Diary of a Shopkeeper, 31st August

Unidentified photo found between pages of booklet: West Ronaldsay?

We’re lucky to have excellent shops for buying new books in both Kirkwall and Stromness, but there’s something specially exciting about scanning the shelves of a good second-hand bookshop. Second-hand shops hide secret treasures: books I’ve never heard of; books no one has advertised or reviewed; books no one has read since their long-ago publication – if then.

This week, a trawl through the shelves of the amazing Birsay Books* turned up gold: a slim volume in soft, faded-green covers, with rusty staples holding it together. The title on the front was So Near Away Yet Far, with the author named as Clouston Hourston. Inside, the title page had a subtitle, Memories of West Ronaldsay, as well as a prologue in verse:

Far to the north where storm clouds chase

And salty billows spray

Lies my home, my native isle

So far yet near away

Fields of green and shores of gold

Dykes coming out of the haar

West Ronaldsay I dream of you

So near away yet far

I decided immediately that the £1.50 asking price was well worth paying, and rushed back home to Stenness to study my purchase more carefully.

I’d never heard of Hourston Clouston or seen anything from this publisher before. The booklet had no copyright page, just a brief note stating, “At the Sign of the Pumpwell Press, 1952.” Immediately I assumed the name indicated a Stromness origin, with the date suggesting the booklet might have been part of that remarkable flourishing of artistic talent in the post-war West Mainland, when folk like George Mackay Brown, Gerry Meyer and Sylvia Wishart came to the fore. But there were no more clues internally. I contacted my friend, Dr Simon Hall, author of the indispensable History of Orkney Literature. He could shed no light on either author or publisher. Further research will be required.

What of the contents of the booklet? First of all, the mystery of the placename in its subtitle. Clearly it doesn’t refer to any place we know today, in Orkney or Shetland or anywhere else. Could it be a long forgotten teu-name for one of the isles? Or a pseudonym designed to protect the anonymity of the people featured in it? Readers will make up their own minds, as they read what I plan to be the first of several extracts from this obscure but fascinating publication.

. . .

THE LOW-LYING ISLAND of West Ronaldsay has no burns or rivers, and only one small loch, which is known to the natives of the North End as the Peedie Sea, and to Southenders as the Peerie Sea. Arguments have raged for over two centuries about the correct name for the piece of water, with each side accusing the other of bringing in a polluting foreign solecism. 

So fierce did this argument rage in the late 1930s, that one summer an artificial ayre of beach stone and turf was thrown across the middle of the loch, the minister’s idea being that the Northenders could have their Peedie Sea, and the Southenders their Peerie Sea, and peace would reign forthwith.

Unfortunately, at the opening ceremony following Sunday worship on March 17th 1940, the eldest Northender, the revered patriarch, Magnus Magnusson of Mansieha, expressed his admiration for the new North Peedie Sea and South Peedie Sea, and William Wersh of Sourness replied with a toast to the North Peerie and the South Peerie Seas.

In the furore that ensued, the men who had spent 18 months labouring to construct this great revetment immediately set to destroying it. 

Such was the farcical prelude to the tragic incident resulting in the second civilian death on British soil in WWII.  Fully occupied with tearing down the embankment, the men of the West Ronaldsay Home Guard failed to spot the approaching flight of German bombers coming in low over the North Sea. Even more tragically, the Nazi bomb aimers mistook an argument about Old Norse etymology for a work party creating anti-invasion defences, and dropped an estimated seventy tons of bombs on the island. This did accelerate the demolition of the loch divider, but it also killed Wersh of Sourness.

This tragic event united the island in grief, and two days later the entire population met to mourn his passing at the funeral in the Old Kirk.  Or, as the Southenders call it, the New Kirk.

. . .

I will transcribe further extracts from this remarkable publication in next week’s column.

*You can see Birsay Book’s list of Orkney books (and others) here. You can also visit their shop on the south side of Birsay Bay.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 4th 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.