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

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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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 boat as transport and fishing tool has shaped so much of Shetland’s history and its culture. We worked the land, true, but all too often a poor, thin land, and in desperate times fishing kept us alive. It made us who we are, a virile, confident, skilled and highly adaptable people with many stories to tell and a unique tongue in which to tell them.⁷

I had assumed, when reading all the admiring writing on the age of the sixareen, that the narrative of Shetland fishing must be one of decline from a golden era when saithe or ling could be plucked from the sea at will, so was surprised to find that the catches of Shetland ships have never been greater than they are today, the technological skill of earlier boatbuilders growing through the age of nets and herring (rather than lines and ling), then steam, motors and engine grease. The question of whether such innovation has been wholly positive – saving lives, but devastating sea life while reducing the number of livings to be made from the sea – is a different matter altogether.

In the serene conditions of the first few days, I felt distinctly un-intrepid, with Shetland’s boating tradition a constant reminder of what humans are capable of when confronting the profound forces of the ocean. I moved slowly on, finding kayaking most pleasurable at night, when winds were lowest and the light dramatic. Between spells of paddling I worked through books I’d picked up in Lerwick, discovering more about the traditions and stories of these islands. Much of this reading was done in the boat, rocking gently on the swell as I rested. Without the splash of constantly rotating paddles, birds and animals often popped up close by, some reacting with surprise but others with curiosity at this bright intrusion in their midst. One gannet appeared within touching distance, allowing me immersion in the infamous ice-blue eye. Like a salt-rimed sea swan, it arched its wings defiantly, but made no sign of moving off. Seated on the waves, the bird’s white tail feathers and black wing tips stretched a surprising distance from its bill (which, slightly hooked, resembled interlocking plates of some long-tarnished metal). Minutes later it launched itself past my bow, bouncing repeatedly on the water and coating my camera lens in sea spray: as elegant as a camel on ice. When I landed, I couldn’t resist a look at the Shetland dialect ‘wird book’ I’d brought along, in case this maritime language had words to evoke things I’d been seeing. To my pleasure, sea spray was brimmastyooch.

It took three leisurely days to pass down Unst then Yell and reach the Shetland mainland. The crossing from Yell to the mainland was the most challenging hour since Unst. With tidal streams running along the sound, around the imposing Ramna Stacks to its south, and then across Fethaland (the finger thrusting out from north mainland), there was no possibility of tackling the whole crossing during the brief slack water between the incoming and outgoing tides. Today, the overnight cloud refused to lift quickly, and a few gusts from the haaf helped amplify my trepidation. But if I had one regret about my paddle down the difficult stretches of Unst and north Yell it was that I’d been too cautious in taking photos: however unsettling it proved to be, I resolved to use my camera even when among the contorted waters at the Stacks (figure 2.4).

The coast of north mainland – the region called Northmavine – is perhaps the most outlandish landscape in Britain: I’d entered a science-fiction vision of an ocean planet. The first headlands, gnarled, grey and viciously gouged by sea, contain some of the oldest rocks in Britain. These soon give way to young red granite pillars and pinnacles, topped with puffins or Arctic terns, which rise directly from the ocean (figure 2.5). Some are smooth and torpedo-like, others prodigiously spiked, and still others have broad bases cut through by arches resembling the galleries of a flooded cathedral. I thought of ‘the living floriations and the leaping arches’ of David Jones’s long poem The Anathemata; in presenting cathedral architecture as an extension of the natural world, Jones insists that nature and culture shouldn’t be seen as separate. Passing through in windless conditions gave me rare access to each dark transept in these enclosed, steep-sided spaces.

These islands are drowned mountains. Six hundred million years ago a vast ‘Caledonian’ range stretched from what is now Norway to the present-day United States. The islands of Shetland were then peaks of Himalayan majesty, before aeons of erosion ground them to their cores. This mountain heritage shapes Shetland’s modern character: the ocean floor falls away from these ‘erosional remnants’ faster than from most of Britain, so that a depth is reached in half a mile that takes a hundred miles to reach from many English shores.⁸ The behaviour of the ocean and the distributions of fish or oil are all defined by those underwater inclines. The first, grey headlands in Northmavine are a rare point at which no remnant of the Caledonian mountains survives, worn down to bedrock laid 3 billion years ago from quartz and feldspar, before laval heat deformed it into the coarse gneiss basement of today. Later, thick sediments settled over this foundation before the clash of continental plates which, through buckling, thrusting and folding, made the Caledonian mountains. When I gazed up at many mainland cliffs, I was staring through cross sections of those ancient hills, with an access to the distant past that is rarely possible from land. The vast variety of rocks – including granite, marble, limestone, gabbro and sandstone – generates the diversity of foliage above. Limestone feeds patches of green munificence, while gneiss and granite starve the ground into blanket bog.

