The Great Seal of Sule Skerrie

This film project has been long in the gestation, thanks largely to the Covid restrictions. The song's roots are in the Orkneys; it features in the writings of George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian bard. It’s long been in my wife Tina ‘s repertoire. This version she performed, backed by daughter Zoë, at a Halloween event with the North Berwick Drama circle in 2019. The song tells the dark tale of the Selkie, a creature half man and half seal, who appears one night to a lone mother as she nurses a baby, one that she has borne without any memory of the begetting. He reveals that it was he who fathered the child on her, and vows in time to re-appear and take back his son home to the sea. And he foretells his own death and that of his son at the hands of the woman’s future husband, who will be a harpoonist. The song produced a breathless hush in the audience; I immediately wanted to record it and shoot a film of Orkney seascapes around it.  

So just days before the first lockdown Tina, at the age of 74, made her debut recording in a professional studio.  

A few days later all travel was suspended, including my photographic trip to Orkney. Despite its lack of visuals, the track went on to win selection at the aptly named Lonely Seal Film Festival and was Folk Song of the Month at Tracks Music Awards.  

It was two years before I at last landed in the Orkneys. The titular Sule Skerrie, a rocky outcrop lying to westward in the Atlantic, was ruled out as too dangerous to approach.  Now here is the film, ‘The Great Seal of Sule Skerrie’.