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What was
he thinking? He was thinking of home, of growing up in Orkney, of riding out
from the Hall of Clestrain with his musket to hunt for hare, and for curlews and grouse and
lapwing. He was thinking of one place in
particular, a stone-built house near his favourite hunting spot in the rolling hills, where because
of the distance from home, roughly fifteen miles, he would sometimes ask and
receive permission to stay overnight.
This afternoon,
on Orkney's Mainland, four of us visited the ruins of that stone house: me and Sheena
and historian Tom Muir, our sortie led by Andrew Appleby, president of the John Rae
Society. The house is located at Cottascarth in the Harray district, directly behind
the Eddie Balfour Hen Harrier Hide – a bird-watching sanctuary.
Rae would have seen many such houses, of course. But this was the one where,
according to local lore, he stayed more than once. And, though we have no
documentary evidence, this was almost certainly the one that sprang to his mind
when he needed to build a shelter. The style of construction is identical.
During
our visit, after an initial half-mile slog from where we parked, the rains came
on. We clambered around regardless, snapped a few photos, and even made our way
through the grass to a winding stream or burn. This was it: another house in which John
Rae once slept.
At Fort
Hope, in the Arctic darkness, Rae learned the meaning of Real Cold. But then he
visited some Inuit in a snowhouse they had built. He realized: wait a minute! it’s
far warmer in here. He converted on the spot and, nostalgia be damned, never built another stone house. Oh, and one thing more. Next spring, when the Arctic Return Expedition sets out to retrace Rae's route of 1854, the team will visit Fort Hope before striking westward.
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