Winter in Orkney is in general a steady series of high winds, heavy rains, and ever varying storms, with much less frequent falls of snow, and fewer severe or continuous frosts than elsewhere in Scotland. Under the shelter of garden walls we have seen strawberry plants in blossom at Christmas and roses in January, while chance primroses may be found in sheltered nooks in any month of the year. The spring is cold and late, but the prevailing winds from N.W., N.E., or E. have not the piercing coldness so often felt in the spring winds along the east coast of Scotland. The summer is short, but remarkable for rapidity of growth. Fogs are fairly common during summer and early autumn, and come on and disperse with exceptional suddenness. Thunder in Orkney occurs mostly in winter, during high winds and continuous falls of rain or snow. The heaviest rains and the most prevalent and strongest winds are from the S.W. and S.E.
Means of Observation in Orkney For Thirty-three Years—1873-1905
| Rainy | Snowy | Days on | Thunder | Clear | |||
| days. | days. | which | storms. | sky. | Overcast. | Gales. | |
| Hail fell. | |||||||
| 219 | 31 | 14 | 6 | 31 | 156 | 79 |
9. The People—Race, Language, Population
It is unsafe to dogmatise on the early races of Orkney; but from the undoubted community in blood, speech, and culture with other northern counties of Scotland during the Celtic period, we may fairly conjecture that the Islands must have similarly shared in whatever pre-Celtic population—Iberian or other—these regions as a whole possessed.
Into the vexed question whether any remnant of Celtic population survived the Norse settlement of the Islands in the ninth century we cannot enter here. It is certain that for centuries after that era Norse speech, law, and custom were as universal and supreme in Orkney as ever Anglo-Saxon speech and institutions were in Kent or Norfolk. The place-names of the Islands are, save for a late Scottish and English element, entirely Norse.
The Scottish immigration into Orkney, which commenced about 1230, came for centuries almost exclusively from the Lowlands—the Lothians, Fife, Forfarshire, and those parts of Stirlingshire, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Moray which lie outside the “Highland Line,” being the chief areas drawn from. A later and much slighter strain of immigration from Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, which affected the South Isles more especially, was itself quite as much of Norse as of Celtic ancestry. The people of Orkney must therefore be put down as in the main an amalgam of Norse and Lowland Scots.
There never was any very rigid line of division between these two races in the Islands. So much is it the case that, while the Norse were being Scotticised in speech and custom, the incomers were at the same time being Orcadianised in sentiment, that the opprobrious epithet of “Ferry-loupers,” hurled by native Orcadians at successive generations of Scots intruders, is itself of Scottish origin. The genius loci was a very potent spirit, and the Scoto-Orcadian was often prouder of being an Orcadian than of being a Scot.
The humblest Orcadians have for centuries past spoken English more correctly and naturally than was at all common among the Scottish lower orders before the advent of board school education, a circumstance largely due to the fact that a great portion of the population exchanged Norse speech for Scots about the period—the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—when educated Scots were themselves adopting English. Add to this the constant presence of passing English vessels and the presence of Cromwell’s soldiers. At the same time a modified Scots dialect is commonly spoken by the less educated classes, but even in this the admixture of pure English is pronounced. A few Norse words, mostly nouns, survive imbedded in the local speech, whether English or Scots. Norse speech lingered in Harray until about 1750.