Read the book: «The Frayed Atlantic Edge»
Copyright
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © David Gange 2019
Cover art by Joe McLaren
Maps by Martin Brown
David Gange asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008225117
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008225124
Version: 2020-06-19
Dedication
For Llinos, who taught me to love big seas and small languages
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: A Journey in the Making
Shetland (July)
Orkney (August)
The Western Isles (September/October)
Sutherland and Assynt (November)
A Mountain Passage (December)
The Inner Sound and Skye (January)
Argyll and Ulster (February/March)
Connacht (April)
Munster (May)
Bardsey to the Bristol Channel (June)
Cornwall (July)
The View from the Sea
Picture Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
PREFACE
THIS JOURNEY INVOLVED arriving, dripping and bedraggled, in dozens of coastal communities. When I set out, I hadn’t imagined just how generous the people whose homes and workplaces I dampened would be: without such openness, particularly evident on small islands, this project would never have got far. I learned as much through long evenings of discussion as through the other three resources on which the book is based: libraries, archives and the observation of land and sea from the kayak. It wasn’t just the spectacles of sea cliffs, nor the dramas of ocean weather, but also those social occasions that meant I ended the journey with greatly intensified enthusiasm for scattered Atlantic islands like Foula, Barraigh and Thoraí.
Such conversations worked to strengthen the conviction I set out with: that British and Irish histories are usually written inside out, perpetuating the misconception that today’s land-bound geographies have existed forever. Despite the efforts of authors such as Barry Cunliffe, whose Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (2001) inspired much debate among historians, the significance of coasts is consistently underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of their histories is rarely explored.
This book sets out to put some of that imbalance right, showing not only that Atlantic geographies have been crucial to British and Irish life but that they continue to be so. It is structured by region, because part of its purpose is to show how similar ingredients of wind, waves and rock have been transformed into entirely different island and coastal cultures by the divergent processes of history. The chapters were written in order, while I travelled, so my process of learning runs in parallel to the reader’s experience of moving through the book: burrowing gradually deeper into the many ways in which the shorelines are significant. This allows the narrative to follow a trajectory in which the opening chapters evoke the act of kayaking, establishing sounds, smells, sights and stories of the venerable tradition of travelling at sea level. Only gradually does the balance shift towards historical research, literary criticism and argument, revealing the implications of new perspectives picked up through slow travel.
The final section, ‘The View from the Sea’, completes that transition. It switches to a different register as it unpicks historical significance from the chapters. It argues that the whole shape of British history is transformed by granting Atlantic coasts and islands a central rather than marginal role. The implications of key historical moments are problematised or reversed. The so-called Enlightenment, for instance, might best be interpreted as the triumph of a few cities – Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Birmingham – at the expense of other regions. For coastal communities it was the beginning, and the cause, of a lengthy dark age. In contrast, much of what were once referred to as Dark Ages had been eras of great coastal strength and enlightenment, when the intellectual traditions of the Irish Atlantic were the most advanced in Europe. Such reversals abound. The widely celebrated Education Acts of 1870 and 1872 were unmitigated disasters for many coastal zones, while the grim economic recession of the 1970s saw an island renaissance unprecedented for two centuries. All British history looks different when inland cities are made remote by seeing them from Atlantic shorelines, and the most powerful element of a year’s journey by kayak was immersion in that changed perspective.
As this suggests, it’s not just historical narratives but also familiar geographies that these waters erode. I began the journey believing I was travelling down a western edge of Britain and Ireland, and assuming I knew what that implied. But these Atlantic shores were long connected as closely to Reykjavik, Bilbao, or the Moroccan port of Safi as to London. There are echoes of Belize on Orkney shores and Nigerian history laps the coast of County Mayo. Communities at the edges were interlinked. Semi-detached from their land masses, they belonged to ocean. This is evident in the artefacts archaeologists unearth and the stories of shoreline encounters. Rare are the coastal regions that haven’t woven the Armada into their folklore or looked to Scandinavia for ocean-going expertise. Scarcer still are the regions that didn’t gain or lose from imperial encounters. These connections are just as clear in the foliage of British and Irish cliffs as in the records of trade or warfare: unfamiliar plants I sat or slept among often turned out to be a misplaced Spanish saxifrage or Norwegian liverwort.
Lerwick (Shetland) and Kinsale (County Cork) have been absent from London-centred histories of the British and Irish isles not because they lacked significance but because they operated in other geographic frames from Gravesend, Grimsby or Dublin: they saw different migrations of people, animals, goods and spores and seeds. At its most extreme, this phenomenon means that some sites on the Irish Atlantic reveal more evidence of historic sea links to China than to England. As I travelled, I found my preconceptions about Britain crumbling, destabilised from within by the diversity of coastal regions and from without by the stories shared by vast Atlantic littorals. Although the local specificities predominate in much of this book (being usually more obvious from a kayak) it was the moments when immense Atlantic geographies intruded that did most to challenge my mental landscape: one purpose of the final chapter is to bring these issues into focus, exploring what visions of the British Isles might emerge at their shorelines.
Just as the most significant histories often happen on the edges of the islands, the most interesting phenomena regularly occur in the margins between disciplines. Exploring past lives on coastlines meant reaching for ideas from geologists, ecologists, naturalists, geographers, anthropologists, artists, poets, novelists or musicians more often than historians. Seabirds, fish and species of seaweed play roles as significant in this book as politicians or their institutions: they had as great an effect on past shoreline lives, and the importance of island pasts today almost always relates both to ecology and community. Talking to naturalists, ecologists, archaeologists and artists was a highlight of the process of researching this book and I’d love to think that such lines of communication might one day be wedged more permanently open.