Geological distinctiveness has drawn scientists and artists to Shetland for generations. The driving force behind the great twentieth-century renaissance of Scottish literature, Hugh MacDiarmid, moved here in search of ‘elemental things’, by which he meant old language as well as rocks and the forces that moulded them. In ways that are often neglected, his career was defined by Shetland: it is indicative of the scale of Shetland’s impact on his work that most of pages 385–1,035 in his collected poems were written here. MacDiarmid’s son described the strange scene in their Shetland fisherman’s cottage:

The blazing peat fire, surviving in its grey ashes through the hollow of the night to be fanned fresh with the rising sun, patterned his legs to a tartan-red, and great blisters swelled. But nothing matched the white heat of passionate concentration, the marathon of sleepless nights and days that suddenly ended the sitting around for months indulging in that most deceptive of exercises – thinking.⁹

When MacDiarmid explored these islands – in his own words, ‘rowing about on lonely waters; lying brooding on uninhabited islands’ – he was actually in the company of a geologist (Thomas Robertson) and a fisherman (John Irvine of Saltness). It seems hard to imagine a group better suited to exploring Shetland than these experts in boats, rocks and words. One result of this alliance, MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘On a Raised Beach’, is perhaps the finest evocation of the entanglement of Shetland’s geology, sea and culture ever written. It becomes a kind of metamorphic metaphysical, with a famous opening – ‘All is lithogenesis’ – that rang true as I weaved my way through dramatic features formed from vertical layers of differentially eroded stone. This is a poem that demands to be read aloud, and deliberately snares the reader in thickets of dialect and science: words piled together like stones on the beach.

I dug my MacDiarmid from my dry bag and savoured his insistence that seeing is not enough when we confront Shetland rock:

from optic to haptic and like a blind man run

My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,

Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveloes

Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear

An angle-titch to all you corrugations and coigns.¹⁰

When I reached Ronas Voe, one of the most dramatic sections of this coast, I took a kind of risk I never had before, sleeping at the bottom of tall red cliffs, where a tiny beach of silver-white stones seemed to stretch two yards behind the tide line: just enough space to keep me and my kayak out of ocean. From here, I looked up to Ronas Hill, the highest point in Shetland: a frozen former magma chamber from a huge Caledonian volcano.

Although the days were still fine, this was my first really wet night. Each day so far, I’d stopped kayaking a couple of hours before sleep in the hope of drying out. While at sea, I wear wetsuit boots, neoprene trousers and a thin rash vest that starts out black but after two or three days is mottled silver with salt. Each evening I’d change into warm and comfy land-wear. Sitting back in the sun, with a book by a Shetland author, I’d eat bread and cheese while watching the tides and seabirds pass. But tonight a thin drizzle set in, making the stones of my little beach shiny and slippery.

Rain makes decisions that would otherwise be of little consequence, such as when to change clothes or how to pack the sleeping bag, into significant moments when mistakes can lead to days of discomfort. I had just one set of land clothes (and nothing has ever dried in the hold of a kayak). So tonight, I rushed straight from my kayak gear into the sleeping bag and went to sleep early. Dampness increased as the rain thickened. True to form, my waterproof sleeping bag let nothing in for hours until I was woken by a thin trickle of water rolling down my neck and pooling above my collarbone. I was glad to be sheltered from the wind that had picked up, but decided that the best chance of comfort was to make a very early start.

