Episode 26 Landward

Hello, and a very warm welcome to the final programme in this

series of Landward, brought to you from the Orkney islands.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year

and that means here in the Northern Isles,

there's less than six hours of daylight.

I'm going to be sampling a food that's been illegal to

buy in a restaurant for decades.

I'll be finding out about the island's Yule traditions

and cooking up an old Orcadian recipe.

But before all that, I'll be visiting a Neolithic site

which has special significance at midwinter.

The heart of Neolithic Orkney is a World Heritage Site.

The prehistoric monuments that can be found all over the islands

give us a unique insight into the lives of our Stone Age

ancestors and how they perceived their place in the cosmos.

But it's the 5,000-year-old chambered tomb

at Maeshowe that has special meaning

around the winter solstice.

So, not the easiest entrance?

No and watch your head as you go under the lintel.

-And here it is...oh, my goodness.

-It's quite impressive, isn't it?

It's amazing! Absolutely incredible!

So, what is Maeshowe, what do we know about it?

It is, well, it's a chambered tomb and we know this partly because

it looks like one and we know that it is about 5,000 years old.

It's a huge construction inside and it's a monumental construction.

There are lots of other tombs even in Orkney that you can visit

and many of them are built with corbelling effect like this

but none of them are built with stones this size.

This enormous structure, with these huge stones, has been very,

very precisely laid out.

It's been built with great skill and great attention to detail.

Not just in the stonework

but you can see how beautifully it's fitted together.

It also aligns on the midwinter solstice sunset where the sun

goes down on the shortest day of the year.

The hinge of the year, when the really long,

dark winter nights slowly start to get shorter,

the days get a little bit longer and as it sets, the sun actually

-penetrates all the way down this ten metres of passageway.

-Wow!

And, of course, inside in the Neolithic this would have

-been dark, perhaps some little flickering lights.

-Sure.

And it strikes the back wall of the chamber.

It moves across the back wall of the chamber

and we have this extraordinary effect.

If you are a farming society that point in the year where you

go from the dark in the winter, even though the worst weather is still to come,

this is the turning point, the days start getting longer, summer is coming back, the sun is coming back.

You know, and one day you'll have crops ripe in the fields

and you'll know that you're going to survive.

Not just you personally but people are going to survive.

Was this just used 5,000 years ago by late Stone Age people or do

we have evidence of other people using the space?

We do have, we have very hard evidence

of later use of this monument.

Erm, and it's in the form of graffiti, Viking graffiti.

There are more runes here in one place, I think,

than anywhere else outside Scandinavia itself.

What sort of things are they writing on the wall?

They were very fond of writing "I carved this high up"

and boasting about how good they were about carving runes.

And this is actually a really good example, this is just one.

This is one inscription but uses two alphabets, lovely clear letters.

This is the futhark, this is the standard alphabet down here.

Some of them might look like letters you would recognise.

These are twig runes and these are almost like a code.

They are using the same language but they're kind of a step away.

You would have to be very well educated and clever

and this is basically a boast, saying that these runes were

carved by the greatest rune carver in the western ocean.

In the same way that a graffiti artist would, these days,

put their mark on the wall, that's exactly what's going on here.

I am the greatest rune carver in the western ocean.

Some all kinds of rune, you can see them,

if you look around, you'll begin to see them everywhere. And here as well.

And they look so fresh as well, that's the extraordinary thing.

Well, this is one of the extraordinary things about Maeshowe is the preservation inside

because it seems to have been filled in at some point.

So, it's all beautifully preserved inside

and it's just an extraordinary space.

Maeshowe is an incredible piece of ancient architecture

and it demonstrates that the people who built it understood

and celebrated midwinter and just like us

they hoped for a prosperous new year.

With Christmas only five days away, most of us

will have ordered our turkey or our rib of beef but if you live here

on Orkney, you could well be dining out on one of these, Greylag Goose.

Over the past few years, Orkney has seen a dramatic increase in the

resident goose population, which is causing major problems for farmers.

There's an increase in the population of resident geese up here,

they just never leave.

They're hitting growing barley crops in the spring,

once they come up through the ground

they're in on them and then back end of the year

before you get them harvested, if they get a flat area,

they'll come in, land there, eat what they can

and just work their way into the crop, eating away.

If we don't do something about it they're just going to keep going up.

There's no natural predators, they've got feed and water

and roosting sites here,

there's nothing to stop the numbers going exponentially up.

-Potentially, that has pretty serious economic implications.

-Oh, yeah.

