Northern Isles

We checked Orkney's tourism site and the definitive accounts of the Highland Midge.

Those accounts detail northwest Scotland and the west coast all the way down to North Wales, but they completely omit the Northern Isles.

But here is the crucial inference.

The scientific account states that midges physically stop flying when wind speeds hit six miles an hour.

The UK only produces about 60% of the food that we eat, so it's not just households who may not be food secure, it's the country as a whole.

Many of the UK's islands, especially the Northern Isles and Hebrides, already experience empty shelves from time to time when the weather is too bad for ferries to arrive with their supplies.

And these serve as a microcosm of our fragile food supply chains across the mainland too.

This appears to be a crucial moment for the country to start readying itself and planning for a potential emergency.

all across Scotland, and it's not just being contained to the eastern side of the country now.

This is up into the Northern Isles through St Andrews and Fife to Barry, as you said earlier, to the West Coast.

It's being played by royalties.

We know it's being played by the upper class and the middle class.

Not really.

I've kind of made a pact with myself that I will never twitch the Northern Isles again.

Very wise.

I'm too far gone and it's too stressful and it's too time consuming and sometimes far too much money, so...

I've complained about the imbalance between UK and Norwegian boats for a long time now, but it demonstrates surely that if these problems are not going to be addressed, then they will be, and this has become urgent.

So that amount might amount to half of what the Northern Isles were due, but that's 12% of overall fishing stocks that the UK was apparently had access to over the course of the year.

Defra, again, in answer to my question, said, consultations with Norway on the arrangements for 2027 are due to take place later this autumn, and we will continue to seek the best possible deal for UK fishers, as though that was the way in which the best possible deal pans out now of course the government is forever reminding the public that we are all so lucky that they're in charge if we can just put that back on screen please because energy security jobs and investment boost through climate action and we're going to continue to reap the benefits of course what we're talking about here is the seventh carbon budget which was announced back in june And there's going to be a science-led target of a reduction of 87% emissions over the period 2038 to 2042.

And that's been endorsed by the Environmental Audit Committee and the Climate Change Committee.

Certainly Perthshire, Angus, Tayside.

You get them in the Northern Isles, across the Western Isles, Caithness, Sutherland, that kind of thing.

And they take different forms.

This one effectively is banana shaped.

What is going on there, and why is that the main thing we find in all these archeological sites and evidence of Vikings?

The book actually begins with a description of this burial mound, famous burial mound called Maeshowe on the, the island of Orkney in the, the Northern Isles of Britain, which was excavated in the 19th century.

Uh, and they discovered on the inside of that, that the walls of the, of the tomb were smothered with runic graffiti.

And a lot of it is pretty profane, pretty salacious stuff, you know, the sort of things that, that people of all eras have wanted to write on the walls of, of buildings.

But there's one really extraordinary line in there, which translated, it comes out as, "Jerusalem farers broke into Orkneyinga, broke into this barrow." And by the date that these runes were written, has the, the much more specific meaning of crusaders.

So we have a really, really fascinating glimpse into a world where people from Iceland, Norway, the Northern Isles of Britain, were traveling these extraordinary distances to the Middle East and participating in the, the phenomenon we know as the Crusades.

And that's a radical kind of change in how we perceive what the Vikings were, what the medieval world looked like, who was participating in the Crusades.

It's a sort of an upending of traditional expectations about that period.

This is such an incredibly complicated site.

We have dug sites in the Northern Isles before, so we knew they were complex, but this is an order above, I think.

What is amazing about this site is that it was a real hotbed of activity.

I think it must have been a very busy place, and the archaeology there is quite remarkable.

We're also engaged with ports.

Just last week, myself and a number of colleagues did a tour of a number of construction ports on the East Coast and the Northern Isles, looking at the different options for floating foundation assembly, wet storage, turbine integration, marshalling.

So some great facilities, a lot of desire to see the work from our project and other floating projects come to those locations as well.

In addition to the construction ports, we've been going through an appraisal of O&M ports.