This was the day I’d reach St Magnus Bay: a bowl in the side of Shetland, fifteen miles across, 140 metres deep and forty miles along the involuted edge I’d paddle. Many of the most dramatic remnants of Shetland’s tumultuous geological past line its circumference. I decided to take my time over the first stage of this journey, passing down the stupendous Eshaness cliffs before landing in a cove at a tiny settlement called Stenness and walking to spend the night on the precipice I’d kayaked beneath. But conditions were slowly changing. Where the sea until today had been a blue-vaulted expanse with perpetual views, the swell had risen overnight to become a series of narrow corridors whose silver walls could obscure even the tallest cliffs. I’d wondered whether I might see basking sharks round Eshaness, but today they could have passed within feet without me knowing. For most of the day, this swell was immensely peaceful, its phases gentle and unthreatening as I moved through four dimensions with every stroke. But at the bottom of the Eshaness cliffs, the swell seemed to come from all directions at once: unpredictable and disorienting. The way to deal with this in a kayak is less about the arms than the hips and thighs. At leisure, I sit straight-ish, but the means of responding to complex seas is to lean forward, lower the centre of gravity and grip the kayak tightly with the knees, creating a sense of connection with the boat. After a damp night and in cold wind, I was deeply reluctant to roll this morning and relieved once I reached the simpler water near Stenness Island. Here I stopped on the swell to take pictures back along the cliffs, as best I could, and to observe the place I found myself: the bowl of another volcano. It felt strangely appropriate that in a spot where I was separated from writhing magma only by time, I should be plunging and leaping with violent swell, head rhythmically plunging beneath where my feet had been.

I landed at Stenness in time for lunch, left my kayak beside an old haaf-fishing station, and began the walk towards the lighthouse to learn these cliffs by watching the setting sunlight shift across them. Before I’d got beyond the bay, the local crofter approached and we discussed the caves along this coast. He insisted I explore the hollow interior of the island known as Dore Holm, rather than just looking up at its huge arch, and told me about a small entrance just north of the Eshaness lighthouse that had been found only a few years ago. It leads, he said, to a huge chamber inside the cliffs. This was my first reminder that apparently timeless and knowable cliffs are mysterious and shifting. There’d soon be many more.

Next day, I continued along the sweep of St Magnus Bay, spending a night that was close to perfection on the cliff-bound island of Muckle Roe. The cove I pulled into through a small gap in the island’s towering crags was as rich in grasses, bog cotton and small flowering plants as anywhere I’d seen. Unsurprisingly, the products of the slow dissolution of contrasting rocks – a wildly varied sward of grasses and flowering plants – appear in Shetland culture almost as much as fish and boats. The star among young poets writing from Shetland today, Jen Hadfield, is particularly attentive to plants of bog and cliff such as the butterwort:

I’ve fallen

to my knees again not five

minutes from home: first,

the boss of Venusian leaves

that look more like they docked

than grew; a sappy nub;

violet bell; the minaret

of purpled bronze.¹¹

In ‘The Ambition’ she even dreams of becoming butterwort, lugworm and trilobite, though her ultimate ambition is to be ocean, ‘trussed on the rack of the swell’:

The tide being out, I traipsed through dehydrated eelgrass and the chopped warm salad of the shallows, and then the Atlantic breached me part by part.¹²

I sat in this immersive scene and watched Arctic skuas (skootie alan) chase Arctic terns (tirricks) as, in displays of balletic brutality, they forced them to drop their catch or vomit recent meals. And as the air cooled, moths began to clamber up the grasses: after sleepily fumbling upwards they’d shift abruptly, as though at the flick of a switch, into a manic spiral through the evening air.

After Muckle Roe, a long voe leads far inland, ending in the town of Aith. Following the coast now meant plunging into the heart of mainland. Here, I visited Sally Huband – ecologist, nature writer and Shetland-bird surveyor – who made me soup and pizza, as well as providing valuable local knowledge for the next stages of my journey. Sally explained several of the characteristics of Shetland’s wildlife that had struck me as I travelled. She told me, for instance, that the absence of peregrine falcons is partially explained by the dominance of fulmars in their favoured nest sites: when threatened, fulmars spit a thick oil that’s enough to debilitate a peregrine chick or compromise an adult’s flight. Sally had just flown back from the outlying island of Foula where she’d been collecting great-skua pellets as a favour for a friend who needed them before going to Greenland. Her descriptions of Foula’s geological and biological distinctiveness convinced me that once I’d finished my month’s journey south I would have to make my way there: without reaching Foula I couldn’t claim to have travelled Atlantic Shetland.

