BAH
It's a Kirkwall thing, those above and those below the line, they know who you are, no need for
tags, flags or colours. The knowledge of where you come from goes all the way back and all the
way down, it's recalled within the scrum. That fused pack of maybe 350 male bodies locked
together, contending for 'her', the Ba', hours at a time, moving only inches, if at all. The pack takes
on a life of its own, a single organism, its pelt is a mix of sport fleeces, lucky Ba'-jersies and rugby
shirts. When it moves, the intense local press coverage tends to say that it 'rumbles' across streets
and down wynds. Drone footage has added a new dimension to the compelling reports in the last
couple of years, features that are savoured like the columns devoted to corrida in Andalucia.
Oblivious to rain, hail, sleet, the pack ignores the hundreds of secular onlookers at the fringe of the
contest. Within is the true Orcadian sweat lodge experience, an intense male passage rite fused by
tribal violence: this level of the ritual game was brought back by Hudson Bay hands during the
nineteenth century, those who left Cree wives and children behind them in the 'noor-wast' North
West.
You need to be early enough on Christmas or New Year's morning to watch the two factions -
'sides' doesn't really cover it - striding towards each other down Broad Street to meet in front of St
Magnus Cathedral for the 'throwup' of the Ba'. There's a silent purposefulness about the two
groups, intent, informally lead by the main beuys, a particular seriousness - this must have been
what a war-band felt like, the male status-gaming of warrior culture. There is a unique kind of
honour code in the islands, seemingly; respect can be gained as a skilful 'body', an exceptional
worker or craftsman - 'He's a fine maan', you hear, of a farmer, dancer, engineer, creelman. There
are heroes, they have an aura, respect is given. Women are also accorded this status - 'A fine wyf,
that wan, sum worker', a kind of known regard that doesn't have a precise equivalent in mass
urban living.
The Ba' is thrown up by an elder of the game, and critical judgement starts here - was it a well
judged pitch? The mass immediately strives for her possession, arms raised like the waving fronds
of a vast sea anemone, She vanishes among contending men. Beyond the first twenty minutes,
steam begins to rise above the ruck, bottles of water pass from hand to hand above the interwoven
clump. The pack becomes an intelligence, a shared thought and meditation, a mode of intimate,
male cloud-computing. In there, treaties are negotiated, for individuals and sub-groups: youths
graduate to the next level of island maleness, honour feuds are cashed and re-tendered, with no
expiry date. Don't tell me tales of Afghanistan. Complicated hand signals point the direction She's
travelling within the bio-mass. Something hopeful is striving to be born from within this manness. A
'witty' - skilful - player delicately crowd surfs over heads and hands, to be inserted at the heart of
the press, a useful body, a handy buddo. The pack suddenly divides like an amoeba, dummy runs
are created to draw off the opposition, and this must be so like war-fighting, ineffable tedium
broken by spasmic, violent activity, always just ahead of your comprehension.
Occasionally a player faints under the airless pressure and is extruded from the pack, an inedible
pip, he is left slumped against a wall, an ugly pallor upon him, his rib cage failing. Paramedics and
an ambulance are parked up, well out of the way of the action. (Serious injuries are very rare.)
There isn't a single policeman in the entire town, I kid you not - are they all playing, or all locked in,
trembling, at their station? There is a genuine if illusory sense of possessing the freedom of the
streets. Time to be naughty. Even Kirkwall's infant CCTV regime turns a blind eye. Massive timber
pressure bars block every entry and window throughout the centre of the town, the place is under
siege from within itself. There is a name for this - civil war. But in this game without apparent rules,
as with all ritual combat, violent behaviour is intended to be self-regulated through a complex
hierarchy of older hero players who shout advice from the edge of the scrum to the young bloods
at the heart; sub-group chieftains, clan allegiances are also in play, and formidable female
marshals patrol the edge of the action. A collie trembles, its tail wedged between its legs, scenting
off-the-scale levels of testosterone and excited female pheromones. The marshal is severe, she
barks, 'Get that dog far awai, right out o here noo!'
