‘I needed to be in that strange, flat place’: how an Orkney garden healed a writer

After her sister died, Victoria Bennett left Cumbria for the remote Scottish archipelago, where she learned to go with the ebb and flow of life It was during her first winter in Orkney that the nature writer Victoria Bennett experienced the joy of baying into the sea during a storm. “There’s something very physically releasing about howling,” she says. “It’s quite animalistic and powerful.” On a stormy beach, when waves are crashing on the rocks, “you can really let rip”, she says. “The sound just disappears.” Until that moment, Bennett had been struggling with her decision to move to the remote archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. “I was beginning to feel like I was in a fight against the sea, and against the weather.” As the storm began, she frantically weighed down the contents of her nascent garden – the first she had ever owned – and felt a little frightened. There is no way to get off Orkney in bad weather, she says: “We can’t even go to the main town, the barriers get shut, and if you’re walking, you can get blown down the street.” But a few hours later, as she stood on the shore and howled into the wind, the feeling that she was i