Back on the water I headed for the mouth of St Magnus Bay, but before I could round the lower lip a large island blocked my route. For any sea kayaker, Papa Stour is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Shetland: a mile-wide rock with a twenty-two-mile coastline, pocked with some of the deepest and most complex caves and arches in Europe. It is stranded in the ocean amid speeding tides, and I decided to break the journey through them with a night high on the island’s cliffs. I watched a trawler pass the remote Ve Skerries (another ancient knuckle of bedrock) as a group of Arctic skuas clucked and quarrelled like the drunk family at a seaside caravan park.

Papa Stour also appealed to Shetland’s first geologists. In 1819, Samuel Hibbert described his arrival across transparent water, which made the boat appear ‘suspended in mid-air over meadows of yellow, green, or red tangle, glistening with the white shells that clung to their fibres’. He observed ‘red barren stacks of porphyry’ that shot up from the water, ‘scooped by the attrition of the sea into a hundred shapes’. Hibbert described many customs, including the Papa residents’ tradition of trapping seals in the famous caves to club them until ‘the walls of these gloomy recesses are stained with their blood’; but he gives a more picturesque vision of his own journey underground:

The boat … entered a vault involved in gloom, when, turning an angle, the water began to glitter as if it contained in it different gems, and suddenly a burst of day-light broke in upon us, through an irregular opening at the top of the cave. This perforation, not more than twenty yards in its greatest dimensions, served to light up the entrance to a dark and vaulted den, through which the ripples of the swelling tide were, in their passage, converted by Echo, into low and distant murmurs.¹³

Hibbert was a polymath prone to taking long excursions in corduroy breeches and leather gaiters, accompanied by his dog (delightfully named Silly). It was one of these excursions that took him to Shetland in 1817, but his relationship with the islands was transformed when he happened across commercial quantities of chromite on Unst. In 1818 he began a geological survey covering all the archipelago. In the evening or during storms, he would appear at the doors of crofters, seeking bed or food. Then, according to his daughter-in-law, he would ‘retire to rest lying down in his clothes, dry or wet, on a bed of heather or straw, but not always sleeping, for swarms of fleas might lay an interdict on sleep’. On Papa Stour his hosts treated him to tusk fish and ‘cropping moggies’ (spiced cod liver mixed with flour and boiled in the fish’s stomach). Such dainties, he writes, should make Shetland a place of pilgrimages for discerning gourmands. He adds one caveat: for variety the poor islanders sometimes resort to coarse foodstuffs like lobster.

In the morning, I explored the caves, though I couldn’t pass far into their depths, lacking the conditions that Hibbert recommends ‘when the ocean shows no sterner wrinkles than are to be found on the surface of some sheltered lake’. I then swung round the headland beneath St Magnus Bay. Passing under yet more rugged cliffs, I called in on the memory of Vagaland at Westerwick, before embarking on the final stages of my Shetland voyage.

Once I was beyond the geological spectacles of the north, I made my way towards a world of small, fertile islands that were long smattered with settlements but are now home only to sheep. The day I set out through these islands was my first experience of the infamous Shetland haa and so the first time I really had to navigate. After ten minutes on the water, I tore my new compass from its plastic packaging and checked I could read it as I rocked. The conditions were haunting. Sometimes the haa sat flat against the gentle, three-feet swell. At others, it hung just inches from the water and tendrils of grey-white cloud seemed to stroke the surface of the waves. I had intended to spend the night on the island of Havera. But this, I’d since heard, was a place without streams: its community had been sustained by two wells that, a century later, I couldn’t afford to rely on. So I aimed first to find my way between the Peerie Isles (peerie being Shetland dialect for small) to the outside tap at the local Outdoor Centre.

