When Orkney Flexes, Nature Bends

Is this a World First?

This month, Smithsonian magazine published a photo story of mine about Orkney, islands off the north coast of Scotland. The opening spread in the magazine shows my shot of a rainbow ending over a very special archaeological site, but the story of what happened immediately before I took this photo has not been told.

At a Site of Wonder, a Sight of Wonder

Laws of nature are descriptions of consistent norms observed by scientists. Sometimes these are broken and need updating, but most of the time the universe falls into line. I had my doubts about Orkney, though. They do things differently up there.

On my final morning in Orkney last September, before the flight home to Edinburgh, I detoured for one last look at the Ness of Brodgar, a complex of monumental Neolithic buildings. Until 2003, no one knew that the site lay mere centimetres under the grass. Then, for twenty summers, volunteer archaeologists had dug, scraped and unearthed a trove of finds. I had been there to document the final act – the site’s reburial, which would preserve the structures. The removed soil was backfilled, along with a few extra new truckloads to replace the 100,000 artefacts removed.

Before and after the trenches are filled.

As I drove west from Finstown, I witnessed something entirely unexpected and so stunning that I gasped. Double rainbows are pretty common in Scotland, but what I saw felt utterly unique.

Location, Location

The Ness of Brodgar lies on an isthmus between two lochs (one fresh, one saline) encircled by low fertile hills and dominated to the south by the dark hills of Hoy. It is one of the sites on an imaginary straight line joining other Neolithic headline acts of Orkney – the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae. This unique landscape is a microcosm of the wider world, the site director Nick Card told me – land then water then land then water. That outer water (the ocean) is key to the rare phenomenon I witnessed that morning.

When you stand at the Ness site, you experience something missing from the maps and which artists struggle to convey – a connection between the landscape and the vast sky that spreads out on all sides and appears lower even than in the south of Scotland. You come to see the rocks but the light fills your memories and calls you back. That day, the heavens were trying to show me something.

Unweaving the Rainbow

As I drove, looking down towards the Ness, a spectrum of colours bowed down to the ground then, inexplicably, bounced back up like a divine ‘job done’ rainbow tick.

My equipment was in the back of the car, but I stopped for a quick phone snap to prove it was real. The rainbow evolved as I drove on, the light refracting through a million-raindrop lens. I turned off the main road, parked, and launched my drone. Time was critical, and the light was already fading.

From the ground I saw the rainbow as a tick or a V, but seen from the air, the two bows separated, the rogue spur moving upwards and forming a Y shape. The spur was fading, so I positioned the drone to capture the single bow falling on the Ness – the shot which would become the opening spread of the Smithsonian article.

Reflected Rainbow

What had I just seen?

It turns out that I was lucky enough to have witnessed the very rare phenomenon of a triple rainbow, also referred to as a reflected rainbow. You can just see all three bows in the photo above. According to the Optical Society, there were only five scientific reports of triple rainbows over the course of 250 years.

And I am pretty certain that my images taken both from the ground and from above, showing the separation of the bows, are a world first.

How on Earth?

Let’s be clear – as magical a place as Orkney is, the laws of physics were not being broken here. They were just showing off.

After chatting to a physicist friend and doing some research into reflection rainbows, I learned that the rogue bow I had seen was formed by light reflecting off the surface of nearby water.

I initially assumed the flat calm of the Loch of Stenness or the Loch of Harray had caused the reflection, but in fact, to see a triple rainbow requires a reflection on water further away: the viewer has to be between the water and the bow. So I checked the sun that day...

My Photographer’s Ephemeris app for 26 September at 9:44 a.m. showed a perfect line through two possible water locations. One, a loch right in the line of fire (Loch of Kirbister), and the other the beautiful Scapa Flow. At that time, the sea was ebbing towards low tide (at 10:40 a.m.). The low angle of the sun would have been just right for light to reflect off still water or wet sand and appear over the Ness of Brodgar.

Sea conditions that day were calm as seen from my accommodation near Woodwick, an excellent mirror, although on the other side of the mainland.

Rainbows Are Circles

Rainbows are actually circles if unhindered by land. In this case, there were two bows with different focal centres. The reflected circle bounced up off the water, so the curve shifted higher. The tick in the image is curving too.

Why Does it Matter?

Raindrops, like prisms, split light into its component colours. They reveal physical information that can offer up metaphysical meaning to the human eye and brain.

Light reveals aspects of historic landscapes that we may overlook, and it brings a sense of what past peoples experienced and were drawn to. After all, trying to understand the significance of a landscape by considering only its geographical features is like explaining a story based on the chemical composition of ink on a page. We need data and facts, but we also need to see the bigger picture in context.

I believe the presence of this triple rainbow can shed light on why Neolithic people gathered and likely worshipped in such places. On Orkney, with its unique confluence of land, light and water, rare light is common. No wonder these islands, have, for millennia, been special sites of awe and wonder.

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