DISCOVER The Orkney Islands
Stuart Maconie travels to Orkney to walk in the footsteps of one of his musical heroes: the composer Peter Maxwell Davies.
LET’S BE FRANK: this doesn’t feel like the home of one of the great British cultural titans of our time. It’s a long way, literally and metaphorically, from either chic Hampstead townhouse or sumptuous Cotswold pile. ‘Airon’ (pictured inset left) sits squatly at the end of a gravel bank between a freshwater loch and the shingle and sand shore at the tip of the Burness peninsula on the remote North Orkney island of Sanday.
Two unprepossessing low grey buildings face each other across the yard and only the fact that the adjoining cowshed was converted into a music room might give any clue that this was the final home of the greatest British composer of the late 20th century, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.
‘Max’, as he was universally known, was a Manchester lad who in life took long journeys both literal and musical. Once an avant-garde enfant terrible who could provoke walkouts and boos from audiences with work such as his crazed, eccentric Eight Songs for a Mad King, he ended up as Master of the Queen’s Music and a knight of the realm.
He also went from a terraced street in Swinton to the experimental salons of 70s London to here, these rugged, lonely islands off the far north of Scotland. The scores of islands of the Orkney archipelago are a paradise for walkers, wildlife enthusiasts, whisky drinkers and all interested in our deep past. Five millennia ago, a thousand years before the pyramids were built, small communities lived here in settlements like the astonishingly preserved Skara Brae. Something of Orkney’s character, its austere beauty, sparseness and flinty humanity, found its way into Max’s music once he came to live and immerse himself in the landscape, culture and people of this extraordinary place.
Two of Max’s most famous and beloved works are strongly Orcadian; the bold and raucous An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise and the plangent Farewell to Stromness. But scores of places are specifically named or evoked in his pieces and all will cast a spell on the discerning walker. Tracking them down on foot will steer you to the music with a greater appreciation of a composer whose work can be initially daunting, but whose
pleasures reveal themselves to those with a sense of adventure willing to make a little effort. The same might be said for Orkney.
Stromness and Yesnaby
Peter Maxwell Davies first visited Orkney in 1970.
“I was fed up living in the south, because of the noise – distant traffic, military