Women have joined the play in the past, it's by no means just a male thing. Any wyf or lass might
run away with her sisterly Ba', as has happened, centuries ago. Today, the gender lines seem
oddly, in fact predictably, more severely drawn, and such a turn is somehow and for no good
reason utterly unthinkable. (Women do help sometimes to push the pack, from the edges; girls are
beginning to take part in the Boys' [Under 16] Ba'.) Very excited, utterly committed lasses text,
tweet and yammer - but there's surely no signal in the middle of the scrum? Wyfs look on, some
resigned, but sometimes fervent, giving a blood-full cry, 'Cum aan the Dounies / Up up you Uppies!'
There was the notorious brief moment of the Women's Ba, in the heady few years immediately
after the Second World War. This was the era of the founding of many cleansing and hopeful
events all over Europe, in Scotland the Edinburgh Festival (the inspiration of a German Jewish
emigre, former Direktor of the Berlin Opera), and in Orkney, the Stromness Shopping Week. On
Christmas Day 1945 and New Year's Day 1946, Kirkwall witnessed the Women's Ba', upon which
the city fathers frowned. Why only at this moment? Was it another aspect of women wanting to
take on yet more male roles and conventions, having done so much during wartime? Had they too
internalised five years of the violence of world conflict, needing to work some of it out? - the male
games for several years after the end of the war were reported as noticeably more violent than prewar
contests. A maddening infection had been brought back to the Orkney streets and farms from
Germany, Italy, Burma, and which would seep for generations into families, down even unto this
day. But of the Women's Games, 'The contests were dour and uncharitable', states the generally
excellent standard history of the Ba', and, most tellingly, 'unattractive'. Miss Barbara Yule won the
Christmas Ba', a 90 minute game (her surname is rare in Orkney, 'someone born at Yuletide',
fittingly - was her victory rigged?), and Miss Violet Cooper won the New Year Ba', in just five
minutes. There's a photo of Miss Cooper in the Tankerness Museum, she looks neither dour nor
unattractive. Suppression of these female games is surely just another instance of an old story:
Euripides' Bacchae tells it very well.
Photos of the game through the previous century show mostly middle-aged contenders, all
'working men', you would say, wearing caps and often, overalls. During the 70's, decade of The
Wicker Man, the numbers dropped to a few dozen, and it looked as if the Ba' would one day
disappear through lack of interest. In recent years it has grown again to several hundred
passionate players; a few deluded souls from 'sooth' do come up to play, schooled in rugby, and
think they will cut through this yokel pack. I have seen them limping broken from the fray.
It's a Kirkwall thing, but players from outside the burgh have participated, and still do. In the early
twentieth century there was also a Ba' game played in Stromness, but the authorities managed to
substitute a target-shooting competition in place of the medieval mass-football scrum - there had
been periodic attempts to ban the Kirkwall game too. Stromness is a town of some 2000 souls that
is as territorially riven as Kirkwall, between North End and South End, just as the island itself
sharply divides between East Mainland and West Mainland. A graffiti in the Dounby men's
conveniences loudly asserts 'West is Best' - and you have to be alert to these divides, the
narcissism of small difference within small-island communities, of small communities anywhere.
Yet it still comes as a surprise to hear the scorn or disgust that some other Mainlanders can
express about the Ba' - a 'stupid violent nonsense', or to meet eighty year olds who have never
witnessed it - the Stromnessian George Mackay Brown saw it only once, and suspended the
customary Stromness/Kirkwa' antipathy to honour the fact that the men of Kirkwall were sober
enough on New Year's Day for such a contest.
The two sides have to take the Ba' from the start point at the Merkat Cross in front of St Magnus
Cathedral and then back into their own territories, effectively scoring an 'own goal', in order to win.
The factions are 'Up the Gates' and 'Down the Gates', from Old Norse and Norn, gata, also Scots
gate, for 'road'. The Uppies must knock the Ba' against a now anonymous wall (site of the old town
gates) just over 500 yards to the south-west; the Dounies have to see the Ba' in the harbour water,
just under 500 yards to the north-east. Another tempting binary: the trophy is contended for
between land and water, beginning from the sacral space of the cathedral forecourts. Some locate
the mythicised origins of the game as a contest for a severed head, obscurely Celtic in cult,
generally assumed to be the caput of an incoming 'ferry-louper'. A common belief is that from the
late Viking period, in the mid twelfth century, the town was riven by contention between 'the
Bishop's men', residing around the new cathedral and the area to the south, the Laverock (lark),
and 'the Earl's men', who lived inwith the boundary of the town, gathered around the harbour and
castle (now gone) to the north - hence Uppies/Bishop's Men, Dounies/Earl's Men.