Mist is an excellent ally in wildlife watching. Today, not much after 4 a.m., an otter stood and watched as I drifted quietly by, while several red-throated divers, known here as rain geese, left it late to sidle off. Conditions, landscape, wildlife and atmosphere had all changed dramatically since St Magnus Bay. After landing and stocking up on water I set off for Havera, a place I’d long been intrigued to see. Slowly, the mist rose, wisps clinging to the moors east of the island, so that Havera gradually brightened from the west. Soon, it was stranded in a wedge of weak light beneath dark and silent skies. Clouds still licked the feet of the rough pewter cliffs long after their brows were clear. As I entered the mile of open water between mainland and the island, the swell was slow and gentle. On this day more than any other, the strange sensation of movement in multiple dimensions was something my body would retain: when I slept, many hours later, the cliffs seemed to undulate beneath me.

Havera is surrounded by richness. Nories and tysties surfaced laden with sand eels; forests of green-brown kelp seemed to grasp towards the surface. I’d planned this day and the next to give me time on the island. Here, if anywhere, I could begin to comprehend the lost communities of Shetland and the ruins that line the shores. The Havera folk left behind an archive, including recordings describing life on the island. A collaborative project of photography, research and writing used these to build a beautiful book, Havera: The Story of an Island (2013). I’d saved this to read in situ, where I could follow up each reference to a hill, promontory (taing) or rocky inlet (geo) by exploring it myself. Later, I’d spend a day on the Shetland mainland listening to recordings of the people of Havera and contextualising the extracts in the book. This was my best chance so far to explore the ‘archive of the feet’.

Travelling south, I reached the island at the deep clefts of Stourli Geo and Brei Geo on its north side, and used a dialect poem, Christina de Luca’s ‘Mappin Havera’, to guide me towards a landing. This poem begins with a warning:

Havera’s aa namit fae da sea.

We could box da compass

o wir isle; hits names markin

ivery sklent da sea is med,

da taings an stacks an gyos.

If on your wye ta Havera

an mist rowled in,

ivery steekit bicht spelt danger;

you had ta ken dem, ivery een.¹⁴

The poem then provides the necessary ‘kenning’, tracing the aids and obstacles encountered by fishermen at the island’s edge, until spying safety at ‘Nort Ham,/wir peerie haven/Mak for dere if you can’.

Having followed these directions, I pulled into Nort Ham at the island’s south-east corner (figure 2.6) and was met with an onshore sea of wildflowers and grasses. I pulled my boat up among the buttercups, where I found the egg of a wheatear (sten-shakker), plundered by a neater and more precise predator than the bonxies who might ordinarily be culprits. But there were also sten-shakker fledglings, less cautious and more curious than their chattering parents. Without this pretty sheltered inlet at Nort Ham, Havera might never have been inhabited. Over centuries, the people and goods that entered or left the island came through this tiny gap: the community’s single link to the world beyond.

I packed myself a bag of food and warm clothes, since new weather seemed to blow in by the hour. Havera has several landmarks I wanted to investigate. The most substantial is the abandoned village packed tightly into the corner known as Da Yard, which was the last place in Shetland’s small isles to sustain a population. In 1911 it boasted twenty-nine occupants from five families. Inland, there are two outlying buildings. One is an old schoolhouse, the other the imposing trunk of a huge ruined windmill: a meed (sea mark) visible from many miles away. I decided to take my bearings according to the landscape before investigating the ruins. This proved trickier than expected since most headlands were colonies of terns: to disturb them is not just harmful to a threatened species, but also draws a volley of intense and committed dive-bombing far more likely to cause injury than the infamous attacks of great skuas (a bonxie attack is never conducted in such numbers or with such frenzied persistence).

When I finally found a spot to sit and read, I was gazing out onto Havera’s satellite, West Skerry. Each spring, island sheep and cattle were swum here, across the hundred-yard sound, to protect the Havera crops. This ridge of rough pasture, completely separate from Havera’s arable land, was key to the success of the island community. But it is arable richness that was Havera’s greatest asset. The island is less than a square mile in size, yet its interior is not the rock- and wrack-strewn waste found on many islets of similar area. It’s an unlikely idyll of well-drained, fertile earth, perpetually replenished by soft limestone that intrudes in veins through the region’s granite bones. From the era of Neolithic field boundaries (still sometimes traceable), to the moment when the crofters left, this limestone made Havera a fine place to grow grain. Indeed, its name is probably derived from hafr, the Old Norse for ‘oats’.

