. Lots of bluebells of Scotland.

On a whim we stop at an art gallery just up the road. Jill is good and practises restraint but Lynn and I, as usual, each buy a dyed silk scarf…mine is actually a shawl but will become a wall hanging at home. It is in brooding grays and although it is in no way representational, it reminds me of the Ring of Brodgar. Lynn’s is more a sunset over heathered hills.

As we will be driving through Dounby a final time we decide to stop in for a late lunch and that wonderful coffee. Back in Stromness I take my camera and Lynn and I videotape the walk down South End, Alfred, Dundas and Victoria Streets a final time and then it’s time to get creative with the bits and pieces left to make a dinner from.

All the quantities and ingredients used were dictated by the remnants of our several grocery shopping sprees. Unfortunately there was no final bottle of wine!

The Rovers’ Farewell Frittata

Saute 1 onion, chopped

1 whole head of garlic, crushed

2 small sweet peppers, chopped

Beat together 3 eggs and

1/2 container of plain yogurt and

pour over well-cooked vegetables.

When eggs have set add

3/4 c shredded Parmesan and

2 Tbl chopped cilantro

Simple and very tasty!

While we watch Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, Michael who has seen it “dozens of times” takes a walk out Ness Road and back up past the golf links and reports back that it is a glorious walk that we have missed. It will have to wait for another trip! The next morning we bid farewell to our wonderful cottage and the amazing two weeks we have spent here. On the ferry back to mainland Scotland we play a last couple of hands of Spite & Malice,

drive to Aberdeen,

divest ourselves of our trusty Ford Focus

catch our plane to Heathrow and the next to Logan Airport (Boston), find Lynn’s car with no problem and arrive back in Colrain, Shelburne and Leyden in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

Category: Farm museums

The Gods Are Not Exactly with Us!

Sea Hames & Kirbister Farm

Michael Comes Through

And so we come to the end…

keldabygoats