Orkney girls head and shoulders above the rest at playing netball

THEY are known for their standing stones, tasty fudge and windswept landscapes, but the Orkney Isles are about to gain a reputation for something entirely different: tall women netball players.

Scotland's national netball team coach, Denise Holland, is heading to Orkney next month to scout for new young talent, believing that the islands produce some of the tallest women in the land.

"There are taller girls in Orkney, and in the Shetlands as well, than in places like Glasgow," said Holland, who works with netball players from all over Scotland in her dual role as the country's netball squad coach and the coach of the Glasgow Wildcats, the only netball Superleague team in Scotland.

Orkney has already provided the Scotland Under 17s netball team with three players, and Holland hopes her trip will help her talent spot some more gifted young six-footers for the adult squad. The tallest person on the Scotland netball squad, which is ranked 13th in the world, is Hayley Mulherron, who is 6ft 1in, while the tallest on world No 1 Australia's national netball team is Susan Fuhrmann at 6ft 5in. Although not all netball players need to be tall, it is a huge advantage for those playing positions such as goal defence.

The belief that people from Orkney and Shetland are taller than those on the mainland comes, it is thought, from their Viking heritage but, unfortunately, it does not appear to have any scientific basis.

Tom Muir, an Orcadian writer and curator at Orkney Museum, said: "It's this idea of a tall, Nordic sort of race. It's that old 19th-century romantic notion of these ancient warrior heroes."

Dr James Wilson, a Royal Society research fellow who has carried out genetic studies on the Orkney population, said that there is little genetic evidence back up the claim.

"Our research has clearly demonstrated that the people in Orkney and Shetland are half Viking in ancestry – they're 50 per cent Norse and 50 per cent Scottish. But that doesn't always translate into tallness. There's something a bit mythical about Vikings being tall – as far as we understand the tallest people in Europe are the Dutch, and even then it's not understood why."

However, Holland, who is coaching the Scotland netball team with a view to taking on the world's top ten when Glasgow hosts the Commonwealth Games in 2014, says that she has learned anyway how to use Scotland's smaller body shapes to her advantage on the netball court.

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