These ideas are the big themes reserved for the end of the book: conclusions drawn from the stories of exploring these phenomenal coastlines by kayak. That exploration – the biggest adventure I’ve ever undertaken – predominates for the next eleven chapters. Paddling beneath huge cliffs and across racing tides produced material that suits media other than prose. Though I didn’t dare risk any expensive equipment, I carried a small camera to sea with me in order to take the photographs in this book. But, especially at the start of the journey, I took thousands of pictures. There is therefore a web resource to accompany the project at www.frayedatlanticedge.com. That site includes a photographic record to accompany each chapter, one or two short films, and further practical information for anyone wishing to paddle or research these coasts. It also contains links to the scholarly articles in which I explored the reasoning behind the project, and hosts an extensive bibliography. It is hoped that any reader who, after reading this book, seeks further immersion in the Atlantic waters of Britain and Ireland will find something of interest there.
INTRODUCTION
A Journey in the Making
I REMEMBER CLEARLY the moment I decided to embark on this journey. I’d shaken myself awake from a miserable night. The sun was yet to rise, but the view to the east was already full of promise. With overnight rain departed, a band of rich gold separated dark blue sky from the black silhouettes of mountains. The purring of curlews had begun to restore a sense of warm, active life to this cold, damp world and fulmars were wheeling over the water as the last of the rough night’s swell died away.
The previous afternoon, I’d kayaked to one of my favourite places: Eilean a’ Chlèirich. This was my last night outdoors for some time, and although a short squall was forecast, I felt the need to venture somewhere memorable. Eilean a’ Chlèirich means ‘Priest Island’. This single square mile of rock is uninhabited, and hemmed in by cliffs and boulders which prevent even small yachts from landing. Its upper slopes are home to storm petrels and other creatures that don’t cohabit well with humans. The most remote of the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, Chlèirich is a final, bleak, landfall before the Outer Hebrides.
Setting off from a small calm bay on the Coigach Peninsula, I’d made my way past the largest Summer Isles and along a chain of rocks that rise like wrecks from the sea. The wind had risen sharply as I battled waves on the final crossing and, with arms and thighs aching, it had been a great relief to reach water sheltered by the south-eastern cliffs of the isle. I clambered up the coast while pale November light gave way to storm clouds, and wandered above a patchwork of tiny lochans to the island’s northern point, where spray from a gathering swell soon rose higher than the cliffs. Because of the approaching wall of rain, I couldn’t see the distant islands to the west, so I settled into my waterproof sleeping bag (figure 1.1), with pinkish sandstone boulders for shelter and my back to the weather. I was soon enmeshed in a drift net of wetness: salt-tasting rain seemed to enclose me from every compass point. My memory of those hours is defined by sweet smells of decaying island earth.
In the morning I blinked water from my eyelashes and stumbled to my feet. I was gazing downwards as I stood, carefully nudging the sleeping bag so the water on its shell didn’t spill inside. Then I looked up, and the moment was heart-stopping. I must have turned around four or more times before I gained enough composure to choose a direction to look in. The storm had cleansed the skies so completely that every feature of the seascape was clear and perfect. A vast shattered coastline stretched on all sides: the tattered ocean-gouged fringe of northern Britain.
I was taken aback by the diversity of this view. To the west, the horizon was a long stuttering line of Outer Hebrides. The first rays of sun caught Harris’ highest hill, An Clisham (An Cliseam); its silhouette, which should have been featureless at this distance, was bright with golden-brown glens and ridges. In the foreground, the Shiant Isles, puffin-covered in summer, rose like great bronze whalebacks from the sea. And above the northernmost point of the chain of islands was a stretch of blank horizon that marked open sea till Iceland. To the north-east, the coastline ran towards Cape Wrath, but as the mainland reached its terminus the land refused to give way: some of the weirdest peaks imaginable – Stac Pollaidh, Suilven (Sùilebheinn), Quinag (A’ Chuinneag), Foinaven (Foinne Bheinn) – erupt like deformed molars on a vast fossil jawbone. These strange corroded towers were once sandbanks in a huge riverbed when this region was on the opposite side of the globe from the rest of Britain’s land mass. There are many miles between each peak – long winding drives along narrow one-track roads – but the view from this spot concertinaed them together. The mountains to the south-east are less disorienting: where the northern peaks such as Suilven (‘the Pillar’) and Quinag (‘the Milk Churn’) challenge every preconception of what a mountain is, the hills to the south, such as An Teallach (‘the Forge’), epitomise the pointed peaks and sweeping ridges a child might draw. These tips stand out from a skyline stretching via the magical Torridon range to the Isle of Skye in the south.
Although I’ve stood at 10,000 feet on peaks in the French, Swiss and Japanese Alps, the vistas from the rough knuckle at the centre of this tiny islet felt like the most expansive I’ve known. The British Isles are undoubtedly diminutive, yet this magical morning made me realise that how small they really are depends on how you measure them. The straight-line distance from Land’s End in the south to John O’Groats in the north is just 603 miles (shorter than some roads in a state such as Texas or Ontario). Yet the first hundred miles of longitude on the mainland’s north-west coast hold thousands of miles of coastline, with mountains, bays, estuaries, cliffs and islets that would repay a lifetime’s exploration. Looking from Chlèirich at hills I’d climbed and stretches of coast I’d kayaked showed me that all I knew from two decades of wandering was mere fragments of something huge. I wondered what it would take to change that, and it was in that moment that the need to undertake this journey was born.
A few hours later I stopped in the port town of Ullapool. My mind had raced all morning as I tried to work out whether the plan I’d hatched could work. I headed for the town’s two bookshops and filled three bags with reading that might help me think this through: tales of travel, natural histories, poetry, and accounts of Highland and Island life. Then I sat in a café, overlooking the pier from which ferries embark for the Western Isles, and began to consider the realities of what I was dreaming up. The trip couldn’t be continuous: with a little planning, I could arrange my life to free up two weeks of each month, but the rest would have to be spent fulfilling responsibilities back in the English Midlands. This discontinuity would have two distinct advantages. It could spread the journey across the seasons, revealing every facet of the turning year on these weather-ravaged coastlines. It would also allow me to equip myself to tackle each stretch in the ways that suit it best: where one month I’d sit low in the water and power my kayak through the waves, the next I could don crampons to cross snow-clad peaks, or fix ropes to rock and descend into networks of mines and caves.
