Why Christine Muir's beautiful writing about 'Orkney Days' puts her alongside George Orwell

Sheep graze near the lighthouse on North Ronaldsay, Orkney (Picture: Adrian Dennis)Sheep graze near the lighthouse on North Ronaldsay, Orkney (Picture: Adrian Dennis)
Sheep graze near the lighthouse on North Ronaldsay, Orkney (Picture: Adrian Dennis) | AFP via Getty Images
Former Scotsman columnist Christine Muir’s descriptions of life on Orkney were written about 40 to 50 years ago, but her words still enchant today

“All we have is every day,” the designer Terence Conran once mused… and the same ethos informs the wondrous prose of Christine Muir. The Orkney-based writer is among my journalistic heroes: George Orwell inspired me to write; Ian Jack inspired me to write better; and Christine Muir showed me that memorable writing need not deal with momentous events.

Her accounts of North Ronaldsay’s passing seasons are remarkable not just for their luminous descriptions, but also because everything they record occurred within three miles of the writer’s home.

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Ten years have passed since my youngest daughter and I – holidaying nearby – cycled to the Muir family home one sunlit afternoon: the ocean’s roar ringing in our ears; its scent mingling with clover; a gulp of swallows darting before us.

Full of light and life

Christine Muir's writing about life on Orkney made her one of Ronnie Kerr's journalistic heroesChristine Muir's writing about life on Orkney made her one of Ronnie Kerr's journalistic heroes
Christine Muir's writing about life on Orkney made her one of Ronnie Kerr's journalistic heroes | contributed

It is often said you should never meet your heroes, but to step inside the croft at Garso was to enter a world I first read about three decades before, as a journalism student 300 miles to the south. Those marvellous pieces of reportage, full of light and life – written by someone I had never met, about a place I had never visited – seemed at once familiar; soothing somehow.

It appears I was not alone. “One man wrote to tell me he had read it aloud to a friend who was seriously ill in St Petersburg, to comfort him,” Christine recalls. “I often wonder if there is something calming about describing a way of life that seems reassuring in a scary world… although when I reread it, there is plenty of shivering in the cold!”

Such constant chittering is understandable, given the climate of Orkney’s most northerly isle. Extreme weather is a motif running through Orkney Days, a collection of her weekly columns written for The Scotsman from 1976 to 1986.

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“Since Christmas Eve, the most ferocious storms have roared around the island, making it too difficult to talk, or to listen to the radio or watch television,” she recounts in one article, January Fires. “So violent was Christmas Day that we were sure that the windows facing south-east were going to blow in.”

‘Shimmering shafts of brilliant green’

The changing seasons are a constant too. The book opens with Turning Another Page of the Calendar, which begins: “Here in North Ronaldsay, there are no flame-coloured carpets of crunchy leaves, or ripe apples and pears, no shiny conkers for small boys to play with, just a gradual fading of green through gold to the leached greys and browns of winter.”

The wonders of the natural world are recorded with relish. Merry Dancers describes the Northern Lights “swaying across the sky, to their own esoteric music, pale diffuse streamers shot with shimmering shafts of brilliant green”.

The day before we visited Garso, Christine’s brother-in-law had taken us to the top of the island’s lighthouse – the tallest on British soil. Gripped by fear, I clutched the guardrail, battered by a northerly wind and awed by the power of the sea. North Ronaldsay is not for the faint-hearted.

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Danger lurks, even in the benignly titled Scented Summer Days: “The Arctic terns have a sentry posted near the five-barred gate which leads out on to the shore, and almost instantly the squadrons take off and begin their attack. Several times they have managed to get near enough to draw blood, but it saves time to go along the shore so that it is better to risk the attack.”

Time to Sow

Such stoicism has hints of the hardiness found in Alasdair Macleod’s magnificent short stories set on Canada’s Cape Breton coast, but it draws its inspiration from closer to home.

“I love the writing of Alison Uttley,” says Christine. “My mother gave me 'A Country Child' when I was eight, and it has remained my favourite book. “Her descriptions of life on a Derbyshire farm in the early 20th century resonated with me – they are lyrical, yet honest about difficult times; descriptive but never tedious.”

Farming has changed out of all recognition since the pieces were written; so much so that the book now reads like a historical document. Time to Sow might easily have been penned by the Venerable Bede, far less 50 years ago: “A few people still sow the seed by hand, using the cubbie, a loop of creel wire, with sacking sown on to it, and tied round the neck or shoulders.”

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“I only wrote for my own and the family's interest,” says Christine, “not as a record of any kind. Stories were typed on a second-hand Olivetti and despatched by post. There was no editorial brief. I was simply asked to record what was happening, but I never wrote about other people, or sensitive subjects – only about ourselves, the croft and nature.”

For all of the beautifully rendered accounts of a fragile landscape, hearth and home are at the heart of Orkney Days, and never more so than at Christmas. Island Advent records: “Christmas is still a simple festival, a sharing of hearths, when everyone is together; the room is warm and the advent star fixed on to the light shines out through the window, golden into the dark.”

Rare as hen’s teeth

There have been huge shifts in the island’s way of life since Orkney Days was written and the demographic has changed significantly.

“The numbers of those whose families have lived here for generations has declined and more people have moved here, bringing many benefits, keeping the school open, and ensuring other advances. But there is an inevitable sea change too – the erosion of dialect, oral history, and traditions. These are priceless and worthy of respect.”

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Not unlike the writings of Christine Muir, in fact. Copies of Orkney Days are, to use a farming analogy, as rare as hen’s teeth these days, and to be greatly treasured. My own copy rests between Ian Jack’s masterful Before the Oil Ran Out and George Orwell’s imperious Road to Wigan Pier on our bookshelf; quietly holding its own, at ease in such exalted company.

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