Loki’s Candles, Mummification, and Maps and Dreams

After a cold night, the day of the tenth of October, 2010, dawned bright and beautiful; the strength of the sunlight enough that I could see my shadow all the way down in the glen below.

The trees were beginning to slowly shift into their autumn garb, reds and yellow providing a counterpart to the mainstream green. Oaks are often one of the last trees in this part of the world to hold on to their leaves—the slender birch were already losing theirs, ovals of acid yellow decorating the top of the pool where I gathered my water, lazily spinning down the burn to the bay and out into the ocean beyond.

In the north of Scotland, whether Caithness, or the islands of Orkney and Shetland, we find what are known locally as Loki’s candles. These are twists of thick birch bark, bundles together and cast on the beaches. They are prized for firelighting, in a land where trees are rare. Their name comes from the fact that, although they light well—birch bark being an incredible firestarter—they are also infused with the salt of the ocean, and spit, crackle, and sparkle as they burn. Loki, the great mischief maker, clearly a part of this process.

Those oil-rich bundles of bark are all that remains of the trees they once clad, washed out from rivers all the way across the Atlantic ocean, pulled north into the Arctic, then slowly spun out and swept east and south to Scotland.

As I watched those leaves slowly drift away, I was reminded of Loki and his candles, of how birch has been used for tens of thousands of years (evidence of processing the bark into tar can be found from 200000 years ago and Homo neanderthalensis), of the depth of our connection to the land and how it shapes us. And I recorded all these thoughts in my journal.

On this day, I also scribbled several pages about my mental mapping of the area, using sources of food, such as a row of violets growing in a crack in a rock, water, different trees, watercourses, berries, and other natural phenomena as reference points. This was the way the landscape would have been mapped in the time before farming—if this is something which interests you, I can heartily recommend the book Maps and Dreams by Hugh Brody, a superb piece of work and a fine read.

There was still work to do on the heather thatching, but I decided that this would be the day when I moved my cook-fire into the shelter, considering the inaugural lighting a ceremonial event of sorts.

Cooking on an open fire is much easier than using a small, collapsible stove. I had deliberately positioned one of the oak branches of the frame above where the fire was to be situated, and hung a length of knotted cord from this. Using a short length of chain and a hook, I could easily vary the height of the pan in the fire. A simple, but elegant solution.

I could now also use this cord and the branch above to dry out my washcloth and microfibre towels—they would smell of campfire, but I do not find this to be a negative.

I took a photo through the open door of the shelter, the first of several. The doorway faced east, towards the rising sun, something which has been incorporated into structures for millennia. I had once dug at the remarkable Bronze Age terrace of roundhouses at Cladh Hallan, on South Uist to the west, where evidence of deliberate mummification was discovered—each of these roundhouses had their doorways to the east, and who was I to do different?

As I went to bed that night, prepared for the following day’s resupply in Fort William, I scribbled the following entry into my journal:

There is something big in the bracken about twenty feet away from me—it sounded like a deer bedding down for the night. How typical that I have put my camera away in my pack; the first time it has not been suspended above my head…

Journal One. Sunday, 10/10/10

To read more about this adventure, and to catch up with the preceding three weeks, follow the link to A Fall in Time.