The clocks went back an hour this morning to so we're now back on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) as opposed to BST (British Summer Time) - that means it's definitely now winter & the nights are drawing in. It also means that theoretically we should have got an extra hour's lie in this morning having gone to bed in BST & got up in GMT, so today what yesterday would have been 7.15am is now 8.15am
(I never used to be able to remember which way it all went until my chemistry teacher at school told us it's easy 'you spring forward, but fall back' & I've had no problem with it since. The same teacher also taught us the way to remember the difference between stalactites & stalagmites is that 'mites grow up and tights come down' which is a slightly more risque mnemonic, at least for a class of giggling teenagers. Funnily enough I can't remember any of the chemistry he taught us!)
Anyway theoretically we should have had a lie in - unfortunately Tigger Tabbs - our oldest cat, now 17 & still going strong - doesn't hold with GMT & when we hadn't surfaced at 6.15am - or 7.15 in TTT (Tigger Tabbs Time) she came through from her snuggle basket in front of the kitchen stove to wake us up. She has a particularly loud and piercing early morning call - a kind of high volume 'mmmrrrrpppp' which wakes everyone up, including the dogs, who then start their own racket & none of them have a snooze button to hit. Hence no lie in - I wouldn't mind but as soon as she'd had her breakfast she went back to sleep.
You can also tell its winter since we've started getting disruption on the boats with the weather. The Northlink Ferries boat the Hrossey had a particularly bad time of it this week - sailed from Lerwick at 5.30pm, made it to Kirkwall late as she'd had to go slow in the bad weather, finally sailed from Kirkwall at 2.15am with an ETA at Aberdeen of 2pm instead of the usual 7.30am, but when she got to Aberdeen she had couldn't get in over the bar at the harbour because of the swell, so had to divert to Rosyth in the Firth of Forth, which they finally made at about 8.30pm.
I wouldn't have got on that boat unless it was a matter of life & death - I did wonder how many of the 95 brave souls on board could walk off at the other end.
We also had the Churchill barriers closed a few times - these are the causeways linking Mainland Orkney with Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray & South Ronaldsay, & they're bad to cross when there's a high tide combined with gale force winds from the wrong direction - you get waves coming across & big lumps of water dropping on vehicles.
I've been having fun looking at finds records of barbed and tanged flint arrowheads from Orkney and trying to work out just how many there actually are. The finest example is in the collection of a friend of mine having been found by one of his ancestors whilst clearing a field for cultivation - he kindly let me take some photos of it which I think I'll have to put in my PhD thesis as an illustration. The records are a bit patchy - there's quite a large collection of flint arrowheads supposedly from Orkney in the National Museums Scotland, but as with most of these things they were donated in the 19th century without provenance - and in archaeological terms if you don't know where something was found you've lost most of the useful information and the object becomes just another pretty find in a museum. In a lot of the Orkney cases for interesting Bronze Age finds, you only have a label that says something like 'said to have been found in Orkney' which isn't a lot of use to anyone.
I think the biggest shame is that we don't still have the Cursiter Collection in Orkney - J W Cursiter was a noted local antiquarian in the late 19th/early 20th century & published a fair few papers on local antiquities, but also had an extensive collection of finds. He was trying to find a home for his collection before his death & apparently approached Kirkwall Burgh Council with a view to forming a local museum- I'm not quite sure what happened but it finished up in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.
Anyway I'd better get back to my arrowheads - I've just managed to get a hold of a copy of the new Amesbury Archer publication ('The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowman Bell Beaker Burials at Boscombe Down Amesbury Wiltshire') and there's a nice section on the flint arrowheads they had there, plus some interesting references to chase. It feels like I've been up for hours (thanks to Tigger Tabbs!) but it's only 10.20am
http://www.orkneyarchaeologytours.co.uk