Over brunch in Ullapool I used my phone to search for things that could help me. The journey would require a large expedition kayak (five feet longer than the one I’d used that morning) to handle rough seas and hold gear for several days (figure 1.2). But the broken landscapes of the far north also made me look for a boat I could carry. I found a two-kilogram packraft: an inflatable vessel that could sit at the bottom of my rucksack until asked to carry me across a loch or along a stretch of river. Travelling like this I could spend my nights on islets and peaks with sight lines to the ocean and aim for 24/7 contact with the coastline.
Five hours later than intended I began the nine-hour drive south, but the sense of excitement was still building. Over the following months I renegotiated my life, striking deals and compromises to buy me time to travel. I rearranged my books so that the most accessible shelves in the house held only reading for this venture. I brushed up my learner’s Welsh, and began to acquire a little Gaelic, so I’d have some access to more than just English writing on these coasts. I mounted a two-metre-tall map on the wall of the room I work in and started to annotate its edge. I chose my starting place and date: Out Stack (a skerry north of Shetland) on 30 June. And I began to contact people who might help me on my way.
I’m a historian by profession: I teach courses and write books about nineteenth-century Britain. Like the work of many historians, my writing has focused, so far, on a few urban centres: it has done no justice to geographical diversity. I knew from past journeys that it would be hard to imagine places with histories, cultures and current conditions more different than, say, Shetland and the Isle of Barra, yet to many people these ocean-bound extremities might as well be interchangeable (and neither is likely even to be mentioned in a history book with ‘Britain’ in its title). This journey would be a quest to comprehend and articulate the intense particularity of the places on this coastline; in undertaking such a project I felt I could become a more rounded and responsible historian of the British Isles.
This is an especially significant task because the predominance of southern and central England enshrined in so much writing on Britain is a relatively recent development. It’s not all that strange a fact, for instance, that in 1700 the island of St Kilda, now habitually presented as fiendishly remote, was among the most thoroughly documented rural communities in Europe. Metropolitan culture tends to take today’s geography for granted, despite the fact that the British Isles were turned inside out by roads and rail. Mainland arteries – the Irish M8, the English M1 and even the West Coast Mainline – now run through the centres of their land mass rather than along the external sea roads that predominated till the railway boom of the 1830s. Since what would once have been miraculous – instantaneous communication across any earthly distance – has become ordinary, and what was once ordinary – travel by boat across a stretch of fierce sea – seems miraculous, attempts to empathise across centuries falter. Coasts and islands carry very different meanings than they once possessed: associations with remoteness and emptiness have replaced links with commerce and communication. This was part of the reason why travelling these coastlines felt like a way of thinking myself into the world of people I write and teach about.
But there were other reasons why this felt right. The belief that wandering the landscape is a productive technique for historical research is not unusual, or at least it didn’t used to be. The links between historians and the outdoors were once strong. In the 1920s, for instance, G. M. Trevelyan wrote his classic histories of Britain while wandering Hadrian’s Wall. Trevelyan soon became patron and champion of the many outdoors organisations that were all the rage after 1930. The links between tramping the countryside and doing history were still so clear in 1966 that when the Oxford historian Keith Thomas noted the rise of new kinds of scientific historian, he described ‘the computer’ replacing ‘the stout boots’ worn by ‘advanced historians’ of preceding decades.1 Simon Schama wrote some of his best work in the 1990s, including a book called Landscape and Memory; at that time he frequently spoke of the ‘archive of the feet’.
I discovered Trevelyan’s writing in my teens, in a small Welsh bookshop on a family holiday, and learning about him was one of the things that set me on the trajectory towards my current life. At that time, part of me wished to work in the nearby national park, and part to write histories. Trevelyan made the two seem not just compatible but complementary. From that moment on, it was thinking of history as something that happened in negotiations between humans and hills, valleys, rain, wind and sea that drove me to be a historian. And I seem to have assumed from the beginning that reading and reflection are best done outdoors.
In those early years, while a pupil at the local comprehensive on the edge of the Peak District known as the Dark Peak, I’d wander past pubs and churches, new factories and old mills and onto the moors, where I’d try to memorise the physics formulae I needed for exams (only occasionally would short-eared owls or golden plovers distract me so much they’d write off a day’s revision). My life over the two decades since then has been a quest for better ways to escape into the wild to think. From the modest moorland of the Peak District, to Scotland’s least-peopled places and the hostile grandeur of Alpine ranges, my travels have extended and my attitudes to nature, work and literature become increasingly entwined. Now, whenever there’s something I need to learn in detail I pack a bag with books and choose an atmospheric place to wander: I spend days over an unhurried journey and sit reading amid dramatic landscape. I’ve come to think that, with food and drink to spare, there are few luxuries more profound than getting well and truly lost for days among mountains. Staying still with a book for hours is also an excellent way to experience nature: a movement in the corner of the eye becomes a stoat between the boots; a sudden, startling noise is ptarmigan clattering onto nearby rocks; strange exhalations are a passing pod of porpoises. I have seen things, through this stillness, that I never would have otherwise: the most candid behaviour of otters and the preening habits of the little auk (figures 1.3 and 1.4). The associations this has created can be incongruous: Thomas Hardy and sea eagles, or Rebecca Solnit and long-tailed skuas. But it is this practice of reading, thinking and writing outdoors that has begun to hone the habits that make a year of journeying feel like the ultimate source of reflection and growth.
Many of the places this journey took me are now more free from human habitation than at any time since prehistory. The west has beautiful coastlines and wild ones, but even their remotest fragments are layered with diverse and difficult histories: they are sites of human default not design, shaped by past people but now reclaimed by nature. In the darkest spell of this story, the imperialism of nineteenth-century Lowlanders drove Highland and coastal communities inland, across the sea and to the grave. Part of the community of the island of St Kilda ended up in Melbourne, Australia; the people of Cork formed new Ontario communities; Welsh-speaking settlements were founded in the pampas and mountains of southern Argentina. The stories of these coastlines have stretched across the globe, revealing facets of Britain’s imperial past and present very different from those seen from metropolitan London or Glasgow.