Up here you need barley to furnish your cattle.

You need the straw, that's more important for bedding your cattle,

and there's only a limited area of arable ground up here.

Last year, at the back end, was a disaster for harvest.

We had to import.

I don't know many artic loads of straw came into Orkney last year

but we couldn't get it.

So, you try to grow your own

but the geese are just going to destroy that,

it's just increasing cost and it's already an expensive place to live.

Early this year,

SNH licensed a cull of up to 5,500 Graylag Geese to help reduce numbers.

Initially, we're trying to make a big impact on reducing

the population fairly quickly.

For the resident Greylag Goose population, we've got

about just over 20,000 from the count from this year

and that compares in 2008, where there were 10,000.

So, it's been quite a dramatic increase over the years.

So, our target has been for the last couple of years, 5,500 geese.

However, we've not been able to achieve that

and this year we've probably reached 2,500.

Up until this year it's been illegal to sell wild goose

anywhere in Scotland

but here in Orkney,

licences have been issued to market the culled birds.

The reason it was made illegal before was

because there was so much pressure on the Greylag Goose population

and they were actually declining.

The legal situation hasn't actually changed,

it's still illegal to sell Greylag Goose carcasses.

What we've been able to do is to produce licences for a very

restricted sale, as part of this pilot project.

Craigie Butchers is one of the outlets licensed to process the birds.

What's the difference between the goose that you're processing

and maybe the one we'd buy in a supermarket over Christmas.

Well, the ones here, they have a far more gamey flavour.

They're obviously wild and have a far stronger taste cos they're

feeding on seaweed, grass and barley, things like that.

So they have a far stronger taste.

So, what kind of volumes are you going through?

Well, so it's all cull meat that we're using,

so we collect all the stuff, basically in August

and September and we have got 1,100 birds worth of meat here.

We've probably gone through 400 birds already

and we've now 700 in the freezer to use now for Christmas time.

We're doing a lot of sausages as well.

The caramelized red onion sausages have gone down a storm too.

-So, you've been surprised?

-Very. Very, very surprised.

Pretty overwhelmed actually, the response we got was fantastic.

The general public were coming back to say how good they were

and coming back for more, which is great.

So what was your reaction

when you first heard that goose was going to be available?

Delight, I mean, absolute delight

because for so many years there's been thousands of geese

flying around here and in Orkney you've got all the shellfish,

the beef, the North Ronaldsay mutton and this wonderful product

that was illegal, that you couldn't make use of

because they were becoming a pest and, you know, beyond any sense

in numbers that it seemed ridiculous that they couldn't be on the menu.

Well, here we are, the moment of truth.

The goose, as you can see, is well and truly cooked.

Let's have a wee gander, see what we've got.

Some bacon wrapped around the breast to give it a bit more fat

and a bit more flavour, some clapshot,

neeps and tatties mixed together,

and some cranberry and leek relish, so let's see what it's like.

You know, I was expecting that to be really gamey

but it's a bit more like roast beef but I'll telly you what,

it's really good and you cannot buy this anywhere else apart from Orkney.

So, the lucky folk here will be having a really tasty

goose for Christmas.

Since time began,

humanity has celebrated the rebirth of the sun on winter solstice.

Although the worst of the weather may be still to come,

the nights will slowly get shorter as the days get longer.

Today, midwinter celebrations are dominated by the Christmas

traditions we know and love but here in the Northern Isles,

Christmas replaced the Norse festival of the Yules.

What was the festival of the Yules?

The way that we know it, we understand it is a Viking thing.

This would have been the old Nordic beliefs.

As you rightly called it, the Yules, in the plural.

Traditionally it started on the 20th of December,

which was the Tammassmass E'en, it was called.

E'en for the feast day of St Thomas.

That night when the sun went down,

you put away any work and you didn't do any work

again until after the whole Yules were finished.

It was a chance for the communities to come together and celebrate.

It included feasting and fire, light,

encouraging the sun to come back.

So, there was a whole lot to it in this darkest period in winter.

You traditionally had to have a piece of meat to eat on Yule.

Erm, people didn't eat that much meat

because they couldn't afford to

and they would traditionally kill a sheep on Christmas Eve,

on the 24th and that would provide some meat for the following day.

Animals were fed slightly more than usual.

There was also tradition that the last sheaf that you

brought in from the harvest was laid up

safely on the top of the wall head and unthrashed,

so it still had the grain on it

and that was given to the horse on Yule morning as a treat.

