The Ball by John Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

Scots
    I f you’re searching for the remnants and roots of old ball games—or old anything for that matter—Orkney may be the best place in the world to go looking. A scattering of 70 or so barnacle-encrusted isles and skerries that extend from the northern shores of Scotland into the frigid waters of the North Sea, Orkney is a place where the present can barely hold its ground against the fierce pull of the past—a place where legend still competes with fact, passion with logic, ritual with routine.
    Here, cheerfully stubborn and oblivious to the ways of “ferryloupers” from beyond the Pentland Firth, men still gather in cobblestone streets on the coldest, darkest days of winter to play football the old-fashioned way: two large mobs, one sawdust-stuffed ball, no rules, and nearly four centuries of grudges to keep things interesting. Here they don’t play games. They play the Kirkwall Ba’.
    The narrow road from the ferry landing on mainland Orkney winds its way through a stark but stunning landscape of treeless hills and rocky coves, interrupted by the occasional small farmstead. Amid otherwise ordinary fields, seaweed-eating sheep rub themselves casually against megalithic standing stones and graze over the top of low burial cairns. Farther along, dominating a high plateau above two shimmering lochs, stands the mystical Ring of Brogar, a 5,000-year-old Stonehenge-like monument made up of 27 massive stones set within a deep circular ditch.
    Clinging to the battered coast nearby is the Neolithic village of Skara Brae. Resembling Bedrock, home of the Flintstones, the site’s remarkably preserved stone furniture, including cupboards, dressers, and pre-Posturepedic beds, has earned it the nickname “the British Pompeii.” And at the heart of the island’s Stone Age landscape lies the unassuming grassy knoll containing Maes Howe, a spectacular tomb formed by 30 tons of flagstone slabs stacked like Legos to form a perfect beehive-shaped tomb for Orkney’s earliest chieftains. On the winter solstice, a shaft of light pierces the darkness of the chamber to illuminate the rear wall, an event that draws an annual pilgrimage of New Agers and born-again pagans from all over.
    What was a sacred site for the Neolithic people of Orkney was little more than a shelter in the storm for later Viking marauders who sought refuge here in a snow squall in 1153, an incident recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga , an account of the conquest of Orkney and the establishment of a Norse earldom here. Out of boredom or a desire to mark their turf, the invaders scrawled runic graffiti on the walls of the ancient tomb. The 30 or so inscriptions accommodate Viking stereotypes nicely, including such literary gems as “ Thorni fucked, Helgi carved, ” and “ Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women ” (carved, disturbingly, next to a drawing of a drooling dog).
    After ruling the isles for nearly 400 years, the Norse handed Orkney over to the Scottish earls in the late 15th century. But Viking influence remains ever-present in place names and in the lilting local dialect, which the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir described as “a soft and musical inflection, slightly melancholy, but companionable, the voice of people who are accustomed to hours of talking in the long winter evenings and do not feel they have to hurry; a splendid voice for telling stories in.”
    One popular story still told on winter nights over peat fires, and captured by local historian John Robertson, is of how the unique and ancient ball game known as the Kirkwall Ba’ came to be:
    Hundreds of years ago the people of Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital town, were oppressed by a Scottish tyrant called Tusker, named for his protruding front teeth. After years of oppression, the locals rose up in revolt and forced him to flee to the islands. With the people still living in fear of his return, a brave young man stepped forward