During my morning on Eilean a’ Chlèirich I sought evidence of the people who once eked out livings in this most uncompromising spot. At first, wading through thick, ungrazed foliage, the island felt largely untouched. But I gradually began to see hints of human history shrouded by the plants: chunks of cut stone and roots of an old wall. The earliest human traces here are vestiges of stone circles from a time before written records: millennia over which imagination has freedom to roam. From a later age are scant remnants of Chlèirich’s time as an early Christian retreat; this was the period that gave the island its name yet it is unrecorded in any document from the time. Then there are foundations from structures built by a nineteenth-century outlaw whose banishment from the mainland was recorded in just one short sentence of Gaelic prose. But the island’s stones only really intersect with literary record with traces of the occupation by 1930s naturalists whose brief stay was immortalised in Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years (1940).
Barely anything of any of these people’s endeavours stands above ankle height, yet Chlèirich is layered with past activity, where each successive wave of habitation has been so limited in scale that it hasn’t erased previous histories. Wandering its hollows and hillocks is therefore a historian’s or archaeologist’s fantasy. Indeed, what made Chlèirich feel wild was not just wind, rain and the sounds of the sea, but the sense of being amid remnants of human action that had been conclusively defeated by weather. Humans toiled here centuries ago and my back when I slept had been laid against their labour: the rocks I nestled among had been worked by people, before wind, rain, ice and lichen reclaimed them for the wild. Although the British Isles have no untouched wilderness, their wildness is all the more remarkable for its entanglement with history: this journey would be an exercise in the art of interpreting the intertwining.
In that sense, my plan was an experiment. I hoped to see what could be learned by travelling slowly along these coastlines with an eye attuned to both the natural world and the remains of the past. The decades over which I’ve wandered here are long enough to begin to see changes and to ask what will become of these landscapes. The way in which some coastal regions were emptied of permanent populations now contrasts their growth as sites of leisure. Mountain paths grow wider and un-pathed regions fewer, coastal walking routes are extended and advertised in increasingly lavish brochures. I’d been spending nights on mountains for several years before I happened across someone doing the same, but now the experience isn’t uncommon: in the winter before this journey I even slept on a Cairngorm summit from which the only visible artificial light was the pinprick of a head torch on a distant mountain. Thanks to social media and political devolution, communities from Applecross to Anglesey pioneer new ways of living well while promoting and protecting the needs of nature. The languages of the small rural communities at the edges of the islands – particularly Welsh and Gaelic – grow in ways that once seemed impossible; lost languages like Norn have vocal advocates. ‘Small language’ networks of co-operation and exchange now link Cornwall and Wales with Breton and Galician cultures in ways that echo historic bonds along seaboards. Lynx might soon be restored to a few remote forests just as white-tailed eagles have been returned to seas and skies. Yet even the eagles are still a source of contention: beloved by tourists and naturalists they are resented, even sometimes poisoned and shot, by those who see them threaten livelihoods in farming, field sports or fishing. This book is therefore not just the story of a journey, or an exploration of past and present on the fringes of the British Isles, but a reflection on how far, and in what directions, our current interactions with the coast are reshaping this north-east Atlantic archipelago.
In attempting to tell this aspect of the story I wanted to rely on more than my own experience, so in the months leading up to my journey I made use of every professional and personal connection I had. I travelled to the University of the Highlands and Islands for events on coastal history, meeting, for the first time, the unofficial ‘historian laureate’ of Scottish coastal communities, Jim Hunter. I contacted artists and musicians, including the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (an old friend of the family, who once taught me to play his Orkney-inspired music, but who passed away just weeks before my journey began). And I made use of my role as a teacher: I acquired dissertation students interested in the history and folklore of western Scotland, Wales and Ireland and wrote these places into my courses.
One class about these coasts was especially instructive. This was a seminar on ‘Film and History’ for the University of Birmingham’s MA in Modern British Studies which I taught with a historian of the twentieth century, Matt Houlbrook. We chose early films of St Kilda and the North Sea as the case studies for our students. They began by watching the first moving picture of Britain’s most famous small island: Oliver Pike’s St Kilda, Its People and Birds (1908). Then they watched four films from the 1930s, including John Ritchie’s footage of the evacuation, and Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937) which was set on Kilda but filmed in Shetland. We then chose three documentaries of the eastern coastline – John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) and Granton Trawler (1934) as well as Henry Watt’s North Sea (1939) – each of which places trawlers and fishing at its heart.
The effect of putting these films side by side is striking. They show the process of these coasts being mythologised. By the early twentieth century, the North Sea had come to stand for shipping, industry and progress: its early appearances on film were commissioned by the General Post Office to advertise the vibrancy of fishing fleets and the productive potential of the ocean. Trawlermen haul herring by the thousand from the waves: despite gales and storms, these icons of modern masculinity demonstrate human dominance over nature. Film-makers experiment with advanced techniques of sound and vision as they seek to portray the striving and struggling that make a modern factory of the sea. By contrast, the west in these films signals detachment and underdevelopment. Its communities hold out against terrible odds with only vestigial industries to aid them. A lone woman sits at a spinning wheel the same as the one her grandmother’s grandmother used. A man is lowered from a cliff, draped in a sheet: he waits patiently, alone, to snag a guillemot which can then be salted for meagre winter sustenance. Children scatter, panicked by the strange sight of a camera and cameraman. Our students saw that when watching the east-coast trawlermen the viewer feels like the audience at a performance; when watching films of west-coast crofters and fisherfolk they were left with a feeling more like voyeurism.
