Diary of a Shopkeeper, 14th September

The aak shop, West Ronaldsay

I’ve received some correspondence about the mysterious booklet I’ve featured these past few weeks, So Near Away Yet Far: Memories of West Ronaldsay, by Clouston Hourston. One person emailed to suggest that the island portrayed in the booklet had had its name changed to maintain the islanders’ anonymity. ‘Clearly,’ he wrote, ‘the island being described is East Ronaldsay.’

Someone else commented on Facebook that her mother had had a schoolteacher whose name was reminiscent of our author: Mr Hourston Clouston. Could the teacher have cunningly disguised his identity, the commenter wondered, to protect his respectability? It’s possible. But then almost anything is possible, and it is best not to speculate, but to stick strictly to reality. With that in mind, there follows a further passage from So Near Away Yet Far. It comes from a chapter headed, ‘Aak Attack.’

. . .

WEST RONALDSAY IS A PARADISE FOR BIRDS and the islanders live in fruitful partnership with them, trapping and eating them in vast numbers. The cliffs of the west side were like shelves in a Kirkwall emporium, with free food just waiting to be picked up. Mothers could be heard telling their bairns to go the ‘aak shop’ for their dinner. Guillemots, Razorbills and Solar Geese were swiped from their ledges using a long lariat made of plaited seaweed: a highly skilled task.

Puffins were easier prey, it being possible to thrust a hand into their burrows and yank them out.  Speed is of the essence while puffin hunting, for once the birds realise the threat the intruder’s hand represents, they grip on with their vice-like bills, bracing their spread feet against the inside walls of their burrow.  Slow hunters might lose a finger: there are still old men on the island two or three digits short of a fistful.

A puffin hunt with a more tragic conclusion involved a southender, Albert Skeld of Grindybrecks, who went out puffin hunting and was never seen alive again.  It was three months later that a boatman setting creels beneath the cliffs looked up and saw Skeld’s corpse, spreadeagled against the crag, his right arm jammed shoulder-deep in a clifftop crevice. A party of Skelds went to investigate, and found they had to dig open the burrow to extricate their kinsman.  Once the turf and soil were removed they discovered his emaciated fist still gripping tight to a dead puffin, and five dead puffin chicks clamped onto his fingers with their colourful beaks – a downy handcuff, imprisoning poor Skeld’s hand immovably.

The symbolism for island life is too obvious to need stating.

It’s a symbol of man’s eternal struggle for dominance over nature: the six-foot man refusing to let go of the bird he so desperately needs for food, the six-inch birds so bravely defending their home, neither side backing down, even unto death.

Needless to say, this incident did nothing to endear the puffin to the islanders, especially the Skelds, and the following spring a campaign of eradication was launched, with the puffins and their young being gassed in the burrows.  This turned out to be not just efficacious, but also very enjoyable, and soon the puffin population was entirely exterminated. Lacking now what had been their staple crag-meat, the hunters turned instead to trapping cormorants.  This was done using an ingenious variation on an old Chinese fishing method, observed by Captain William Mulloch during his merchant navy days, freighting opium into Nanking. 

Mulloch had seen specially trained cormorants with long tethers on their legs diving into the water and returning with a fish.  The birds were prevented from swallowing their catch by a metal ring clipped tightly around their long neck. The captain’s notion was to reverse the technique: instead of a ring in the bird’s neck, he proposed fastening a ring of metal spikes around a specially trained mackerel.  The fish would be tethered to the hunter’s wrist by a long line of seaweed, then sent swimming back and forth under the favoured rocky perches of the birds. The theory was that the cormorants would spot the fish, dive down and swallow it, until the ring of spikes lodged firmly in its gullet, at which point the hunter would reel in the line, free the fish by slitting the bird’s thrapple, and take the prized catch homewards.

Unfortunately, after several years of trials, the scheme had to be abandoned.  It proved impossible to train the mackerel to swim back and forth by the correct rock.  Indeed, it proved impossible to train them to do anything at all.  They tended, rather, as soon as they were taken out of their special tank on the boat and placed in the water, to streak off into the open ocean, their escape hardly hindered by the seaweed line, which invariably slipped off as soon as the fish hit the water.

Local fishermen were the ones whose objections finally brought this scheme to an end.  In the summer of 1923, over 30 tons of mackerel were used without a single cormorant being caught.  It might be better, it was suggested, if the islanders simply ate the mackerel themselves.

Which innovative practice did succeed, providing a staple diet for the islanders for 20 years, until the fisheries were exhausted.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 18th September 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.