The Boys' Ba' begins at 10:00, and the Men's at 13:00. Every visitor to Kirkwall is recruited to one
or other of the sides, unwittingly, depending from which direction you entered the town on your first
visit. This would seem to inordinately favour the Up-the-Tounies, since this is the direction of the
airport and the cheap, short-crossing ferry route. When the Balfour Maternity Unit began
production, also on the south-eastern edge of the town, place of birth had to be abandoned as
criterion of Ba' allegiance, which now mostly goes by family tradition, and often back through
several generations of players.
I am a Dounie, having first visited Kirkwall by car, from Stromness. The second time I came,
December 2002, I flew in, astonished to find myself at this strange new latitude in a sharp
midwinter season. Kirkwall was all fitted up with massy barricade bars at every door, entry and
window, and I genuinely thought I had come to a place besieged. The following year, a friend from
Baghdad visited at Christmas; he developed a taste for the local, bere [pron: 'bear'] bannocks, flat
dark brown, round breads made from six-row bere barley, a long established crop and local
speciality, which not everyone appreciates, a bitter bread in truth. Walid loved it, so like his Iraqi
Mum's flat bread of his childhood. We witnessed the Ba', and Walid giggled throughout: 'Dounie', in
some Iraqi dialects, is an inexpressibly filthy insult.
But even after reaching either one of the goals, the contest is not over, and moves into a final, even
more intense contention. The winning side now atomises into its component players, who proceed
to fight for their own glory, and they 'debate' with each other, in the water or against the wall,
sometimes for more than an hour. The final decision is therefore fraught and mysterious as
attempts are made to vet contenders, and competing names are shouted out. The Ba' must go to a
distinguished player who has done good service over many games, usually a man in his middle
years, but sometimes younger; he must also have contributed to the current game, and be able to
fight for possession right down to the final minutes, though he is not necessarily the man who held
the ball - each one uniquely crafted and then retained by the winner and his family for generations -
at the triumphant goal moment. When a consensus grudgingly emerges, he is lifted high with the
Ba' herself. He has gained hero status, respect will follow him, throughout Kirkwall at least.
It's a Kirkwall thing, those above and those below the line, they know who you are, no need for
tags, flags or colours. The knowledge of where you come from goes all the way back and all the
way down, it's recalled within the scrum. That fused pack of maybe 350 male bodies locked
together, contending for 'her', the Ba', hours at a time, moving only inches, if at all. The pack takes
on a life of its own, a single organism, its pelt is a mix of sport fleeces, lucky Ba'-jersies and rugby
shirts. When it moves, the intense local press coverage tends to say that it 'rumbles' across streets
and down wynds. Drone footage has added a new dimension to the compelling reports in the last
couple of years, features that are savoured like the columns devoted to corrida in Andalucia.
Oblivious to rain, hail, sleet, the pack ignores the hundreds of secular onlookers at the fringe of the
contest. Within is the true Orcadian sweat lodge experience, an intense male passage rite fused by
tribal violence: this level of the ritual game was brought back by Hudson Bay hands during the
nineteenth century, those who left Cree wives and children behind them in the 'noor-wast' North
West.
You need to be early enough on Christmas or New Year's morning to watch the two factions -
'sides' doesn't really cover it - striding towards each other down Broad Street to meet in front of St
Magnus Cathedral for the 'throwup' of the Ba'. There's a silent purposefulness about the two
groups, intent, informally lead by the main beuys, a particular seriousness - this must have been
what a war-band felt like, the male status-gaming of warrior culture. There is a unique kind of
honour code in the islands, seemingly; respect can be gained as a skilful 'body', an exceptional
worker or craftsman - 'He's a fine maan', you hear, of a farmer, dancer, engineer, creelman. There
are heroes, they have an aura, respect is given. Women are also accorded this status - 'A fine wyf,
that wan, sum worker', a kind of known regard that doesn't have a precise equivalent in mass
urban living.
