Written in
stone
On a visit
to Orkney Museum the
other day, my eye fell on a postcard of the stone opposite. It’s a spindle
whorl from Buckqoy in Birsay from the seventh or eighth centuries AD. Ian Smith
from the museum was very helpful in supplying information about the ancient
language carved on it. For many years scholars believed it was inscribed
with an unintelligible non-Celtic Pictish. They were perhaps reading it backwards! Once it was recognised as Old Irish
Ogham, the inscription became clearer:
A blessing on the soul of L
And on the
other side – May the road rise up to meet you and the wind be always at your
back ...
No, not
really! But fascinating to think the early settlers in Orkney were writing and
reading in stone, even if we can’t always decipher it today. Interesting too, to speculate about where they came from.
You will find a great chapter on the Picts in William P.L. Thomson's The New History of Orkney available to read in the Orkney Room beside the Archives.
Today’s
Orkney Readers
The brief forms
I handed out during the Orcrime Festival are still coming back to me. People were
asked to comment on READING, BOOKS and LIBRARIES. Here are some of the things
people said about why reading is important to them:
It opens many new worlds and allows me to
leave every day life
It is a source of information, education and
enjoyment far better than film, TV or ven radio
It keeps my mindactivetrying to solve
mysteries in crime books and I love the language used by classic authors in
their novels e.g. Jane Austen
It’s a silent escape
Well it just IS, even more so since I am
trying to write. It always has been since I was passionate to read from the age
of three.
I’m addicted – always have been!
It’s breathing for the brain!
The Library
The good
thing now is that we no longer need things written in stone. There are books
and e-books available to borrow from Orkney Library. The forms returned show an
overwhelming appreciation of what libraries in Orkney offer. I’ll be quoting some
of the comments in blogs to come.
Ann Cleeves
on Libraries
Meantime,
you can listen here to this podcast of the Reader in Residence receiving a
passionate response from Ann Cleeves when I asked her about libraries and their
importance. Here she is at the Orcrime Festival with Stewart Bain of Orkney Library and champion tweeter @OrkneyLibrary!
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