Challenges of Living on a Small Remote Island
(and the lessons we learned thus far)
Note - there is a YouTube video at the end of this article offering a quick summary.
We have left the comforts of South Wales in December 2016 and moved to a remote island in Orkney. It is a complete change of environment and lifestyle so we have to re-learn a lot of what we used to take for granted and pretty much start again - what used to be common sense down South simply doesn’t work up here.
During the last 18-months we noticed a few differences and challenges that we face now which we didn’t have or which happened far less frequently before. We thought we’d share a few of the biggest difficulties with you, so you have a better understanding on why we’re not building raised beds every weekend or picking leeks in mid-December and why things are taking a while longer than expected to establish.
|
Orkney Weather
We used to complain about it being a windy day when the tree tops of the local woodland swayed a little, but now we realise that we didn’t really know the meaning of the word “wind”. Nowadays, we describe gale-force gusts as mild and only become concerned if the neighbours car flips upside-down or if parts of our shed roof end up in the local beach!
As there are no trees growing on Eday, the island is exposed to the Northern Sea and, as such, salty corrosive rain and air. Tools, equipment and vehicles, even when hidden in a shed, tend to suffer from the rust far more than we’ve ever seen before.
|
|
Short gardening season
We live so far North that we only seem to get 4 or 5 months of summer season. We were so spoilt in South Wales with the ability to grow various things all year round without much thought. Nowadays, we are restricted to growing fruits and vegetables only within those few months of sunshine and warmth. This means we need to be careful with the varieties of plants that we choose to cultivate and only go for plants that are suitable for cold climate gardening, are fairly hardy to withstand the gale-force winds and unexpected cold-bursts and have a short growing season. On the plus side though, it is worth mentioning that we have an extremely fertile land and superbly clean air and water which the plants love!
Our research so far reveals that the plants that love it up here in Orkney are potatoes and neeps (parsnips, turnips, swedes). The rhubarb patch has proven itself extremely fruitful over the last two seasons and the best variety of local grain, praised for its short growing season and used to make bannocks, breads, oatcakes and beer is a type of barley called bere (pronounced “bear”)!
|
The short season also affects the ability to incubate, hatch and rear our own poultry. Many other homesteaders start their incubation rituals as soon as they take down their Christmas trees - and, we were so excited to do the same only to find out that the incubator was constantly shouting at us for low room temperature and running an extra radiator nearby ended up costing us an extra £300 in our electricity bill! Also, thinking that March signifies springtime we put our teenaged and well-feathered birds in an enclosure outside and then found them sadly taken by the cold soon after. Eagerly, we started the process of hatching and rearing way too early for these climes and it was just not worth it! We incubated again in May and found we had no such troubles and a really good result!
Specialist services
The island of Eday is superbly catered for. We are lucky to have the local medical clinic (attended by excellent nurses and a visiting doctor), the local school, a pier, an airport and a beautifully stocked and managed local shop. There is also a fish & chip takeaway service available on Fridays and a cafe open on summer’s weekends.
|
However, there are a lot of services which are not available directly on our doorstep. For example, once we had the happy and long-awaited news that we were pregnant we had to initiate the usual process of meeting up with local nurses and midwives. This is when we truly realised just how isolated we are.
Dee has to attend regular prenatal appointments every couple of weeks which are held in Balfour hospital, located in Kirkwall. This means she has to take a boat over to mainland, which usually leaves the island at 8am and spend two hours on a boat. Then, after a ten minute check-up and a chat with a midwife, she has to wait in town for six hours until the evening boat and spend another few hours travelling. Although the service provided is really excellent and we are really pleased with the care and attention we receive, this is indeed an exhausting process.
The same process applies if we wished to make use of any dentistry and veterinary clinics, legal services and banking, garages, supermarkets, DIY / hardware stores and even the farmers markets. They are all located in Kirkwall and would require ferry sailing and a whole day spent in town. This is making us a little bit more selective and self-reliant but it can be frustrating at times, especially when we remember how easy it used to be and still is for many other people!
|
|
Entertainment
We are not the sort of people who enjoy spending hours shopping or at the local cinema. Even when we lived with many city-centre attractions within walking distance we were never interested in the ice-rink, bowling alleys, restaurants, nightclubs or cabarets. Once or twice a year we would spoil ourselves by attending a local amateur dramatics theatre or indulging in a meal at a pub, but those were rare occasions.
A small island of Eday has a school sports hall and a community room in the shop where once a year, at Christmas time, there is are a few small events and plays for the local people to attend. It is an interesting time as we get to see all of our neighbours and meet newcomers to Eday. This is indeed how we met all the locals on this island when we first arrived to settle in on this wonderful land on the edge of the world! It was a wonderful time!
|
Apart from that, however, there are no entertainment establishments on such a small island, so we make do by enjoying board games and films at home or by visiting our closest neighbours and having them visit us. We find good company of like-minded people really enjoyable and much prefer it to anything that we had access to before but never took any advantage of.