The island was generally presented by its last inhabitants as a plentiful and perfect home. Gideon Williamson died in 1999, seventy-six years after he left Havera; he remembered his birthplace as unique in Shetland because its fertile land was not ‘just bits a patches here an dere’ but one great expanse of rock-less, weed-less loam: ‘you could tak a ploo an ploo da whole lot up … Hit wis entirely clean.’ Shetland tradition accords to tilled Havera earth pest-repelling tendencies that verge on the magical.

Yet the topography did have drawbacks. Wells were no substitute for streams because running water had uses beyond cleaning and quenching thirst. The most common ruins I’d passed along other Shetland coasts were small, simple watermills built where rivers met the sea. But the people of Havera had to row their grain to Scalloway (a five-mile crossing) or Weisdale (eight miles) and pay for its grinding. This added labour, cost and risk to the challenges of island life. In the 1860s, a solution was dreamed up: the only windmill ever built in this storm-ravaged archipelago. The innovator might have been Gifford Laurenson, a skilled mason who was entrusted by the Society of Antiquaries with repairing the Iron Age Broch of Mousa (then ‘mouldering into dust’). Between 1848–52, the Laurensons married into Havera families twice, and Gifford’s sister and father (also a mason) moved to the island.

The significance of Gifford Laurenson’s link to the Broch of Mousa is that the Havera mill evokes ancient Shetland more than modern. It stands like a round Iron Age edifice in a region where circular buildings are rare. It is a landmark that, like an ancient fort, puts Havera on the map: the most instantly recognisable of the small islands and, according to one local seafarer, ‘a kinda lodestar for whaar you wir’. That incidental function is all well and good. But so many compromises were made with the mill’s design, in order that it might withstand the Shetland weather, that it was useless for grinding grain: Havera folk quickly quit and resumed their mainland journeys.

The large, ill-fitting stones make the mill easy to climb, so I edged my way carefully up the green and golden lichen to an exceptional vantage on its walls. From here the world of which Havera was the centre could be surveyed. The rough low hills of the southern mainland, with their scattering of small white houses, occupied the eastern horizon, the shores becoming ever sandier as the hills sank and stretched south. These were the coastlines that Havera folk traversed on calm summer days. But beyond the southern extremities of the mainland, thirty miles distant, Fair Isle stood out on the horizon. From there, sweeping west, a long stretch of ocean was punctured only by the mad cliffs of Foula, frequently referred to as the wildest inhabited spot in the British Isles. These two islands signalled a remoter world to which, in certain weathers, Havera most certainly belonged.

I wandered downhill to the village, where small buildings are packed into a narrow isthmus with surprising neatness. This order is a product of the history of habitation. Although Havera had long been lived on (this is probably its first period of abandonment in millennia), the population was increased, and several new crofts built, during a sudden enforced settlement in the eighteenth century when landlords aimed to increase rents from every part of their domain. When the island was abandoned, it wasn’t because of clearance, but was an after-effect of the overpopulation engineered by the lairds. A few Gaelic place names round the coast suggest that some incomers might have been Scots, not Shetlanders; two very different cultures forced together.

The overwhelming impression amid the ruins was of how communal life must have been. Doors and windows of the small neat houses look onto one another, while amenities such as the single village kiln suggest prominent shared spaces (in most of Scotland at this time each croft had a kiln of its own). Inside houses, outlines of two rooms, the but and ben (living room and bedroom), are often clear, although the interiors of some have been converted into well-crafted winter sheep pens. A single habitable house stands on the inland edge of the village. It is used by those who tend the island’s sheep but its occupation seems irregular: a faded chess set and 1990s magazines accompany a toy animal that stares incongruously from a window.

This building shows that the village is not entirely abandoned. But nor is it entirely uninhabited. As I walked around its eastern edge I realised that the honking of fulmars was not just coming from the precipice below, but also from the ruins of crofts: the birds use the village walls as crags. Despite the healthy human population shown in the 1911 census, the last residents left the island in 1923. Jessie Goodlad, born on Havera in 1903, explained why:

Dey left becaas dey wir naeboady left ta geeng back an fore wi da boat … becaas da young menwis aa laevin … weel, dey wirna laevin exactly, dey wir aa gyaain tae da fishin … dey wir naeboady to steer dis boat, dis saily-boat, back an fore.¹⁵

Fulmars spread across Britain’s Atlantic coasts in the early decades of the twentieth century. The first of these birds may well have begun to nest here after the Havera folk had left (there are still retired Shetland fishermen who recall the time they were told, as children, to come and see this strange bird, the maalie). There is as much social change in nature, and as little permanence, as there is among people. Few events demonstrate this more fully than the sudden and unforeseen expansion of the fulmar across the North Atlantic world; this might even be called the most dramatic conquest of Britain since 1066.

