Orkney: 10 years after; A decade after shocking claims of ritual

Sunday Herald, The, Feb 25, 2001 by Torcuil Crichton

They did not leave many clues behind, the people who built the circle of stone sentinels which make up the Ring of Brogar, the most familiar landmark in the Orkney Islands. There are theories about what the obelisks were for, but no firm evidence to support any one idea. We don't really know what Neolithic men were up to when they dragged these sandstone monsters across the moor and set them upright above the Loch of Stenness.

On this February afternoon, with the light fading in the south and the snow coming in from the north west, the temperature is too numbing to contemplate their symbolism for long. They make eerie pillars on the skyline but they serve no practical purpose other than shelter from the storm.

The stones are no mystery to Michael Hartley, who is leading his blind dog in a clockwise direction around the wide circle. From my side of the ring I watch through the swirling snow as he purposefully touches each stone he passes with his red-gloved hand until, inevitably, he comes to my shelter stone. By way of introduction, he explains his regular little ritual, saying that from the stones he can feel energy. I say I feel the cold.

Hartley is an expert on the stones because, you see, he has lived near the 5000-year monument for nearly two decades. He is a tour guide but sighs like an ignored academic as he explains that the middle of the circle is where tribal leaders from villages all around would meet. They had feasts here, ceilidhs even, he says, throwing a stick towards the middle for the blind dog to find. Somehow the dog manages it.

If the archaeologists would only excavate the centre of the ring, they would probably find evidence to back his explanation. But until then Michael's story is just a theory, a child might have made it up. Rumour and sigh, words on the wind. It is one way to dig up Orkney's past.

It's noticeable that St Margaret's Hope does not get the first of the morning light. The South Ronaldsay village sits in the shadow of a hill and it takes a while for the sun to creep along its slated roofs. It was about this time, on Wednesday February 27, 1991, along this route from Kirkwall, that a convoy of cars swept onto the island, over the Churchill Barriers to four houses where they removed nine children from their families.

That dawn raid on sleeping families signalled the beginning of the South Ronaldsay affair. But that bald term hides the scars that left families traumatised, the islands stigmatised in the eyes of the world, the credibility of social workers and the local council destroyed and triggered a radical change to the law on child protection in Scotland. Some legacy.

South Ronaldsay is where the "ritual sexual abuse" theory leapt from the pages of social work journals and entered the popular lexicon of the nation. The grounds for the children to be taken away mentioned ritualistic music, dancing and dress in the context of abuse. There was no reference to satanism but that did not matter. The stories of children previously taken into care, of cloaked figures, of lights at night, of dancing in a circle in a quarry led to the local Church of Scotland minister, Reverend Morris McKenzie, being quizzed by police over "lewd and libidinous" behaviour. The elements were enough for the media to label South Ronaldsay "Devil's Island".

The bizarre and hurtful affair stemmed as much from an actual case of child abuse in one family on South Ronaldsay as it did from theories of child abuse in America. LA psychiatrist Roland Summit's controversial idea was that organised, ritualistic abuse of children was happening everywhere, unnoticed and unreported. It was out there and all the social workers had to do was go and find it. And they did so with the passion of a zealot rooting out evil.

The idea crossed the Atlantic gaining, professional credibility as it spread like wildfire. What happened on Orkney was not unique. Families all over Europe found themselves in the same allegations of "ritual child abuse".

In South Ronaldsay, the children from one allegedly abusive family were subjected to questionable interview techniques by social workers, in so-called new disclosure therapy sessions. This involved repeatedly questioning until they "admitted" to what was happening. As the children were led through "their stories", accounts were made of how they had been exposed to sexual intercourse between adults and children. For social workers on high alert for ritual abuse of children, the accounts bore all the hallmarks of Summit's theory. They acted decisively.

The culture of professional hysteria that swept children out of their parents' arms during the next five weeks was finally stopped in its tracks by a Scottish sheriff after the nine children were taken into care. Sheriff David Kelbie began a hearing into the proof of the allegations and after two days and, he admitted, two sleepless nights, he announced that the sooner the children were returned to their parents, the better. He went further, deliberately wrecking the case against the parents, some thought, by dismissing the evidence presented.