FILM: SWONA ON A MORNING TIDE
Out on the edge of Orkney, Swona is exposed to the full force of the Pentland Firth’s tides. With access from outside difficult, the people of the island were always highly self-reliant, skilled with their hands, farming the land and working their boats for fishing and transport.
Selena S. Kuzman’s new film looks at an island uninhabited today but retaining so much of the life of the past. Katy Firth joins her to meet William Annal, whose family have owned the island for several generations, and naturalist Penny Martin, along with students from Gordonstoun School who now visit annually to help to restore buildings and to study the island’s story. Several of them are helping their housemaster Dan McLean to follow clues to a possible early Christian site on the island, in liaison with archaeologists from UHI Orkney.
Made with the assistance of the group Swona Heritage.
You can see more of Swona at the Orkney Museum at Tankerness House, Kirkwall, in the exhibition Wild, Still, a collaboration between photographer Josh Spindler and archaeologist Prof. Ingrid Mainland.
There is a fine description of life in Swona in the old days in an article in the Press & Journal 90 years ago subtitled ‘Life on tiny Pentland island is full of happy days’.
“Besides being crofter and fisherman, James Rosie is a general handyman. He has built his own motor boats, of which he has three, and fitted them with motor car engines purchased on the mainland. An oil engine drives the mill which grinds his corn …
“The difficulty of getting their wireless battery charged was overcome by the erection of a windmill to drive a dynamo, which also occasionally supplies electric light for the house.”
