ODDLY enough, I first discovered the joys of sauna in a small village.
I say "sauna" when I mean "steam room", but it was a start, even if I didn't take it much further. The steam room was attached to the village gym and swimming pool.
This was in the oil-enriched Northern Isles, which at the time had an unwritten policy of "aa swimming pool in every hamlet".
This is far from the case in other parts of Scotia Minor. Edinburgh, indeed, is a place of few facilities compared to many rural areas. When you point this out to local ratepayers, they say: "But we've got yonder castle, ken? We dinnae need facilities."
A reader jumps in: "Come on, Rab. One thing Edinburgh isn't short of is saunas." That is a bad point well made. For, while Edinburgh is replete with saunas, you daren't use them.
They are not what they seem. Even the one attached to a gym I once frequented in the city was out of bounds, according to a pal who was a fitness instructor there and rescinded my sauna booking with a tap of his nose and the advice: "You don't want to go there, mate."
You wonder what happens to Finns and other innocents when they come to the Scottish capital looking for a sauna. I did manage one that did what it says on the tin, as a guest at a friend's right posh gym. But I'd have had to take on a second job to pay the monthly fees for that place.
That was six years ago. Never had a sauna since. It's the price you pay for living in the capital. Recently, I noticed that Skye boasted better facilities, including a normal sauna in Portree, and one too in nearby Kyle of Lochalsh. So, might there have been one in ancient Orkney?
I do not raise the question lightly; more of a cheap link, really. But it has been raised by no less than a personage than Julian Spalding, formerly the chief exhibit at Glasgow's museums and galleries.
In his new book Realisation: From Seeing to Understanding, Julian advances the theory that the ancient Orkney site of Skara Brae was not a village but a sauna. Skara Brae is right Neolithic, so this would make it a fairly early example of the genre.
You'd think Skara a bit big to be a sauna, but Julian hypothesises that it was indeed a cluster of saunas, each apportioned to local families who honoured the spirit of their ancestors by sweating profusely in their underpants. Julian says stone was used in the Flintstone Age for proper spiritual purposes and not for mere hooses.
He says Skara doesn't even look like a village, because "the people were not midgets". A small point perhaps, but he adds: "I am not an expert on Skara Brae." Yes, I was wondering.
So far, Julian's claim hasn't really sparked a heated debate, perhaps eliciting in the main that trope of Scottish positive negativity: "Aye, right."
Tom Muir, the Exhibitions Officer for Orkney Islands Council, said it was interesting, which is usually what polite people say when they mean rubbish. But, no, he maintains: "It is not a ridiculous notion." Still, the similarities to other sites "support the idea that this was a village", he says.
Interestingly, in a rubbish sense, the oldest saunas in Finland were also used as dwellings in winter, so maybe Julian is on to something after all (even if these early efforts were holes in the ground).
Julian says his theory comes from "thinking about things" and he's certainly given me food for same if I ever visit Skara Brae again. Most of us have tried with limited success recreating images of life from the remains of ancient sites.
Once, I tried imagining castle residents pouring boiling oil on besiegers through a cleverly conceived hole near the defensive wall. When I told the guide, he said: "That was the cludgie."
But we are all free to let our imaginations roam and rewrite history. It's certainly intriguing to think of Stone Age ratepayers in Orkney sweating out toxins from their bigger-than-midget bodies.
True, they didn't have toxins from additives in their sugary drinks or pesticides on their plums. But evidence, or thought, suggests they were fond of a libation. Perhaps they liked nothing better than a good sauna after a night on the Malibu. Who can say?
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