In Orkney, October marks a change. Summer is a memory. The days shorten rapidly, regular gales are a given, ditto our sometimes biblical rain. An unwritten rule says that bright dry days are to be grabbed with both hands. There are many upsides though, misty days bring a soft light, storms bring a white-capped life to the sea. Grey seals give birth to doe eyed pups and there’s the musical and beautiful yap of wintering Barnacle geese. One of the best gifts that October brings is the chance to spend a quiet couple of hours watching and photographing the Mirrie Dancers, the Northern Lights.
We’ve had a few teasers, an app tells of imminent displays – you go outdoors and see a blanket of unbroken grey cloud. Occasionally though it all comes together. Saturday past was such an evening, the sky velvet black, shot through with scattergun pin-pricks of light. Clear and still, a true silent night.
I stayed close to home, the frames above and below were taken in the garden and the meadow. In the frame above I used a fisheye, a lens that gives a 180 degree angle of view, wide enough to take in both the Milky Way to the West and the beginnings of the Auroras glow to the North. The downside of a fisheye is uncorrected distortion, those trees on the frame edges aren’t really growing on a slope. For the frame below I’d walked down to a pond in the meadow, disturbing a pair of what I think were Mallards. A splash of wings, a silver ripple on torch-lit water and they were gone, lost to the dark.
The aurora ebbed and flowed, the nights finale came as I walked back up to the house, dozens of light pillars erupted, green topped with red, filling the Northern horizon and stretching hundreds of miles high. For twenty minutes or more they shimmered and danced, a silent orchestra of light.
A garden in Orkney 
Oh wow Gary absolutely stunning, we’ve had a few lovely sunrises (pics on instagram) but nothing as good as the colours of the Northern lights.
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Hi Pauline, the clear spell didn’t last, at the moment we’re on day two of three consecutive days of gales 😀
I saw the sunrises and the mown walks through your garden, it looked beautiful.
J sends her love x
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Thankyou Gary. We had our first frost of the season this morning. Winter draws on. It’s sunny and dry for us again today. Sending love back xx
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I have to repeat paulinean’n’s comment – wow, just wow. Spectacular.
Tell me, when you’re out on those nights is your brain just ‘in the zone’, or do you get thoughts of the physics of the phenomenon, or the galaxies that are on display….?
Totally unrelated, but was reading up on the history of ‘Red River Carts’ yesterday and came across this about my hometown:
https://www.aboutorkney.com/2020/05/13/the-orkneymen-of-the-red-river/
Wondered if you have any insights into whether these types of carts, that Wiki says may have their origins in Scotland actually might have been used on Orkney in days gone by?:
Red River cart – Wikipedia
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Hi Penny, I just love the show and the silence, you spend a minute or two setting up, a quick test shot for shutter speed and iso and then switch off from camera and tripod and soak in the aurora, the night sky and the sounds, at home there’s the occasional just perceptible murmur of geese on the bay, once you get your night vision you feel very very small under that canopy of becoming ever clearer by the minute stars and planets.
Thank you for the links, what a population explosion, from 100 to nearly forty thousand in 22 years.
The earliest reference I could find for carts in Orkney is 1721, they were certainly in common use by the 1800’s and here at home there’s a dozen metal wheel rims and a couple of axles leant up against the wall of my workshop, found here and at our first home on South Walls. The photo on Stroma is very similar in design to a red river cart, the design could well have come from Orkney with a few tweaks to suit local timbers. They were almost always pulled by Oxen, see the Hoy Express. Hoy, Graemsay and Flotta had two styles, red river style spoked wheels and a “sled”, which had solid wheels, possibly used for carting peats & loose hay, I’ve seen photos on line but Sod’s law says I can’t now find any.
https://open.journals.ed.ac.uk/ScottishStudies/article/download/298/324/353
https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photos-old-hand-cart-image20078338
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Thanks Gary! I knew you’d be able to track this down 🙂
The Scottish Studies article describes the Red River Carts with their wooden axles perfectly. Makes sense for the Orcadians to have brought that knowledge to Canada, a land with no roads. BTW they used to drive the carts cross country 6 abreast because the wheels rutted the prairie soil badly on first pass, it was subsequently impassable. That’s why the 1800s picture of Portage and Main in the then tiny village of Winnipeg is so wide.
The axles were ungreased due the prairie dust, but they made so much noise they were known as ‘squeals’ not wheels. Prairie First Nations joke says the buffalo weren’t wiped out by white man’s guns, but moved away because of the noise!
‘..feel very very small under that canopy of becoming ever clearer by the minute stars and planets.’ I imagine the inhabitants of Skara Brae must have felt exactly that too.
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Wow Gary… super photos – really interesting, not the standard sort just of sky. I loved the fish eye lens Sue
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Thanks Sue.
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Glory to God! Such beauty — and isn’t it splendid that people like you know how to use their cameras and can share these wonderful sights with us? Thank you!
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What fabulous photos Gary! Thank you. An alien invasion? Talking of which I watched, “Once Upon a Time in Space” last night. I’m a big fan of the director. Awe and wonder alright.
Much colde here with a nasty wind and I am most certainly not a fan of hour back rubbish!
Margot xx
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Hi Margot,
Thanks for alerting me to both James Bluemel and “Once Upon a Time in Space”. We can’t get BBCi Player here, but the US’s Public Broadcasting Service frequently buys in BBC programs (eg Wolf Hall). Vancouver Public Library system buys these PBS programs when they come out on DVD or makes them available to us to stream for free, so I shall wait until “Once Upon a Time in Space” appears on VPL’s list.
Meanwhile, I shall work my way through the James Bluemel documentaries they already have in the VPL catalogue while I wait.
Keep warm!
Penny
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Hi Penny, Nice to see you! I’m so glad Gary is continuing with this blog. His photos are magical.
“Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland” is the best piece I have ever seen on the “Troubles.” It was superb documentary making. And the same for “Space” too, just let the people speak.
Westerly winds coming my way this week, so wetter and warmer.
Take care, Margot
PS Keep those elbows out!
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Hi Margot
As per Penny’s comment, thank you for the nudge for Once upon a time in Space, saw the preview and then forgot all about it, we’ll catch up on iplayer. No Aliens, they’d take one look at our gales & rain and promptly head South 😁
Cold here as well, Northerly gales over the weekend were bitter, some fool took himself for a walk along the coast when it was gusting to 60mph, talk about one step forward and two steps back. Did see a lot of Gannets feeding just offshore though, a silver lining.
x
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