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

Victoria Bennett, whose memoir about life in Orkney, The Apothecary by the Sea, showed her that ‘the most beautiful light is found in the darkest time’. Photograph: Annabel Williams

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.”