The three enclosures of the fishery at Lyrawa Bay can be seen in the right of this picture taken from Lyrawa Hill/Scad Head viewpoint.

In the heyday of the fishing trade, many men of Orkney used to farm during the spring and in early summer go off to the Haaf (the deep sea) for fishing.  Herring fishing was most common, and like many other places around the north and east coasts of Britain, men came to land the fish while women earned a small amount from gutting and preparing the fish.  In Hoy, both Lyness and Rackwick were centres of the herring trade, with Rackwick village having up to 150 inhabitants, a far cry from today's 5! 

In the 1770's, Lyness was home to a young woman named Betty Corrigall.  She became pregnant at age 27 but her man left her to go to sea with the rest of the fishers.  At this time, this would have been frowned on greatly, a young unwed mother with no income, and so Betty tried to commit suicide.  At first, she tried to drown herself but was rescued from the waters of Scapa by a passer-by.  Shortly after she died by hanging herself in the family byre.  As a suicide, the strictly religious community would not let her be buried in the consecrated ground of the parish cemetery and the landowners of Hoy and Melsetter refused her burial on their lands.  Therefore she was buried at the parish boundaries, in an unmarked grave.  160 years later, two young boys digging peats came across her grave in a good state of preservation but respectfully re-buried the small wooden coffin.  During the Second World War, a party installing telegraph poles for the base at Wee Fea came again across the grave.  Throughout the war, it was a macabre pastime of the servicemen, perhaps unused to the relative boredom and isolation of island life, to open the grave site to view the body.  Sadly, this constant exposure to the air allowed the body to decompose.  Officers then re-buried the coffin in its present site under a concrete slab.  A small wooden cross was installed later but this quickly became damaged by the elements in such an exposed location.  A fibreglass headstone was then installed and has remained in place since the 1970s and now there is a short path across the peatbog so visitors can visit the grave, and an interpretation panel giving the story of Ms Corrigall.  Although this site is now by the main road in Hoy, and gets many busloads of tourists each year, it is clear to see below (www.scotlandphotos.net) that in the 1770's this would be a terribly isolated, desolate place to be buried.

Whaling, although traditionally associated in Britain with Shetlanders, provided a good source of income for the men of Orkney, as well as northern and eastern Scotland to a smaller extent.  Men could take a ship from Leith, stopping usually at Kirkwall and Lerwick, before passing across the Atlantic Ocean to Buenos Aires or another big port on the eastern seaboard of South America.  How exotic this must have been for the Islanders!  After refuelling and taking on supplies, these whaling ships would be off to spend 6-9 months of the year in the Antarctic, with bases around South Georgia.  Whale oil could be used as fuel for cooking or lighting, and later was used in the Singer sewing machines.  Whalebone corsets were among the most stylish items for the fashionable women of Britain.  The meat was also taken for food, so no part of the whale was wasted.  In later years, conservation efforts set national quotas and innovations in technology meant there was less need for whale products, so in the 1960's the Northern Islanders explorations to the Antarctic dried up. 

The main company taking men from the Northern Isles was Christian Salvesen of Grangemouth, later of Leith (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/index.shtml?walk=edinburghandlothian for a walk through the old Salvesen yards at Leith).  Learning about the whaling of Orkney was again really interesting to me as I feel I have a personal connection to the time.  My grandad, from Yell in Shetland, was a whaler with Salvesen, and later as a student in Middlesbrough, I worked on a boat in a dock where many years before Salvesen's whaling fleet was built. 

For those who stayed at home, whaling was only an occasional sport when one or two were spotted offshore and driven into sheltered bays like Rackwick where the villagers would be ready to kill and prepare it, again using all parts that they could.  Seals were also hunted in the bay, and shearwaters and gull's eggs taken by young boys from the cliffs, as much for sport sometimes as for supplementing the farm crops.  Throughout our exploration, it was clear that there were few places on North Hoy for cultivating crops, though plenty farmland for hill sheep farming.  Although sheep were much more in evidence across our route, there were also small herds of dairy cattle- contributors to the amazing Orkney cheese, fudge and ice cream?

Farming must have been a hard existence, with Rackwick sometimes being cut off in winter for a number of weeks.  At one time in the 1970's Jack Rendall was the only inhabitant of the village so this must have been a lonely time for the shepherd and his flocks.  It is a shame that the farming traditions have left Rackwick, although Jack does talk of his hope to sell land to a young person to stay in the village and keep it alive.  The village and bay is a most poetic place so it is perhaps no surprise that both writer George Mackay Brown, and composer Peter Maxwell Davies have come here to practice their arts.  It would be difficult to make a living while staying in this part of the island, but since Orkney is famous for its cheeses, maybe I could bring some dairy sheep into the village one day!