“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The Road to Deepdale
The Deepdale Monster was almost certainly a dead basking shark which washed up on the rocky shore of Deepdale Bay in Holm, Orkney, in 1941.
Today Deepdale Bay is polluted with an unusually large amount of plastic trash from fishing boats, decommissioned oil rigs, and people generally opposed to the existence of life on Earth. This suggests the local currents in Scapa Flow make it is a likely place for a body to wash up.
The nearby farmstead is abandoned and ruined, but on the periphery of what is still (for now) working farmland.
In a tragic piece of symbolism a wrecked automobile, one of the primary drivers of mass extinction, serves as a scarecrow to ward off birds. It is set against the backdrop of the oil rigs which powered it. There is no road to Deepdale Bay.
The Road to Deepdale is a digital painting created to accompany an article on the Deepdale Monster by Fiona Grahame of The Orkney News for her monthly column in iScot magazine.
The painting symbolises one of the very real monsters which has a death grip on the governmental and legal institutions of Scotland – The Crown. It is a monster of injustice and corruption from which there appears to be no escape. There are no depths to which it will not sink.
Prints are available for sale: https://martinlaird.scot/store/digital-artwork/road-to-deepdale-monster-print/