The contrasts that appear in these films are fictions. They don’t portray these places as they exist today nor as they were when the films were made; still less do they depict a world that could have been recognised in earlier ages. Yet stereotypes like these are repeated endlessly. Twenty-first-century poets are forced to work as hard as Norman MacCaig did in 1960 to remind readers that Gaelic verse is often small and formal: grandiose romanticism and the wild red-haired Gael live in lowland imaginations, not in west-coast glens and mountains. But I can’t pretend that engrained romantic imagery doesn’t still colour my own, lowlander’s, obsession with these Atlantic fringes. Such notions are resilient to short spells on icy crags or a night in the ghostly remains of a cleared coastal township. But could they survive this journey’s long immersion in these regions? I hoped to find my imagination changed by travel: the mists of Celtic twilight dispelled perhaps, with the delicate textures of mundane and everyday history appearing from the fog. This would not, I hoped, be a tale of disenchantment, but of changed enchantment, in which the rich worlds of real human beings exceeded (as any historian will say they always do) the hazy types of myth. So I knew, when I set out, what I wanted from this journey. But if journeys always turned out how we planned, and provided answers only to the questions we knew to ask, there’d be little point in taking them at all.
Let my fingers find
flaws and fissures in the face
of cliff and crag,
allowing feet to edge
along crack and ledge
storm and spume have scarred
for centuries
across the countenance of stacks.
Let me avoid
the gaze of guillemots,
the black-white judgements
of their wings;
foul mouths of fulmars;
cut and slash of razorbills;
gibes of gulls;
and let me keep my balance till
puffins pulse around me
and the glory of gannets
surrounding me like snow-clouds
ascendant in the air
gives me pause for wonder,
grants further cause for prayer.
Donald S. Murray, ‘The Cragsman’s Prayer’ (2008)
SHETLAND
(July)
JULY IS THE TURN of Britain’s year: counterintuitively, perhaps, it’s the true peak of spring. At the month’s onset, auks and waders throng the coastline. Gulls and skuas feast on the eggs and fledglings of smaller birds, while lumbering monsters like the basking shark rise from the ocean’s depths to predate the algal bloom. In this month of frenzy, travellers by kayak can’t be sure of an onshore place to sleep, however much they scrutinise the map: when a landing is met by chittering terns the only option is to slide back onto the sea. But by July’s end, seabirds slip the leash that briefly tethered them to the land: wax becomes wane in the glut of coastal life. Winds rise, then temperatures fall, as species after species leaves, till every crag that was once a thick white fudge of feathers and excrement is flayed clean by gales.
I spent my first night on Shetland high on some of Britain’s most dramatic cliffs and north of every road and home in the British Isles (figure 2.1). All night, seabirds returned to ledges below, gradually ceasing their daytime cackle; I watched the last light of a sun that barely set gleam on the backs of fulmars and puffins as they wheeled in to roost. When I woke (a mere three hours after closing my eyes) a fat skua sat feet away on the storm-stunted grass. It stared as though keeping watch, with feathers only occasionally ruffled by a hint of breeze. This morning could barely be a better one to begin my journey: in this most wind-lashed extremity of Britain all was sunshine and stillness.
Shetland felt like a fitting place to start. It embodies July’s double nature more fully than anywhere else in the British Isles. In the early summer, ‘the aald rock’, as these islands are affectionately known, is a cauldron of life as rich and distinctive as any of the world’s celebrated archipelagos, from the Galapagos to the Seychelles; its species – whether wrens, voles, moths or mosses – have evolved along unique trajectories. This month’s journey will bid farewell to the fecundity of spring with a carnival of screeching, mewling life of which this morning’s seabirds are just the start. The descent into winter in the Scottish mountains, when every plant or creature seems miraculous, will be dramatic.
Within an hour, early on the last day of June, I’ll have paddled to Out Stack: a small rock that is the northernmost scrap of Britain. I’ll turn. When I shift the sun from my right shoulder to my left, a journey that has filled my mind for months will begin. I wonder whether I should have some ritual ready: it’ll feel odd for the act that begins this venture to be a paddle stroke like all the others. But I can’t think of a ceremony that wouldn’t seem ridiculous performed, alone, at sea. So I paddle north to my starting point, passing up a long, fjord-like voe called Burra Firth. This is lined to the east with Shetland’s characteristic rich-red granite crags and stacks. To the west, a contorted, steely gneiss is shot through with quartz that, like the water, glints with silvery light. All the cliffs are swathed in a fleeting green: grass, moss and sea pinks cling to fissures in the rock through the short Shetland summer.
Reaching the mouth of Burra Firth was a decisive moment. If I turned right, around the red headland of Saxa Vord, I’d travel coasts sheltered from raw westerlies by the land mass of Britain. I’d write a book about the North Sea. But turning left is to choose the more austere Atlantic, its swell built through 2,000 miles of open ocean, and its coasts ravaged by some of the most powerful and unpredictable forces on the earth’s surface. In her unparalleled trilogy of books on seashores, the Pennsylvanian Rachel Carson makes this coast a case study precisely because of the violence of waves which sometimes break, she says, with a force of two tons per square foot.1 For now I was still shielded from swell by a long line of rocks, some with ominous names like ‘Rumblings’. These outcrops are usually known simply by the name of the largest, Muckle Flugga, which is topped by a large, precarious Victorian lighthouse. Out Stack is the last and least imposing of the group.
Only later would I learn the need to ignore names like Rumblings and Out Stack, as late impositions on the landscape. It’s a signal of Shetland’s long separateness that the islands as their people know them are named differently from how they appear on maps: Out Stack, for instance, is merely a garbling of ‘Otsta’, a name still used by Shetland fishermen. These historic names of Shetland were collected and mapped for the first time in the 1970s, and those who undertook the task referred to the lived tradition they recorded as ‘100,000 echoes of our Viking past’. Muckle Flugga is among the names that reveal the resilience of local terms most clearly: for a century, officialdom imposed the bland ‘North Unst’ on this rock, but in 1964 gave in to the Shetlandic name which – derived from the Norse for large, steep island – speaks more eloquently of geography, history and Shetland’s singularity.
