A chance to look again
Image: Fiona Sanderson
What do you see in this picture?
It is taken on the shore; an island couple barrowing kelp, using a wooden 'borrow'. Behind them the built structure is a 'meeth'; a landmark for boats at sea to take a reckoning.
In the foreground is a kelp pit.
The pits were for burning the kelp, after it had been stacked on stone plinths, 'steeths', to dry. More than once, collecting kelp has been a common part of life on North Ronaldsay. Beatrice Garvie made a whole series of photographs documenting the sequence of collection and processing of the kelp, so we know how it was being done in the 1930s. She was methodical in making sequences of pictures like this.
But this isn't one of her pictures.
In fact, this is a photograph from 2022, when pupils at the school worked with me to reconstruct some of Dr Garvie's pictures.
This was just part of a project to look again at Dr Garvie's life and work.
'Culture Collective' funding gave us the rare opportunity to do this over three summers.
A chance to look again, to rekindle knowledge of her on the island, and to collect more information from those who hold her in living memory.
This led to the captioning of most of the 500 photographs held in the Orkney Library and Archive, so that we know who is in the pictures, where they lived, and what they were doing.
It has also helped to bring her memory back to life on the island, and to add to what we know about her, too.
One of the things we did was to make a short film about Dr Garvie's life on North Ronaldsay, there's a tiny bit of it here:
Here's the original Beatrice Garvie picture of the couple working on the shore, with
the 'meeth' in the background, and a kelp pit in the foreground:
Image: Orkney Library and Archive D156/0394
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