TOUCHSTONES

June, 2005

For the past few years when I have worked on Orkney I have stayed at Ramsquoy Farm B&B in Stenness. The house sits on a hill with a grand view over the harbor of Scapa Flow. From this “base” it is less than a three-minute drive to the Standing Stones of Stenness or the Ring of Brogar.

On the other side of Orkney is the Neolithic site of Skara Brae. Historic Scotland describes the site as follows: “When a wild storm on Orkney in 1850 exposed the ruins of ancient dwellings, Skara Brae, the best preserved prehistoric village in northern Europe, was discovered. The excavated farming settlement dates back 5000 years. Within the stone walls of the dwellings – separated by passages – are stone beds, dressers, seats and boxes for provisions, recesses for personal possessions, and a hearth where dried heather, bracken or seaweed was burned.”

I visit Skara Brae every time I am on Orkney, always looking for images. I have never found one at the site but I keep searching. Walking from the Visitors Center to the dwellings is a “Walk through History”, with markers set along the pathway. The length of the walk represents the 5000 years between when the village was built and today. Near the Visitors Center are events from the 20th century, and with each step you walk further and further into the past. The first time I walked down this path I noticed that the marker for the building of the pyramids was quite a distance from the ruins.

If you type “Orkney pyramids” into a search engine, you will find numerous reports, essays and guesses about the relationship between the Skara Brae ruins and the Egyptian pyramids. One report states that the technology for the pyramids started on Orkney and another conjectures that the residents of Skara Brae were actually Egyptians priests who had been stranded on Orkney when their boat sank. It is all speculation and I find it fascinating.

The idea of pyramids on Orkney stayed with me. It was one of those incongruous notions I couldn’t shake. As I drove from Ramsquoy Farm down the back way to Stenness I passed a croft right up against the hillside through which the road cut. Stopping alongside to let a large truck pass I looked right and saw the shed roof of the croft leading up to the roofline. It suddenly struck me that I was seeing my Orcadian pyramid! I grabbed the 5x12 with my widest lens (the Schneider 120) and went to work. The lens of the camera is almost resting on the roof of the croft shed and the peak of the roof is just about at the top of the frame. It was one of those rare images when there is only one camera position and only one lens that could make the image work. I wanted to create the illusion of a pyramid on Orkney. It is my homage to those settlers at Scara Brae.