Despite the shelter of the skerries, I proceeded south from Otsta with caution: as the sea spills round Britain’s apex, strong tides can change a boat’s course and sweep it into offshore waters. Just as the Atlantic breaks against these cliffs with unusual force, the tides round Shetland and Orkney are some of the most treacherous in the world. These forces, because they draw in floods of nutrients and prevent disturbance, are the skerries’ greatest asset: they permit whales to feed and seabirds to breed.
On this still day, at the height of spring, this fecundity was spectacular. It felt like a stronghold: a vision, perhaps, of how all these shores might have been before human action ravaged them. By the time I left the firth, I was no longer alone but surrounded by life, and the new entourage that whirled around me provided the sense of occasion I’d thought impossible. A moment that could have been anticlimactic became entirely magical. A long string of gannets, slowly thickening, had begun to issue from the southernmost skerry of Muckle Flugga. Within minutes, hundreds of these huge birds – with wingspans of almost two metres – formed like a cyclone overhead. They circled clockwise, from ten to a hundred feet high, tracing a circuit perhaps a quarter-mile wide, each individual moving quickly from a speck in the distance to loom overhead (figure 2.2). Moments later, dozens of great skuas (known to Shetlanders as bonxies) joined the fray, pestering the gannets (solans) and drawing the only squawks from this otherwise voiceless flock. Black guillemots (tysties) and puffins (nories) flew by too, but took no part in the larger choreography, plotting small straight lines across the expanding circle.
More perhaps than any other bird, gannets evoke the bleak world of seaweed, guano, gales, crags and mackerel that sweeps north and west of the British Isles. Spending summer in dense communities, they colonise the steepest and most isolated elements of the Atlantic edge, building a world that looks like an oddly geometrical metropolis. Their chicks are known as squabs or guga, and dozens of these black-faced balls of silver fluff were visible on Muckle Flugga as I passed. During July the guga turn slowly black and leap from their ledges into a journey south that begins with a swim: they jump before they can fly. The young birds then make vast foraging flights, gradually securing a place on the edge of a colony that might be hundreds of miles from their birthplace. Then, they’ll perch year after year in their tiny fiefdom, unmoved by everything the weather of Shetland, Faroe or Iceland can throw at them. I could feel no sense of identity with full-grown gannets, whose command of air and water transcends clumsy human seafaring; yet the guga’s hare-brained, ill-prepared flop into the sea made me imagine it as an emblem of this journey’s running jump into an alien ocean world. If I were ever to give my boat a name (and at least one Shetlander I met was taken aback, even offended, that I hadn’t) I thought an excellent choice would be Guga.
Despite the infrequency of their squawks, the noise the gannets made as they swirled above was extraordinary. The sound of millions of feathers scything the air was enough to drown the ocean. This was the first time I’d considered the importance of hearing to the kayaker: unable to listen for dangers over the sound of the gannets, such as breakers over barriers in the sea, I felt shorn of a tool critical to navigation. And the thousand shadows of these powerful creatures created just the slightest sense of threat. Indeed, besides a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to their sagacity and storge (the familial fondness they show towards their offspring), humans have rarely associated gannets with anything benign. Their appearances in art and literature are shaped by their most characteristic act: the fish-skewering dive from height into the depths. Wings folded back, the angelic, cruciform bird becomes a thrusting scalpel. This is, according to the leading naturalist’s guide to the species, ‘the heavyweight of the plunge-divers of the world’ (and the gannet’s evocative power is such that even this scientific monograph can’t resist noting the bird’s ‘icy blue’ stare).2 In the 1930s, an island joke held that plans were afoot for the canning of ‘fird’ (gannets tasting like a cross of fish and bird) but that no tin could hold ‘the internal violence from the northern isle’: the gannet had come to stand for the storms of its northern outposts as well as its own oceanic stink and sudden plummet.3 And the shift from soaring beauty to abrupt violence has long been a theme to build macabre visions on; as I moved beneath the avian storm cloud I couldn’t keep the most sinister of gannet poems, Robin Robertson’s ‘The Law of the Island’, from needling its way into my head. In this beautifully distilled poem, an island outlaw is lashed to a barely floating hunk of timber, with silver mackerel tied across his eyes and mouth. The islanders who have been his judge and jury push him into the tides:
They stood then,
smoking cigarettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.4
This captures something of the force with which these bright birds, wreathed in shining bubbles, pierce the gloomy depths. Yet real gannets are ocean survivors, not kamikaze warriors, so there was no need for empathy with the island outlaw, and never a Hitchcockian threat in this great wheeling.
In fact, the leisurely hour I spent in the sun at Muckle Flugga would be the last moment of safety for some time. As I began the journey south down the island of Unst I hit a wall of breakers and swell that beat against the most preposterous cliffs I’d ever looked up at. With astonishing precision, fulmars traced the profiles of complex waves that seemed entirely unpredictable to me. Crests soon hit the boat from both sides, forcing its narrow bow beneath pirling water until its buoyancy saw it surge up through the foam. The bow would then smack down – diving through air where there had just been wave – into a sucking surface of receding sea. Twice in the first half-hour an unforeseen peak forced me sideways and into the ocean and I had to flick my hips to roll back upright, wrenching the paddle round to twist my body out from underwater (I was desperately glad of the previous week, spent practising short journeys in surf off North Uist with the most foolhardy kayaker I’ve ever met, my partner, Llinos – figure 2.3). As the last of my gannet escort returned to their pungent white promontories, I felt my sense of distance from everyone and everything keenly. I wouldn’t see another human today, not even a silhouette on the cliffs that tower above. Even if someone was looking down, the roiling stretch of intervening ocean meant we might as well have been a world apart.
