Saturday 28 November 2015

Rackwick Bay and the Old Man of Hoy, Orkney Islands


The Orkneys can be anyone's Ultima Thule. They have the remoteness, the preserved authenticity, the wilderness of cliffs, bays and seas, quaint towns with an atmosphere and a history of their own. And they were certainly on the route of Pytheas the Greek when he adventured on the northern icy waters.


On the west coast of Hoy, one of the Orkney Islands, there are two great sceneries that attract visitors to the rather wild coast : Rackwick Bay and the Old Man of Hoy, a slim but high rock column.


Rackwick Bay

Coordinates: 58° 52' N, 03° 23' W.


The bay in half moon shape is a strikingly desolate yet beautiful beach between red sandstone cliffs.



A glorious pink sandy beach with  giant sea-smoothed boulders lies below the cliffs. Only the boom of the sea can be heard on a summer day.


The tiny settlement, previously a farm, was converted to a boothy for visitors, a hostel and a small museum.

The boothy at Rackwick.


Rackwick has its own microclimate and is often warmer than elsewhere in Orkney. The terrain is hard to walk on but the views and landscape make the suffering worthwhile!


Rackwick is also the home to the Crows Nest Museum and  the Rackwick Hostel.

Craa Nest Museum occupies three old farming cottages.

These are the oldest houses on the bay, from a hundred years ago.


The Rackwick Hostel

The best option if you must spend the night at the bay.

The three-mile path to the Old Man of Hoy.

Old Man of Hoy

Coordinates: 58° 15′ N,  5° 23′ W


The rock is tallest sea stack in Europe (137m) and the most famous sight on the island if not all Orkney.

The column is probably the remaining end of a complete arch.



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A handful of houses are scattered around Rackwick Bay, but there’s no shop, pub or café which is probably the reason that the place has retained its charm. But also reminds us of how har life used to be there:

No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun; the bloody dames
Won't even give their bloody names

                                                                                     atribb. to Captain Hamish Blair


Has inspired this little jewel on the piano, Rackwick Bay by Phamie Gow:








Monday 16 November 2015

Kullorsuaq
- 1060 km north of the Arctic Circle.


Kullorsuaq is among the most isolated and poorest communities in Greenland. Over 1000 km above the polar circle, lost in the far north ice desert, it's hard to belive that this community has been continuously growing (yes !) to the present day - to almost half hundred inhabitants.



Kullorsuaq (old Kuvdlorssuaq) is located in the Qaasuitsup region, in northwestern Greenland, on an island at the southern end of Melville Bay.



Coordinates: 74°34′ N, 57°13′ W
Population: ~ 450

The church.

School youths.

Football with nearby communities is a must, weather allowing.


The settlement was founded in 1928 and became a trading station, growing in size after World War II when hunters from several small villages around moved into larger settlements.
Today, Kullorsuaq remains one of the most traditional villages in Greenland.



Fishing and hunting – including the fur seal, narwhal and walrus – still are the primary occupations in the region. The fish processing plant for Upernavik Seafood (a subsidiary of Royal Greenland) and the Pilersuisoq general store are the only organized employers in the settlement.

Pilersuisoq store. The shop is red, the church is white, the school is blue. Strong colors are easy to notice in the distance over the white snow.

Kullorsuaq helipad allows year-round connection to and from the remoteness of its high arctic location.

The name of the settlement means "Big Thumb"; the Devil's Thumb is a pinnacle-shaped rock in the center of the island, not far from the settlement.


Life in Kullorsuaq runs according to the glace cycles and the polar night. Between December and Mars, people live in total darkness, except for the moon and stars if the skies are clear; temperature can fall down to -35ºC, the sea is frozen and no ship can reach the village. The sunny months are also the best for fishing, and warmer days up to 5ºC allow for the melting of the ice and the arrival of ships with provisions and a few tourists.

