The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Author:Amy Liptrot [Liptrot, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782115496
Publisher: Canongate Books

16

PAPAY

ALTHOUGH PAPAY IS FAIRLY REMOTE, life here doesn’t have to be isolated. Over winter there is a programme of community events. On 1 December, a Saturday, the semi-seriously named ‘Papay Walking Committee’ – the island is organised by many committees – has planned a walk around the whole island. We’re asked to gather at the old pier at midday and to bring torches: walking the eleven or so miles will take us beyond sunset at three twenty. It’s hailing and I worry that, as the over-enthusiastic newcomer, I might be the only walker, but others turn up. We set off south along the east coast, following the shoreline around jagged geos and curving bays, chasing the winter sun around the tip of the island.

Talking to people while walking is a good tactic for the anxious ex-drinker. It solves the problem of what I’m meant to be doing with my body now I’m not lifting a drink. Each person who wasn’t born or bred here has their own story about how they came to Papay, refined by retelling. Some people ‘fall in love’ with a particular island and wait for years for a time when they can leave their lives in the south and move up. Others are attracted simply by the cheaper property prices, buying a broken-down croft house and moving here without even visiting first. Daniel tells me about his two years working on Douglas’s creel boat, a job he started on the first day he moved to the island from England, with no experience. Marie tells me how she realised that, as a nurse, she could work anywhere. The Northern Isles were a good place to live so she and her husband bought a house and moved from the south of England.

Many folk on the island have more than one job: David, the farmer who meets the plane, is also a coastguard, and Anne, who lives near Rose Cottage, is the postie, a mother of four, janitor at the school and creator of beautiful delicate jewellery made from things she finds on the beach – groatie buckies and sea-polished glass.

The 1851 census recorded 371 people living on Papay. As we pass now-derelict crofts scattered along the coast, I imagine each of them filled by an extended family with many children. Our current population of seventy seems to be the critical mass for keeping amenities, like a shop and the school. Islands that don’t have these things are less attractive to newcomers. Thanks to the arrival of new islanders, the population of Papay has risen from a low of fifty-something in the mid-nineties and the school now has six children.

Our islands are home to a peculiar mix of the type of eccentric, adventurous ‘south folk’, who would choose to move up from, say, Reading to Stronsay, and the more conservative Orcadians who can trace their family on the island back generations and have watched members move away, as well as incomers who come and go. It is a mistake

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