There are no trolls in Orkney. But there are trows, or so legend says.

Norway has its big stomping mythical monsters.

Its former colony off the north coast of Scotland is instead plagued with peedie fowk, or small people, mischievous little uggos who play tricks on locals.

I was thinking of trows this weekend when I saw the headlines about Orkney looking at rejoining Norway. 

Orcadian leaders - who claim to be mulling rejoining their old Norse empire - will no doubt be accused of “trolling” the rest of Scotland and Britain. 

Me? I think they were - to coin a phrase - trowing. They are playing a wee trick, pulling our legs. But there is method in their mischief.

Politicians - and punters - from Orkney and Shetland have been flying constitutional kites for decades.  Usually they are mooting greater autonomy. And usually this gets over-interpreted as some kind of bid to “go it alone” or “go back to Denmark”.

There is a whole genre of truly terrible analysis columns in English papers predicting that the Northern Islands will quit Scotland if the mainland ever wins its independence.

I think it is worth stopping for a second to look at why this - and the talk of rejoining Norway - is a very silly fantasy.

Now it is absolutely true that there are strong senses of local identity the Northern Islands. And - as elsewhere in Britain and Ireland - there are historic links with the Norse world. 

People in the south-facing parishes and islands of Orkney joke about being able to see Scotland from their houses.

But Orcadians and Shetlanders are Scottish. And we have gold-standard data showing this. 

In the 2011 census 62.4% of Orkney residents said described their nationality as Scottish only. That is exactly the same as the average for all of Scotland. Another 10.8% said they were British only, while six percent or so said they were English only.

Read more: Orkney independence firmly ruled out by UK government

How many Orcadians think they are Norwegian? Too few to count, if any. In fact, Orkney has far higher levels of Scottish-only identity than Edinburgh with all its tartan tat tourist shops and pipers skirling on every corner.

Moreover, some 40% of Orkney residents at the last count say they can speak Scots. That is way more than most places on the mainland, and nearly double that of Edinburgh.  The last speaker of Norn, the now lost Norse tongue of Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, died in 1850.

Census data for the Northern Isles does not allow us to measure the intensity of local identity or knowledge of local dialects. 

But these islands really are Scottish. They are also, politically, largely happy to be British and European.

Orcadians and Shetlanders voted for both the UK and European unions in recent referendums. Both archipelagos have repeatedly turned out for liberal candidates.

My take? Islanders, broadly speaking, are joiners, not splitters. Though that does not mean that there are no supporters of Scottish independence north of the Pentland Firth. There are. The SNP and Greens have their voters and members.

But is there some kind of meaningful political party or organisation seeking a new union with Norway?  Or island independence? Sorry, no, not really, though such groups have come and gone over the years.

The Orkney and Shetland Movements put up a candidate in the 1987 UK general election, John Goodlad. The SNP agreed to stand down in his favour. Mr Goodlad, a fisherman, got 14.5% of the vote and finished fourth. 

It is tempting to focus on all the apparent calls for Orkney and Shetland to become independent countries, or Crown Dependencies or even Norwegian counties.

But that would be to miss the point. Northern Islanders - like others in the Highlands and Islands - are essentially letting out a screech of complaint about how they are governed from Edinburgh and London.

The real issue is that places like Orkney and Shetland face specific challenges that many islanders - with good reason - require more local input and less centralised policy-making. 

It is a decade since the Lerwick Declaration - when then First Minister Alex Salmond - set up a working group on decentralising powers to islands. There has not been much more than talk since.

Central governments are like big trolls stepping on the islands. Sometimes peedie trows are better, even if they can get up to mischief.