Passing down Unst was the hardest day’s travel I’d ever done. In the evening I pulled into the shelter of a small cove, Westing Bay, with the sensation that I’d walked repeatedly through a brine car wash. I set out my sleeping bag on an islet called Brough Holm which, like so many tiny Shetland skerries, has a ruin attesting to productive purpose long ago. Covered in golden lichen, the remnants of this böd (fishing store) stand among deep-yellow bird’s-foot trefoil which gives way suddenly to kelp and bladderwrack: a colourful world of greens, gold and brown that was made still richer by the evening light. The remnants of the Iron Age and Viking sites of Underhoull commanded the landward horizon, with a vantage along tomorrow’s path, which would take me across a major sea road of the Norse world: the sound that separates the island of Unst from its southern neighbour, Yell, was once the easiest route between Norway and conquest.
Safe from the sea, I shuddered at the thought of what today’s journey would have been like in less forgiving weather. I spent sunset drying out while reading about the small boats of Shetland, and thinking of centuries of families who’d rowed these coasts in all conditions.5 Far from an anticlimax, this dramatic day felt like a grand fanfare to see me on my way. Although it would be a while before I learned to sleep well in July’s perpetual light, I did doze for more than three hours that night, mostly unbothered by the outraged squeak of an oystercatcher each time a gull strayed close.
By some kind of miracle, the calm weather in which I set out held for days, with only brief early-morning interludes of cloud and breeze. I was able to travel what should have been the most challenging stage of my journey with few hardships beyond some sunburn round the ears. The two rolls in the maelstrom round north Unst were my only submarine adventures. Covering an average of thirty-two miles a day – not as the crow flies, but in and out of gorgeous inlets with imposing headlands – I still had hours to read or hang around at sea when gannets dived or porpoise fins rolled above the waves. In the orange evenings and white mornings I stretched my legs across the islands I’d chosen to sleep on and nosed round their ruins (I’ve never been anywhere with so many abandoned buildings from so many centuries). I began to think up questions for present-day islanders and for the past Shetlanders whose lives persist in the archives. But this still idyll, I had to remind myself, could not last.
The sensible way to undertake a journey along Britain’s Atlantic coast would have been from south to north. With prevailing sou’westerlies at my back I would have been working with, rather than against, the weather. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. While planning this trip in moments snatched from university teaching, familiar English and Welsh coastlines felt like the wrong kind of start. If I was to make sense of the Atlantic coastline, I had to begin by disorienting myself with total immersion in the seascapes and histories of a place I still knew mainly through clichés of longboats, horned helmets, sea mist and gales. This place is the seam between the Atlantic and North Sea, where waves rule Britannia and always have. It is a coast of staggering diversity as well as a thriving cultural hub: those coasts and that culture are thoroughly intermixed.
The bond between Shetlanders and their extraordinary tradition of small boats is rightly renowned. There are many Shetland dialect poems whose message boils down to the principle that a boat is more than a means of transport:
Take time; name dy boat weel,
fur du’s
naming a wye o life.
Du’s
naming a attitude.6
Most families in nineteenth-century Shetland had a ‘fourareen’: a small, wooden vessel for inshore fishing and ferrying supplies (known as ‘flitting’). Shetland’s ‘national poet’, Thomas Alexander Robertson, who wrote under the name Vagaland, popularised an old Faroese proverb to sum up the ethos of this family vessel. This is now well known across Shetland:
Fragments of battered timber:
teak, larch, enduring oak,
but from them may be fashioned
keel, hassen, routh and stroke.
A homely vessel maybe,
we build as best we can,
to take us out of bondage:
bound is the boatless man.
Vagaland was born in 1909 in Westerwick, a tiny village on the Atlantic coast. Around this settlement are impressive drongs (the Shetland term for sea stacks). These are tall needles and prickly ridges, forming cauldrons in which the incoming Atlantic beats and swirls. Vagaland had reason to hate the sea: his father drowned here before young ‘Tammy Alex’ was a year old. But, like so many Shetlanders, he found poetry in boats, coasts, and rows or walks along the cliffs of the ‘wast’ side. Vagaland’s verse is full of evocations of small boats in driving gales on ‘da wastern waves’, of constellations reflected in still seas, and of rhythmic songs of sailors and fishermen.
Boats were essential to a family like Vagaland’s because Shetland life and laws necessitated coastal and inter-island links. An inhabitant of tiny Out Skerries, for instance, had rights to flay the peat from the more fertile island of Whalsay: like the people of most small islands, Skerries folk would regularly ‘flit da paet’. This didn’t just imply a single journey, but weeks of seasonal back-and-forth for cutting and turning to prepare the fuel for use. Provision boats, postal boats, fishing boats and social boats negotiated tidal channels in everything but the fiercest storms: many routes I took, between islets and along coasts, were once widely travelled in those ways.
Elegant Shetland-style boats now rest onshore in coves of the Atlantic coast, some in use and others in decay. But their distinctive form has a long and illustrious pedigree. The famous Gokstad ship, excavated in Norway and dated to AD 850, was accompanied by two small vessels that differ little from later Shetland examples. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, parts were bought from Norway to be pieced together on the islands. These Nordic kits made light, narrow and double-ended vessels. They ‘pranced’ on the water; their gunwales (the top edges of a boat’s sides) tapered before the bow and stern so the ship would flex and twist, dancing with the waves in ways that few boats can.
Yet each part of Shetland had different ocean-going needs, so the Shetland style developed local variations. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, three things accelerated this divergent evolution. First, the supply of Norwegian kits was interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, giving Shetlanders new impetus to build for themselves. A generation later, the advent of steamers to the Scottish mainland allowed access to Scotland’s oak and larch, reducing the reliance of this treeless archipelago on Norwegian pine. Between these two changes, the need for vessels more suited to Atlantic conditions became horribly clear: in June 1832, thirty-one boats were wrecked in a sudden storm that lasted five days. A hundred and five fishermen drowned.