Shopping and provisions
The island has a small shop. It is a very well stocked and superbly managed shop and we are very happy and grateful to have it. It is, however, a grocery shop so anything specialist has to be ordered and imported to the island. The shop also has limited opening hours so the days of 24-hour shopping (and therefore bacon butties at 3 am) are long behind us!
It used to be so easy to pop down to the local hardware store and pick up some timber for the shed, clay pots and fruit bushes for the barbeque area and a new wormery just for good measure. Nowadays, we have to order such things to be delivered to us, so everything becomes a much more considered purchase. I think this is a good thing as it makes us spend a little less money and make do with what we already have, cobbling many things together from sparse supplies around the island and recycling many things.
|
There are times, however, when we have to order supplies in - one such example is us recently buying a new washing machine from a very well known high-end department store operating in the UK. The website advised us that our new item will be delivered to Orkney, no worries - but we soon learned that it was easier said than done. They lost our washing machine somewhere in North of Scotland en route to us and had to refund us the cost. It was a little frustrating and time-consuming but we learned a valuable lesson - it is best to shop locally. We called an electronics shop in Kirkwall and, although the purchase was a tad more expensive, we had a new washing machine the next day!
|
|
Long winters and short summers
We are really high! I mean, we are located so far up North that it is easier for us to get to Norway or Iceland than England or back home to Wales. It is also true that the North Pole is closer to us (3693 miles “as the crow flies”) than a city of Kampala in Uganda, located near the equator (4488 miles away) - not that we’re planning a holiday to either destination anytime soon, we still have a lot of jobs around the house!
But let’s get all scientific, shall we? Equator is at 0 degrees and the North Pole is at 90 degrees latitude. Eday is located at 59 degrees - so we are ⅔ of the way to the North Pole!
All this means that when North half of Earth is facing the sun (i.e. when it is summer in the Northern hemisphere) we get 20 hour days and the sun never really sets! It is brilliant as we get extra daylight hours to get so much accomplished, sometimes even forgetting to have our dinner or go to sleep! Sleeping can be difficult as our midnight usually looks like a typical sunny afternoon anywhere else - it certainly took us a while to adjust.
|
Due to the same geographical reason, same is true in winter, only the other way around - we get about 20 hours of twilight and darkness and only a few glimpses of the sunlight! This sounds depressing to a lot of our friends from back South, but we really love it - this is the reason why in winter months we get to see the stunning aurora borealis (or Northern lights to you and me) and the deepest and most intense night sky we have ever seen. It is also extremely cosy in winter and we usually just batten down the hatches, snuggle in (cwtch up, as they say in Wales) and do various house projects, watch films, read books or socialise with our neighbours.
Frequent power cuts (and other utility failures)
Since we moved to Orkney 18 months ago, we have had at least five or six power cuts. Sometimes they last a few hours, as one would expect, but other times they are prolonged and inconvenience us for a couple of days! Same is true for running water - due to rocky ground in Eday, the pipe coming to our house is laid in a shallow ditch and is prone to freezing over in winter, preventing running water from reaching our taps! It happened once, so we are convinced it will happen again!
|
All this is really intriguing to James who considers himself a bit of a “prepper”. You see, a prepper is someone who anticipates various disasters and emergencies and makes active preparations for such events, typically by stockpiling food and emergency supplies (and for all our American prepper friends - no, we don’t have any guns or ammunition, I must hastily add!). And oh boy, have we stockpiled! We have enough tinned food to feed a small nation, 4 or 5 different ways of cooking, an awesome gravity fed water filter so we can use water from our water butts and ponds, candles, torches and at least 3 first aid kits. We also have many board games and books ready to entertain us - we are prepared.
The fun part of any prolonged power cuts is the financial compensation we get from the local power company! Some cash is always a welcomed bonus for all the hardship we have to endure - eating fire cooked jacket potatoes, spending quality family time in the evenings and enjoying the cosy atmosphere that candlelight provides.
|
|
|
Conclusion
To conclude, I must say that living in Orkney has certainly redefined our common sense and tested our creative problem-solving skills. We learned that we can’t cheat the environment and must instead work with it, respecting the local climate and natural elements of wind and sea that dominate this island.
I am sure that local Orcadians watch us with a bit of a smirk, but we feel that we have all the time on our hands to learn things “the hard way”, the scientific way: by trial and error, by trying things out and seeing what works.
Maybe we were a little hasty and silly to make such a drastic change and move to such uncharted territories but hey - life’s an adventure and we just couldn’t pass up on an opportunity for a new way of life! The more difficult the set-up seemed, the more determined we became to give it a go. So here we are, giving it a go and having a grant time doing it too!
|
|