History Scotland Magazine: Review - The Landscape of Scotland: A Hidden History

A More Enterprising Spirit: The Parish and People of Holm in 18th Century Orkney

Sheena Wenham

Bellavista Publications. ISBN: 0952535076

The parish of Holm (always pronounced Ham, though spelt Holm for reasons which defeat both Hugh Marwick and the author of this book) is not perhaps the most noteworthy of the Orkney parishes at first sight. Stromness and Kirkwall, Stenness for stones, Birsay and Rousay for monuments, Hoy for cliffs and the Old Man these are the obvious priorities for the historian and tourist alike. Of even the Churchill Barriers, one of the modern marvels of Orkney, only one, or perhaps one and a half, is technically in Holm, and the Italian Chapel, the relic of the builders of those marvels, though within the parish, is more associated with its own small island, Lamb Holm (pronounced holm). For most of us, Holm is what we pass through on the way to the sights of the eastern South Isles.

Nevertheless, it has in recent years attracted two books which show us why we should look to east on west on our way south - first, Gilbert Schranks An Orkney Estate: improvements at Graemeshall, 1827-88, and now this broader and more impressive work by Sheena Wenham. Schranks is a rather curious book, useful in its way and firmly rooted in primary sources - the estate records of the Graemes of Graemeshall - but curiously dead in its academicism, from a writer who cannot describe the Orkney landscape without hiding behind the authority of W P L Thomson. The honest opinion of an overseas visitor on what he saw and what he made of it would have been much more interesting than a citation which, however telling, we can read elsewhere at greater length.

Wenhams work also clearly owes a great date to the record-keepers of the lairds of Graemeshall, and records dominate the work. This is not a history of Holm as such, but a glimpse of the parish in the heyday of the family who left the greatest mark. There is an older story to Holm, particularly involving the curious sub-parish of Paplay, entered separately in the early rentals, probably because it had been acquired by William, the last Sinclair earl, as part of the personal estates which continued to give him a locus in Orkney after his loss of the earldom.

But after a fairly brief account of the earliest times, the Graemes move to centre stage, beginning with the progenitor of the family, George Grahame, bishop of Orkney. Although the family survived well into last century, we are here concerned with the first six lairds, beginning with Patrick, Georges son, who acquired the estates in 1655, changed the spelling of his name from Grahame to Graeme, and the name of his house from Meall to Graemeshall; and ending with perhaps the most distinguished of them, though an absentee, Vice-Admiral Alexander Graeme, who died in 1818.

An interesting account of the old ways and Country Acts of Orkney leads on to Munro Graemes planking of 1750 not the first enclosure in a somewhat backward area, but in the vanguard of the agricultural improvements during the remainder of the century. Although more far-reaching improvements had to wait until the 19th century, the estate had two firm-handed factors during the period, from 1742 when the lairds own wife Jean Chancellour took up the reins until David Petrie died in 1827, to be succeeded by his son.

On to this framework of the lives of the lairds and their doers is built a fascinating picture of Orkney life through various aspects of the running of the Graemeshall estate the factor and his family, the mansion house, the servants, the garden

Developments at Graemeshall are well placed in the context of the broader Orkney picture, and other parallel figures like Sir James Stewart of Burray and Col David Balfour put in the occasional appearance. There is evidence too of wide reading outside the confines of the 18th centry, though whether Raymond Lambs view that the papar of Orkney really were really of the Roman rite has has been generally accepted is questionable. There are some errors. Ms Wenham comes to no conclusion on how to spell St Andrews (no apostrophe), there is no Hanover Square in Edinburgh (sounds as though there should be, but there isnt). Some repetition; we are twice told that Sir James Stewart of Burray was an agricultural trailblazer, and that his lands of Cara were vast. (Vast? In Orkney?)

Peter Anderson,
National Archives
of Scotland