The Ba' is thrown up by an elder of the game, and critical judgement starts here - was it a well
judged pitch? The mass immediately strives for her possession, arms raised like the waving fronds
of a vast sea anemone, She vanishes among contending men. Beyond the first twenty minutes,
steam begins to rise above the ruck, bottles of water pass from hand to hand above the interwoven
clump. The pack becomes an intelligence, a shared thought and meditation, a mode of intimate,
male cloud-computing. In there, treaties are negotiated, for individuals and sub-groups: youths
graduate to the next level of island maleness, honour feuds are cashed and re-tendered, with no
expiry date. Don't tell me tales of Afghanistan. Complicated hand signals point the direction She's
travelling within the bio-mass. Something hopeful is striving to be born from within this manness. A
'witty' - skilful - player delicately crowd surfs over heads and hands, to be inserted at the heart of
the press, a useful body, a handy buddo. The pack suddenly divides like an amoeba, dummy runs
are created to draw off the opposition, and this must be so like war-fighting, ineffable tedium
broken by spasmic, violent activity, always just ahead of your comprehension.
Occasionally a player faints under the airless pressure and is extruded from the pack, an inedible
pip, he is left slumped against a wall, an ugly pallor upon him, his rib cage failing. Paramedics and
an ambulance are parked up, well out of the way of the action. (Serious injuries are very rare.)
There isn't a single policeman in the entire town, I kid you not - are they all playing, or all locked in,
trembling, at their station? There is a genuine if illusory sense of possessing the freedom of the
streets. Time to be naughty. Even Kirkwall's infant CCTV regime turns a blind eye. Massive timber
pressure bars block every entry and window throughout the centre of the town, the place is under
siege from within itself. There is a name for this - civil war. But in this game without apparent rules,
as with all ritual combat, violent behaviour is intended to be self-regulated through a complex
hierarchy of older hero players who shout advice from the edge of the scrum to the young bloods
at the heart; sub-group chieftains, clan allegiances are also in play, and formidable female
marshals patrol the edge of the action. A collie trembles, its tail wedged between its legs, scenting
off-the-scale levels of testosterone and excited female pheromones. The marshal is severe, she
barks, 'Get that dog far awai, right out o here noo!'
Women have joined the play in the past, it's by no means just a male thing. Any wyf or lass might
run away with her sisterly Ba', as has happened, centuries ago. Today, the gender lines seem
oddly, in fact predictably, more severely drawn, and such a turn is somehow and for no good
reason utterly unthinkable. (Women do help sometimes to push the pack, from the edges; girls are
beginning to take part in the Boys' [Under 16] Ba'.) Very excited, utterly committed lasses text,
tweet and yammer - but there's surely no signal in the middle of the scrum? Wyfs look on, some
resigned, but sometimes fervent, giving a blood-full cry, 'Cum aan the Dounies / Up up you Uppies!'
There was the notorious brief moment of the Women's Ba, in the heady few years immediately
after the Second World War. This was the era of the founding of many cleansing and hopeful
events all over Europe, in Scotland the Edinburgh Festival (the inspiration of a German Jewish
emigre, former Direktor of the Berlin Opera), and in Orkney, the Stromness Shopping Week. On
Christmas Day 1945 and New Year's Day 1946, Kirkwall witnessed the Women's Ba', upon which
the city fathers frowned. Why only at this moment? Was it another aspect of women wanting to
take on yet more male roles and conventions, having done so much during wartime? Had they too
internalised five years of the violence of world conflict, needing to work some of it out? - the male
games for several years after the end of the war were reported as noticeably more violent than prewar
contests. A maddening infection had been brought back to the Orkney streets and farms from
Germany, Italy, Burma, and which would seep for generations into families, down even unto this
day. But of the Women's Games, 'The contests were dour and uncharitable', states the generally
excellent standard history of the Ba', and, most tellingly, 'unattractive'. Miss Barbara Yule won the
Christmas Ba', a 90 minute game (her surname is rare in Orkney, 'someone born at Yuletide',
fittingly - was her victory rigged?), and Miss Violet Cooper won the New Year Ba', in just five
minutes. There's a photo of Miss Cooper in the Tankerness Museum, she looks neither dour nor
unattractive. Suppression of these female games is surely just another instance of an old story:
Euripides' Bacchae tells it very well.
Photos of the game through the previous century show mostly middle-aged contenders, all
'working men', you would say, wearing caps and often, overalls. During the 70's, decade of The
Wicker Man, the numbers dropped to a few dozen, and it looked as if the Ba' would one day
disappear through lack of interest. In recent years it has grown again to several hundred
passionate players; a few deluded souls from 'sooth' do come up to play, schooled in rugby, and
think they will cut through this yokel pack. I have seen them limping broken from the fray.