Soon there were boatbuilders all over Shetland, experimenting with styles suited to local waters. Of all the islands, Fair Isle – twenty-five miles south of Shetland mainland and twenty-four north of Orkney – maintained Norwegian design features such as the narrow beam and short gunwales most faithfully. Fair Isle craftsmen could rely on tides and isolation to bring enough drift- and wreck-wood to construct much of their yoals. The most specialised and distinctively shaped parts of the boat, however, had to be recycled from old boats into new ones. This explains why Fair Isle vessels were conservative in form.
In the rest of Atlantic Shetland, lightness was slowly sacrificed for ocean-going heft. Adaptation was modest in the south, and more dramatic in the north. At Sumburgh Head (the mainland’s southernmost headland) an extraordinary tidal splurge known as da roost provided excellent fishing, particularly for pollock (called piltocks by Shetlanders). Saithe boats stayed close to shore, but needed to hang on the edge of the tide, controlled by two skilled rowers, while two others ran lines through the racing sea. These boats were shallow and manoeuvrable; each could run da roost more than once a day.
A little further up the Atlantic coast, around the islands of East and West Burra, fishing grounds were sheltered, so there was no need for long, deep or beamy (wide) boats to carry large cargoes on heavy seas. Jetties were rare so boats were dragged up beaches to be kept in noosts (hollows in the ground). Short overland carries could help avoid tidal streams around these small islands and peninsulas. The result was that lightness remained a priority even as boats widened and lost their prancing flex.
The seafaring traditions further north were different. The demands placed on Unst boats grew rapidly after the Napoleonic Wars, partly because of the new confidence and abilities acquired by seamen returning from war, but also due to growing international demand for white fish which swam in grounds so far offshore that, in the words of an eighteenth-century commentator, distance ‘sink[s] the land’. Boatmen began to take the extravagant risks associated with travelling to the edge of the continental shelf and spending nights on the wild fishing grounds known as da haaf. With lines up to three miles long, bristling with a thousand hooks or more, they fished after rowing or sailing thirty to forty miles from home.
The boats that answered these demands were known as sixareens. They were as large and muscular as little wooden rowing boats can get. The width of Norwegian precursors was expanded dramatically, because the new, stupendously long and heavy lines would have dragged a yoal over. Space onboard was such that once lines were laid, fishermen would make a fire in the middle of the boat: they’d light pipes, brew tea, perhaps cook some of the herring caught for ling bait, and pass the time until they began the four-hour task of ‘hailing the lines’. Yet lightness had not been entirely sacrificed: even the most robust sixareen could be carried by its crew of six. Twenty-five to thirty feet from stern to bow, the biggest of these boats was less than double the length of my eighteen-foot kayak. While kayaks are designed to pop back up if submerged and overturned, sixareens were open-topped and undecked. If tipped or swamped they were lost: no one has ever righted a sixareen at sea.
To attempt to comprehend the Shetland experience of the Atlantic I returned to Unst on the first day of really rough weather. By chance, I arrived at the Unst Boat Haven on the same day in July that, 135 years earlier, a storm took fifty lives. Most accounts from survivors of the 1881 storm were chilling but similar word-pictures of still waters turning quickly violent, so that ‘the sea commenced to rain over us’. But one document was different: it asked searching questions about how the characteristics of Shetland sixareens had shaped the tragedy. This text was notes taken in a 1979 interview with Andrew and Danny Anderson who had rowed sixareens in their youth: their father had survived the 1881 storm, but their uncle was killed by it.
I asked a custodian of the Boat Haven, Robert Hughson, whether he knew any more about the family. He recalled Andrew, in his nineties, telling a tale of being caught in sea fog (haa) with his father. As they fished, none of the six on board mentioned the haa or said anything about navigation. But when they completed their tasks, the older men just set to rowing and cruised straight into their noost on Yell. Andrew had a long career as master mariner and captain of one of the first supertankers, but insisted that he never discovered what skill allowed his father’s generation to navigate fog without so much as a compass. Such are the stories the sixareens inspire.
But Andrew wasn’t entirely dewy-eyed for the previous generation of boatmen and boats. In the 1979 interview, he explained why he thought late nineteenth-century changes in sixareen construction magnified the storm’s impact. The heaviest and longest sixareens, he claimed, had lost their key advantage: the lithesomeness of the small Shetland boat. It was impossibly gruelling to prevent these boats being caught side-on to a rough sea. And when a boat plunged into troughs between waves (or ‘seas’ as the brothers always call them), even the best crews lacked time and strength to turn its helm upwards and make it what they called ‘sea loose’ for the next barrage. Andrew and Danny detailed the actions required of boatmen during the phases of a wave; they described main swells forty feet high and the complex action of the intervening lesser swells, as well as how to deal with each. Their imagery is rich: boats reaching messy peaks were ‘running through a sea of milk’. And they detailed the nature of the dangers: a sixareen could take a breaking sea filling it to the gunwales, but failing to clear the boat of water by the next such crest spelled ruin.
Andrew described how in a gale, every captain had a choice. They could raise the sail and run, risking ruin on skerries and being pushed into unsafe landings. On the night of 1881 almost all sixareens took this option because skippers knew they were too heavy to manoeuvre under oar: ten were wrecked. The alternative was what the brothers called ‘laying to’. The smallest sixareen at sea on the night of the storm was the Water Witch, an older boat exactly the same length at the keel as my kayak. This was the only boat whose six oarsmen dared confront the weather. The crew fought a war of attrition with the storm, rowing solidly into the oncoming sea all night to keep the boat from ever yawing side-on to breaking swell. They won a battle with the winds that no other crew could have taken on, and they rowed safely into harbour next morning.
Lying in the path of deep depressions that sweep the Atlantic, Shetland regularly sees beautiful weather for a few short hours, sandwiched between storms and blanket fog: the crew of a sixareen rarely had the luxury of knowing what seas they’d confront. That they risked everything in small wooden craft for modest hauls of fish demonstrates their intrepidness, but also indicates the harsh conditions – both climatic and political – in which islanders often found themselves during times of oppressive governance before the present era of oil-driven affluence. As the Shetlander John Cumming put it,
The free sample has ended.