There was a strange one that I'm not sure when it came in,

but it was weighing the children at Christmas.

So, you weighed the bairns.

There was a balance beam at the mill called the pundler

and that was used for weighing grains.

So, you would take the bairns in there and weighed them

on the pundler.

It was to see how much weight you'd put on during the year.

And I suppose if they were a healthy weight then it was

good to see them through the, sort of, lean times of winter.

Absolutely, yeah, it was seen as being a good thing.

There was a danger, though, in that these dark nights at midwinter

was when the trows had the most power.

So, the supernatural creatures, trows are like fairies in

Scotland but not the wee, gossamer winged, wish-granting things.

These were nasty, wee creatures that would carry off your bairns

and leave changelings in their place and carry off animals as well.

So, they...you had to protect yourself from them.

So, during the Christian period, the signs of the cross was used

but before that it was iron, which they had a fear of.

I mean, today we see Christmas as a time for celebration,

for feasting, for sharing, for giving. Was it the same?

Yeah, erm, people feasted, gifts were given

and there is that celebration of being by the fire, telling

stories and families coming together and communities coming together.

This is our final programme of 2013 but we will be back in the spring.

So, if you have a story you'd like to share with us,

then send us an e-mail to...

One of the most eagerly anticipated winter events on Orkney is

a battle of epic proportions,

which takes place right here on the streets of Kirkwall.

I'm talking, of course, about an infamous event,

simply known as The Ba.

SHOUTING

I guess The Ba is a residue of a huge range of traditional street

games, that were played right across the country for centuries before

and nobody really knows exactly when The Ba in this form started.

There are two teams that take part in The Ba,

the Uppies and the Doonies.

In the old days everybody who was born or lived below the market cross,

that's in front of the cathedral would have been

a Doonie and everybody who lived above that would have been an Uppie.

But then, the hospital was built in Uppie teritory and that meant

obviously that everybody was born as an Uppie, if went along that line.

Nowadays, I would guess, mostly boys would play what their fathers played.

Before you take part in any contest it's important to know the rules.

Rule number one of The Ba,

there are no rules and all these shop fronts

at Albert Street will be boarded up before battle commences.

Right now.

It's like a rugby scrum with 300 men in the scrum, you know.

You do get terrific pressure in it.

And obviously you're playing against the walls of the town so that

you need to wear clothing that will take a bit of wear and tear.

Inside the core you would usually get the best players and what you

really want is for your team to have possession of the ball cos

that means when the pressure comes on, you can turn the core

and that means you can roll it out from a wall and get them

-going the way you want to go.

-Can you hide it?

Oh, people put it up jerseys and, you know,

and put it down on the street and try and keep it between their heels and

take it along because if you want to smuggle, you want the ba to disappear.

That means, if you're positioned in the middle, you can

start moving the ball back among your supporters and hope that nobody

notices because people always look to the middle of the ba,

where this core is and think "That's where the ba is".

If you can get the ba out of that, then get it smuggled along towards

the back of the supporters and somebody takes it and runs with it.

SHOUTING

For the Uppies to win, they have to get the ba to this rather

nondescript gable wall, site of the old town gates.

SHOUTING

But for the Doonies to win to win,

they have to get the ba into the harbour here

and for the man or men who want to claim the ba as their own,

well, they have to go in after it.

In December or January it's freezing!

You've got a ba in your hand here,

how much of an honour is it to have that, to be awarded that?

If you're interested in The Ba, it is a very, very significant honour.

I mean, hundreds of people play in The Ba every year,

so there's a tremendous number of good players,

which as fortune doesn't favour them on the day

because there are no rules with The Ba,

so at the end of the game

it's what you would call ultimate democracy. It's

who can get off with the ba and get it home, that wins the ba, you see.

When I stand at one o'clock on Broad Street,

waiting for the ba to be thrown up, it really gives me

a tremendous boost cos it means, you know, I'm an Orcadian, I'm

a Kirkwallian and this is about the place I stay in.

It really means something.

It's ancient blood, you know,

it's what our ancestors did and I often think,

you know, when we were gathering for a game, you had no idea who's

going to turn up or whether you have a good side or a bad side.

Or you have any berserkers with you.

And that's exactly the same as it was

when we were gathering for the long ships, you know.

If we were going off on a raid, that's the same kind.

You were not quite sure who would turn up

and who might have been fools the night before or whatever, you know.

I mean, you're black and blue sometimes,

especially if you're losing.

You'll be black and blue from head to feet, you know, your shins.

You do get a real battering, there's no doubt about that.