It's a Kirkwall thing, but players from outside the burgh have participated, and still do. In the early
twentieth century there was also a Ba' game played in Stromness, but the authorities managed to
substitute a target-shooting competition in place of the medieval mass-football scrum - there had
been periodic attempts to ban the Kirkwall game too. Stromness is a town of some 2000 souls that
is as territorially riven as Kirkwall, between North End and South End, just as the island itself
sharply divides between East Mainland and West Mainland. A graffiti in the Dounby men's
conveniences loudly asserts 'West is Best' - and you have to be alert to these divides, the
narcissism of small difference within small-island communities, of small communities anywhere.
Yet it still comes as a surprise to hear the scorn or disgust that some other Mainlanders can
express about the Ba' - a 'stupid violent nonsense', or to meet eighty year olds who have never
witnessed it - the Stromnessian George Mackay Brown saw it only once, and suspended the
customary Stromness/Kirkwa' antipathy to honour the fact that the men of Kirkwall were sober
enough on New Year's Day for such a contest.
The two sides have to take the Ba' from the start point at the Merkat Cross in front of St Magnus
Cathedral and then back into their own territories, effectively scoring an 'own goal', in order to win.
The factions are 'Up the Gates' and 'Down the Gates', from Old Norse and Norn, gata, also Scots
gate, for 'road'. The Uppies must knock the Ba' against a now anonymous wall (site of the old town
gates) just over 500 yards to the south-west; the Dounies have to see the Ba' in the harbour water,
just under 500 yards to the north-east. Another tempting binary: the trophy is contended for
between land and water, beginning from the sacral space of the cathedral forecourts. Some locate
the mythicised origins of the game as a contest for a severed head, obscurely Celtic in cult,
generally assumed to be the caput of an incoming 'ferry-louper'. A common belief is that from the
late Viking period, in the mid twelfth century, the town was riven by contention between 'the
Bishop's men', residing around the new cathedral and the area to the south, the Laverock (lark),
and 'the Earl's men', who lived inwith the boundary of the town, gathered around the harbour and
castle (now gone) to the north - hence Uppies/Bishop's Men, Dounies/Earl's Men.
The Boys' Ba' begins at 10:00, and the Men's at 13:00. Every visitor to Kirkwall is recruited to one
or other of the sides, unwittingly, depending from which direction you entered the town on your first
visit. This would seem to inordinately favour the Up-the-Tounies, since this is the direction of the
airport and the cheap, short-crossing ferry route. When the Balfour Maternity Unit began
production, also on the south-eastern edge of the town, place of birth had to be abandoned as
criterion of Ba' allegiance, which now mostly goes by family tradition, and often back through
several generations of players.
I am a Dounie, having first visited Kirkwall by car, from Stromness. The second time I came,
December 2002, I flew in, astonished to find myself at this strange new latitude in a sharp
midwinter season. Kirkwall was all fitted up with massy barricade bars at every door, entry and
window, and I genuinely thought I had come to a place besieged. The following year, a friend from
Baghdad visited at Christmas; he developed a taste for the local, bere [pron: 'bear'] bannocks, flat
dark brown, round breads made from six-row bere barley, a long established crop and local
speciality, which not everyone appreciates, a bitter bread in truth. Walid loved it, so like his Iraqi
Mum's flat bread of his childhood. We witnessed the Ba', and Walid giggled throughout: 'Dounie', in
some Iraqi dialects, is an inexpressibly filthy insult.
But even after reaching either one of the goals, the contest is not over, and moves into a final, even
more intense contention. The winning side now atomises into its component players, who proceed
to fight for their own glory, and they 'debate' with each other, in the water or against the wall,
sometimes for more than an hour. The final decision is therefore fraught and mysterious as
attempts are made to vet contenders, and competing names are shouted out. The Ba' must go to a
distinguished player who has done good service over many games, usually a man in his middle
years, but sometimes younger; he must also have contributed to the current game, and be able to
fight for possession right down to the final minutes, though he is not necessarily the man who held
the ball - each one uniquely crafted and then retained by the winner and his family for generations -
at the triumphant goal moment. When a consensus grudgingly emerges, he is lifted high with the
Ba' herself. He has gained hero status, respect will follow him, throughout Kirkwall at least.