In July 2019 I travelled from my home in Adelaide Australia, to remote northern Scotland, and this photograph of a rainbow arching across the treacherous Pentland Firth was taken from the John O’Groats wharf the very moment I disembarked from a tiny ferry returning from Mainland Orkney where I had been exploring the homeland of my father’s ancestors. Never was a rainbow more significant or welcome as the crossing although brief, had been utterly terrifying.
Looking back across the grey, rough sea on that ‘dreich’ afternoon, I was filled with gratitude that despite passing on their FHE gene, my forbears had been brave enough in September 1851 to somehow find their way from their cold, dark subsistence life in the Orkney Islands to Plymouth from where they undertook a far more perilous sea voyage, landing in sunny Hobson’s Bay Victoria, Australia three months later.
I also visited the family home of my mother’s Irish ancestors (to whom I also owe my C282Y inheritance) in Port Laoise, but that is another story – and photo!
Given my age and the world pandemic, I don’t know that I will ever manage to return to Scotland, so this memory is especially precious.
Marigold Francis (Adelaide Australia)