David Leask: A royal visit to Orkney and a row over what remote even means in the broadband age

This was the sweet wee anecdote the couple would want from their first official visit to Orkney. And the picture too. A photo of Kate, leaning down to the children, smiling, made the front page of yesterday’s Orcadian newspaper. “A royal visit to remember,” went the headline, above a row of union flags.

The Duchess and her man, Prince William, were on a mission, their soft power mobilised to save the British union. Or at least that is what it looked like to some independence supporters. In yesterday’s Herald columnist Rosemary Goring talked of a ‘smooth wooing”. Then rhetoric around the visit got a little rougher. Why? Because of one word.

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Pooled reporting of the Kate and Will’s travels – including in this newspaper – referred to Orkney as a “remote” Scottish archipelago.

That did not go down particularly well on either side of the Pentland Firth. It didn’t seem to matter that neither William nor Kate had called Orkney “remote”, as far as we know. The term, said former SNP cabinet minister Michael Russell, was ‘ludicrous”. It wasn’t the islands which were distant, went the social media response, it was the royals.

We talk a lot about remoteness in Scotland but we are rarely clear what we mean. The very concept seems contested, contradictory. That is what makes the chat following the royal visit so intriguing.

So is Orkney remote? Well, yes, somewhat. And also, no, not really. Depends.

Mr Russell’s government officially classified the islands as remote. Strictly speaking all of Orkney was deemed to be “remote rural”, except Kirkwall, which was a “remote town”. That is because everywhere in Orkney is more than half an hour’s drive from a settlement of more than 10,000 people.

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This definition applies to swathes of Scotland, more than half the country, including all islands and most of both the Highlands and Southern Uplands. This is not some trivial technicality, it is a practical measure of whether additional state help is needed to ensure access to jobs and services for citizens.

The royal visit helps to illustrate this. William and Kate were in Orkney to open Kirkwall’s New Balfour Hospital (a declaration of interest: I was born in the old one). A less remote Scottish community of Orkney’s size would not be getting anything like this. The facility is designed to mitigate against remoteness. Across Scotland, as local medical facilities are replaced by big centres, we are all having to make long journeys for the best care. For Orcadians, even with the Balfour, that can mean getting on a plane, usually to Aberdeen, when they need specialist treatment. Remoteness matters.

This week I saw people claim that Orkney is not remote because it has planes, because you can be in Glasgow in an hour. Well, it has the planes, which are subsidised, because it is remote, because it is an island.

Its transport links – the northern islands have not been as badly affected by ferry problems as those in the west – might actually make it feel less distant than parts of the mainland. But that takes effort. And money.

This is worth it. Why? Orkney is showing strong prospects for sustainable development, especially in renewable energy. The royals this week toured the European Marine Energy Centre. In its field EMEC it is anything but remote. It is central to efforts to address the climate emergency.

Moreover, Orkney – pandemics withstanding – has a booming tourist trade. Many businesses even trade on an image of remoteness.

The word “remote" can be a marketing tool. It can be a practical and bureaucratic way of describing distance from jobs and services. It can be a basis to lobby for more money from central governments.

So why does the term irritate some Orcadians? Donna Heddle is a professor of Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, an institution created to bring higher learning to communities Holyrood would classify as remote.

The word, she says, is annoying because it means a place and its people are defined by their relationship to somewhere else.

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Remoteness, she adds, “is a very subjective concept – the focus of a map is defined by the agenda of the person who created it.

“In earlier times, Orkney was a key player on the world stage and has never been seen as particularly remote – it is visible from Scotland and is included in the very earliest maps and descriptions of the world that we have.

“What are we remote from – the seat of power, the capital city, or an urban lifestyle? In the words of the Orcadian poet Robert Rendall, it is all about your ‘angle of vision’.”

Are there particular cultural undertones to the “remote north”? Heddle thinks so, that such language makes the islands sounds inaccessible. “There is also an element of danger – in Orcadian folklore witches etc come from the North,” she says.

So could new jobs. Orkney might be portrayed now as being at the edge of something. But when the seas were motorways, the islands were vital pit stops, leaving an astonishing, world-class archeological heritage.

Local authorities think this could happen again as global warming opens the polar ice routes. “We could be the northern gateway to Britain,” James Stockan, the council leader, tells me.

Liam McArthur, Orkney’s MSP, echoes Prof Heddle on history and perspective but adds another thought.

“With more people 'remote' working from home, across all parts of the country, there's been a bit of a levelling effect over the course of the past year or so,” the Liberal Democrat says.

“That is likely to continue so digital connectivity will become as much a determinant of 'remoteness' as transport connectivity.” Yesterday William and Kate shared the front page of The Orcadian with another story, a far more important one: a super fast broadband development. Is the end of remoteness far away?

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