But if you win you don't feel a thing.

HE LAUGHS

Farming has been a way of life in the Orkney Islands for more

than 5,000 years.

Methods may have changed

but there is one heritage crop which still remains the same.

Bere is a very ancient type of barley, which has probably

been grown in the north of Scotland for at least 1,000 years.

And it's probably one of the most important cereals that's been

grown in this area for much of that time.

So, just to give viewers of what it looks like, we have here,

-I suppose, traditional bere barley.

-Yeah.

Compared to the modern variety I'm picking it all up there.

-So, it's a huge difference.

-It is, it's dramatically different.

It has a bout twice the straw length of a modern type of barley

and other differences is that if you look

at the way in which the grains are

arranged in the ear, in a modern variety they're

arranged in two rows, whereas in bere they're arranged in six rows.

Bere has some very interesting characteristics which I think

have contributed to its survival.

Erm, when you think of where we are in Britain, we're a long way north.

We have lower temperatures, we have a very short growing season

and then we also have a lot of exposure to wind and rain.

One of its main characteristics is that in the spring it has a very

quick growth and it can also come to harvest in a very short time.

Not just in Orkney but also in Shetland and the Western Isles.

There are many small-scale,

very dedicated farmers who still grow bere,

although they may have no market for it but they love to keep it

growing because it is such an important part of their heritage.

Until the 19th century, bere was an important Scottish crop,

mainly used by breweries, millers and distillers.

Today, Barony Mills in Birsay is the only place where beremeal is

still made.

-Good morning, how are you?

-Fine, fine.

-Wow!

What a wonderful site! All the original equipment?

Yeah, the original equipment. Yes, everything original here.

Except modern stuff, electric light.

We're just taking the raw bere, it's been dried

and taking the husk off and then part-grinding it for beremeal.

And is it the same process as milling say wheat...

Just the same...same process. Exactly the same process.

How much are you processing every year?

Maybe 10 to 12 tonnes of bere.

We normally just use it for beremeal for baking

but it can be used for malting, for home brew or for whiskey.

There's a market for it, a bigger market now than what used to be.

Some goes down to Edinburgh, we've got stuff going to

Gleneagles, Perthshire, got some going to London restaurants.

There's a very kind lady who has promised to show me how to

make bere bannock, so would you mind if I take a bag away with me.

No problem at all, I'll give you a bag.

The beremeal ground at Barony Mills has been

used by generations of Orcadians to make bere bannocks

and where better to go for a demonstration than

the Kirbuster Farm Museum just down the road.

Barbara, I've brought the meal but no skill

and I hear you're the lady with the expertise, and to be quite

honest now that I've met Barbara, I feel underdressed to say the least.

BARBARA LAUGHS

Anyway, carry on. How do you make a bannock?

Well, this is two cups of beremeal, which I've sieved

and a cup of plain flour.

-That's the baking soda.

-Baking soda.

-Cream or tartar...

-Cream of tartar and salt.

-..then salt.

I mean, they were obviously once a diet staple, are they still popular?

Oh, yes, and I think maybe coming back more.

It can be served in restaurants now with soup

-and as part of the bread basket.

-So, water next?

Yes, I mix mine with water.

Well, it would have been done with butter milk long ago or ordinary milk.

-Just working in the dry ingredients.

-And here we go.

That's it coming together.

And how many bannocks would you get out of this amount?

-That should make three.

-Make three?

-Yes, uh-huh.

-Get it to a kind of circle.

-It's pretty perfect, I have to say.

-Ready to go in the griddle now?

-Yes, on the yetling.

Oh, on the yetling, come on then.

-So, this is a yetling?

-A yetling, yes.

-An Orcadian word for griddle?

-That's right, yes.

-And how long do they take to cook?

-Three to five minutes on each side.

So it's really quick.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Now, Barbara, shall we have a wee taste?

Mmmm, very good.

It's not a way of cooking that we're used to these days

but sitting here with Barbara, you can imagine countless

Orcadians in the past sitting around the fire, eating a bannock.

I'm just not sure there's going to be much left for the boys.

Sorry, guys!

I can't believe you never brought any for us!

I'm sorry, I have to say they were very good though, sorry guys.

-SHE WHISPERS:

-In my tummy.

Disappeared like hot cakes.

Now it's time for us to disappear off to disappear off your screens,

at least until the next series of Landward.

Join us in March, when we'll be back with all the best

stories from the Scottish countryside.

So, from all of us here at the Ring of Brodgar, Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas!