Notes from smaller islands

PHENOMENALLY successful is how the book trade describe travel writer Bill Bryson who, over the past few years, has turned his mischievous spotlight on some of the more obscure corners of Europe - everywhere, in fact from Tromso to Thurso.

Now, the archipelago of Orkney - the scattered islands beyond the Pentland Firth including our own stomping ground, Papa Westray - awaits, with just a little trepidation it has to be said, Bryson's conclusions and adjudication.

The June edition of National Geographic, perhaps the world's most widely-read magazine, and now printed in several different language editions including Greek and Japanese, will contain a

major feature on Orkney in which Bill Bryson will look at a

variety of aspects of Orcadian

life from whisky manufacture

to depopulation.

His book Notes from a Small Island, in which he travelled the length of Britain, will soon pass the million mark in sales and a spin-off TV series is in the pipeline. His latest offering, A Walk in the Woods, relating to a bizarre trek along the Appalachian Way starting from his own back garden, is also doing big business.

Bryson's witty, occasionally brutally honest, and direct style and his indecorous, even earthy humour has won him a legion of followers; his books carrying what amounts to a warning against reading in public. They are said to be laugh-out-loud funny.

However, National Geographic, it seems, do not believe in rushing into print, even with such a hot property as Bryson.

The writer, who worked in London as a travel journalist, and has now returned to live in the United States, setting up home in New Hampshire, visited Orkney in the autumn of 1996, and only now will his verdict be delivered.

Mind you, in a domain where the house next door may have been built 6000 years ago and people talk about events of two centuries past as if they had happened just yesterday, you could fairly say - what's the rush?

In fact, Bryson, an unassuming American, casually dressed and quietly interested, breezed in and out of Orkney almost unnoticed all those months ago . . . for all the world, just another end-of-season tourist. But that's part of the

man's style.

This is the third time this century that Orkney has featured on the pages of the Washington DC-based National Geographic, which in itself is a major achievement for one of Scotland's peripheral areas, speaking volumes about its distinctive character.

In 1921 the writer Charles S Olcott, in a vast, 30-page article which ranged across Orkney's colourful history but only touched on contemporary life in passing, spoke of Orkney taking a breather after the frenzied activity of the First World War. The early twentieth-century photographs of the now legendary Orkney Pic man, Tom Kent, graced Olcott's article and showed Kirkwall with its flagstone streets, gents in straw boaters, the unchanging standing stones, as well as peat gathering, harvesting, social life, fishing, and a selection of distinctively rugged Orkney faces.

Oddly, although Olcott's article is titled The Orkneys and Shetland - a Mysterious Group of Islands, little mention is made in the text of Shetland and a couple of photographs are the only concessions to the fact that he is discussing two island groups.

Whisper it up Lerwick way but it's almost as if, for Olcott at least, Shetland was a mere offshoot

of Orkney.

This is how Olcott saw Orkney's capital Kirkwall: ''A quaint place and in ordinary times quiet enough . . . a very narrow lane called Bridge Street leads back from the steamship landing and when a team passes the pedestrians have to stand close to the walls or enter the doorways.''

Not much has changed there, although these days you're more likely to be mown down by a Ford Thesaurus (a vehicle discovered by Bill Bryson in Thurso).

Olcott's conclusion was that Civilisation, Commerce, Science, and Art may march forward with proud and determined mien but that the ''Shetlands and Orkneys, after ages of turmoil, are taking their vacation''.

Isobel Wylie Hutchison's article on the islands in the October 1953 edition of National Geographic was flagged by a heading which read: ''Change comes slowly to these outposts . . . nearby Scotland still seems a bit foreign.''

Other features that particular month includes a study of the US Navy in the Korean war zone.

The balance was redressed from 1921 because if anything Shetland was given more prominence than Orkney in an altogether more prosaic feature. Arriving over Orkney by plane - ''like strips of gummed paper, white roads score the islands and little farmhouses stand primly, like stranded arks''.

She noted that the source of Orkney's prosperity was the egg, the county handling 60 million annually, but ironically it was around this time that fierce Atlantic storms killed thousands of hens and destroyed hen houses, effectively ending large-scale egg production in Orkney.

Isobel headed off for a tour of the North Isles including a stopover on Papa Westray where she drew attention to the fact that the last Great Auk in the British Isles had been slain here.

Her conclusion was that the future of these isles was bright if only the young folk would stay. Sad to relate this has not happened. Her prediction that labour might get so scarce out in the isles that individuals have to take on a multitude of jobs has proved, sadly, to be bang on target. During his brief stay on Papa Westray,

Bill Bryson saw all the sights and took great draughts of our spectacularly relaxing air.

I know that it worked its strange magic even on such a seasoned traveller. He fell asleep on our couch at School Place.

Orkney can take comfort from the fact that Bill Bryson loved Thurso which, being the last town on the British mainland, he made his northern terminus for Notes from a Small Island. Some Orcadians would tell you if you liked Thurso, then Orkney must have seemed like paradise. We'll see.

During his Thurso sojourn Bill went to Dunnet Head and stood gazing at the view across the Pentland Firth admitting later in print that part of him longed to catch a ferry to those outward isles.

Will he find us still lost in a time warp or facing up to the

challenges of the twenty-first century? What he discovered when he eventually got here will soon become the property of National Geographic's vast readership.