The scuttle of the German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919 gave rise in the years that followed to a salvage operation which lasted until the outbreak of the next war. The rights to salvage were sold, in the first instance, to the firm of Cox and Danks, which based its operations at Lyness on Hoy and developed a number of innovative ways to raise the ships and mine them for their great weight of steel. Some were inched up from deeper to shallower water, making use of the spring tides. The smaller destroyers had flotation balloons, called camels, attached to their flanks, and were bobbed quickly to the surface. The larger battleships and battle cruisers had their hulls compartmentalised and pumped full of air, and the holes in them patched by divers often working in the dark, by feel.
Not everything went to plan. The battleship Hindenburg was raised on several occasions over the years, only to sink again each time. There is footage from British Pathé News of the last raising in 1930 (“The Hindenburg is proving stubborn, refusing to leave her watery grave”). The colossal sea-weeded and barnacled hulks, when they were raised, breached like bloated dead whales, covered in tonnes of mussels which were battened on by vast flocks of delighted seabirds, as though the steel had been metamorphosed into something foetid and organic in the long years at the bottom of Scapa Flow, zombie ships rising in time for a new world war.
...
...
The bulk of the breaking up work took place at the Royal Naval base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth where the hulks, after patching, were towed; but before they went down bits of their superstructure were removed at Lyness on the island of Hoy. Among some of the objects retrieved were the bells of the sunken ships. Some of these bells were repatriated to Germany, and are now housed in museums; others hang in private collections, in houses in Britain and elsewhere. An effort was made to bring the bells together for the commemoration of the scuttle, but the expense was too great.
It wouldn’t have been too great in the Bronze Age. They’d have got a thousand men to drag the great bronze bells over the hills. Or in the Neolithic, when a bronze bell might as well have fallen from the heavens as have been dug and shaped from the earth. But they would have had the manpower to move it wherever the elders of the cult deemed fitting.
...
When I first visited the little museum in Stromness, with its diorama of paddling John Rae, and George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair, much of the ground floor was given over to special displays about the scuttle, and the salvage. The Neolithic collection which I had come to see was for the most part in storage.
I was not distressed by its absence. Looking at Neolithic objects in a museum is much like looking at beach-combings: a handful of pebbles, bits of driftwood, broken shells and razor clams. Bird bones. So much stuff left littering the naked shingles of the world after the tide has gone out. Skull, stone, bone, pot, mud. A gloomy litany of back vowels. With the exception of the odd polished axe in some luminous stone – jadeitite, haematite, felsite – you have to focus long and hard, and with a lot of context, to sift the patterns and see the beauty.
That said, I am starting to appreciate (or perhaps project) not just the beauty of a polished stone axe, the confluence of picturesque mineral and skilled hand and aesthetic sense, but the range, at once domestic, familiar, and bizarre, of the Neolithic spoglia. When Childe excavated Structure 7 in the late 1920s he found an especially rich assemblage of artefacts “littered about everywhere…an axe, a carved stone ball and a significant quantity of bone beads, bone adzes, flint flakes, stone mortars and sherds of pottery. Three whalebone basins were also found: one full of ochre in the floor in the left-hand corner, and two further ones near the western box-bed.”
He also found a cattle skull in the left-hand bed, and a number of inexplicable stone objects, some of which are on display in the visitor centre at Skara Brae and some of which have found their way to the national collection in Edinburgh. For the most part these objects are round or ovoid, with patterned carving on their surfaces. There is for example a ridged oval carved in dark charcoal-coloured camptonite which looks like a hand-grenade, which Childe described as "one of the most outstanding monuments of human skill and patience known".
Ornament proliferates in the settled world. All that scrimshaw energy has to go somewhere. And for whatever reason, these objects seem to have taken on a weight of symbolic meaning, so that they were deposited in boxes or recesses or in one case at the Ness of Brodgar in the buttress of a wall, like the lithic skull of an ancestor.
...
During the first excavations of Skara Brae in the 1850s, William Watt found a small whalebone sculpture of a human-like figure, with two eyes and a mouth and a navel. It was lying on one of the beds in structure 3, a building washed into the sea in the 1920s, before the site was stabilised. The object was drawn in the 1860s by the antiquarian George Petrie, but was then lost. It was found again only in 2016 in a box of Neolithic jumble in the Stromness Museum stores. It now has pride of place in a vitrine just inside the door of the museum.
I ask the custodian if he has ever held the object in his hand, and he says he has not, but that he understands from those who have that it is frighteningly light, delicate: a desiccated object vanishing particle by particle, then, like those antler masks from Star Carr; an apt representation of a human staring out of the past, no less sharply defined than any wobbly, burred, mental image we might form of its makers.
...
What are we to call these objects, or indeed any object of the Neolithic? We have no words, after all. We can call what we retrieve from these past ages implements or tools, baggy words both; or we can use more specific words like axe, or dresser, or pin; but these are words which have our own cultural resonances. If we call a Greek pot an aryballos or a kantharos, we are using precise and properly resonant words; but to call this an axe, or that bit of stone furniture a dresser, is to wrench it into our own time.
The Neolithic is, for us, pre-linguistic. They had their language, with no doubt wonderfully precise and evocative, and non-baggy, terminology, but we can never recover that. The closest we get are those silently ululating scratches in invisible courses of stone.
The whalebone sculpture is known as Buddo, an affectionate dialect word for a dumpy little person. It is as good a word as any.
...
By the time we stirred her ashes into the soil of my back garden, some months after my first trip to Orkney, what remained of my mother’s possessions had long since been divided up. Some objects, of hers and of my father’s, are dotted about my house. A collection anyone else would find hard to explain.
There is for instance a small brass statuette of the Virgin Mary which my mother had owned from time immemorial, and which was always by her bed. She clutched on to it in the agonies of childbirth, she told us, whether mine or my brothers, or both, I do not know. It was never far from her. In her last years in the nursing home she kept it in her handbag, for fear someone would steal it. She was sceptical of faith and religion, but this object she found comforting. When I was a small child I lodged a plastic grenadier guard up the Virgin’s skirts (or my brother did), and we could never get it out again. My brother finally dragged the guardsman free with a pair of pliers after my mother died, but the sight of it stirred no memories, and in the end we just put it back where it came from, for distant archaeologists and poets to puzzle over.
The statuette is a heavy object, as the Stromness Buddo is light. And as my mother, lying dead the last time I saw her, was desiccated, dry, weightless. She could have passed over any number of thresholds without tripping alarms.
The brass Virgin, on the other hand, remains with me on this side.