Watercolour by Maria Coryell-Martin, 2013


Midnight sun in Kullorsuaq


Friday 6 November 2015

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter - a passionate arctic novel


I should have read this book when I was a kid, at the age when I read about Byrd in Antarctica or Darwin in South America. But Christiane Ritter is adult - serious and authentic - in this report of her foolish adventurous stay in the freezing subpolar desert: it's finely written with precious and stunning descriptions, sometimes as if she is doing fascinated paintings, or poems. The book had great success when it was published and is a classic of Arctic literature.

The year is 1930, between the two wars, and then Europe was confused, depressed, unpleasant and dangerous. The crash and the long American depression put an end to the brief democratic years, and dictators went sprawling. Christiane Ritter, a 36-year-old Austrian housewife, was invited by her husband, a fur trapper in Northern Spitsbergen - the largest island of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago - to visit him for a whole year, so she can update long overdue readings and sleep to her content.

Gråhuken (Grey Hook), by the Woodfjord, is the location of the cabin where she lived.

The invitation was tempting, yet the desolation of the long Arctic night could frighten: Christiane was to live in a tiny and rough wood hut, on the shore of the Woodfjord, at about 80° northern latitude, under -40º C up to -15º C in the Summer. Only a long journey on the rugged ice may allow contact with other hunters huts - often deserted but still cozy.


Christiane will suffer moments of deep solitude, enclosed in the small cabin during long and windy storms, or wandering the Arctic night without horizons or references; on the other hand, she will live the experience of floating in an unreal world, with fantastic luminescence through blackness, starry skies never before seen, and when fairylike boreal aurora lights up, an intense feast for all senses.

- White shadows -

"The world is in deep twilight, a perpetual twilight from which it can no longer emerge. There is no wind, and a transparent mist carries the waves of the last dying light. Everything, near and far, is unreal, without spatial dimension. The frozen mountains soar up into the dark grey sky like white shadows. Weightlessly, they seem to sway.

With a soft musical note, the dark water nestles in the round white bays and in the river estuaries, and glides in the calm obscurity over to the broad sea, which in the distance seems to melt into the grey of the sky.

The scene has nothing earthly in it. Withdrawn, it seems to lead its own contained life. It is like the dream of a world that is visible before it takes shape as a reality."



- The shining rhythm of the spheres -

"It is as though we are on another planet, somewhere else in universal space, where in nameless peace bright mountains rest and the light speaks with a mute eloquence.

We go out into he bright land. In the valley the wind howls, over the plain the snow is driven like a glistening river, but calm and unmoved the mountains soar into the star-glittering heavens.

Bright veils detach themselves from the sky. As though stirred by the gentlest breath of wind they float in ever bright and broader waves across the whole heaven. We watch the shining rhythm of the spheres until the veils disappear, and come to ourselves, small beings struggling forward mute and heavy through the storm on the earth."



- Dissolving in moonlight -

"It is full moon. No central European can have any idea of what this means on the smooth frozen surface of the earth. It as though we were dissolving in moonlight, as though the moonlight were eating us up. It makes no difference when we go back into the hut under the snow after a moonlight trip. The light seems to follow us everywhere. One's entire counsciousness is penetrated by the brightness; it is as though we were being drawn into the moon itself.

... what I would like best of all is to stand all day on the shore, where in the water the rocking ice floes catch and break the light and throw it back to the moon."


- A red desert -

"I can scarcely believe my eyes. A radiant red dawn illuminates a land that is itself red. Red is the sea, red the rocks, red the beach, and the square driftwood hut is tinged with red.

(...) meantime Karl, who does not allow himself to be bewildered either by colours or by geological images, has been in the pink hut, making some glaring red cocoa. "I had to make the cocoa so thick," he says apologetically, "so that you would not see how red and sandy the water was that I had to make it with".



[ In the Woodjefjord there is a vulcanic area covered by red sandstone mud rich in iron ]


Perhaps the psychological dimension is missing, and entering deeper into human feelings and relations - there were three sleeping in the cabin, the couple and a younger hunter, a friend of her husband. But Christiane Ritter devoted herself totally to the emptiness of the irresistible surrounding world, and as her husband, she preferred the contemplative silence - this is the testimony that she left in her book.







A Woman in the Polar night
Christiane Ritter
Greystone Books, UApress Alaska