Fulmars are the most characterful of seabirds. They seem to be constantly at play, especially in high winds, and appear to demonstrate an inexhaustible curiosity in humans, quietly approaching any boat at sea. Many photos from the kayak can be filed under ‘Photobombed by Fulmar’. These birds are often written about as though they possess an unflappable mastery of the winds, but much of their personality comes from clumsiness. As they misjudge a gust and lose their poise, a huge webbed foot is thrust into the air; after a split second of feather-ruffling slapstick they’ll be balanced on the breeze again.

The arrival of thousands of fulmars has transformed the experience of Havera from anything its crofters would have recognised. But fulmars are not the only change to the island’s avifauna: the hilltop rigs where crops were grown have also been conquered. These thin strips of rich land were known and named in detail: responsibility for rigs called things like Da Peerie Wirlds, Da Hoolaplanks and Da Kokkiloori was circulated round crofters every season. Now, the space where kale, oats and bere (the traditional four-rowed barley of the Northern Isles) were grown is barely traceable beneath the same foliage that would be there had the island not been farmed. Ruling this feral domain is another victor in the struggles between species: the bonxie. Every rocky vantage, whether a corner of the old schoolhouse or a chunk detached from a long-flattened dyke, is now a watchtower for a bulky skua.

This two-century legacy of change is a profound demonstration of the entanglement of human and natural worlds. The Havera way of life was transformed – ended – not only by the ill-judged whims of distant landlords but by the movement of fish offshore, while many differences between Havera today and in the past are a result of the changing social lives – the histories – of birds. At the end of my Shetland journey, I spent a night in the shadow of the Havera windmill’s twin, the fourth-century Broch of Mousa. This is a domineering monument to human belligerence, yet now its walls reverberate with the gentlest purring. Storm petrels nest in the cracks between stones, and as I settled down to sleep, hundreds of tiny stormies fluttered across my sight line. Masons making ready for war had unwittingly built the perfect hive for these sparrow-sized seafarers.

It is tragic to see abandoned places that were once filled with people, especially when (as in the case of Havera) their magnetic personalities – their pleasures and regrets – shine through recordings of their voices. Yet in a world where humans wage wars of conquest not just among themselves but on almost every species on the planet, it might be heartening to see the agency of animals reshaping realms to which humans are, more than ever, peripheral.

At about 3 a.m. on my night on Havera, heavy rain set in. As I paddled south, soaked to the bone and (for the first time in this journey) truly cold, the windmill remained on my horizon, only briefly hidden by the heaviest downpours. Both the red cliffs of the north and the fertile, low-lying isles were now left behind. A diverse geology, including complex whorls of multiple rocks, had taken over. Drongs were no longer the square-edged towers of St Magnus Bay, but rugged grey wedges like spittle-wreathed teeth. Few mishaps had occurred so far, but I’d now misjudged the battery level of my phone and was left unable to check tides and weather. I knew such accidents would happen quite often, but with the tidal challenges that lay ahead, this was not a time I would have chosen. Momentarily I thought there was a virtue to this failing: that it made my journey more ‘authentic’ (not a word I’d ever usually trust). But I quickly realised that every seafarer of the pre-digital age had resources to judge tides that I lacked. I had some familiarity with what to expect, built up over the last two weeks (I knew, for instance, to expect ebb tides in the afternoon) and I also had time: if I confronted hostile tides or weather I could, in theory, sit them out and consume the ample food and reading still stowed in my boat.

The sky began to clear as I passed St Ninian’s Isle, linked to the mainland by its tombolo beach. This pretty strand of sand, lapped gently by the sea on either side, is perhaps the most famous landmark in Shetland. Like many of Shetland’s spits and bars, it indicates an alarming reality: a drowned coastline that has not stopped sinking. Shetland may have sunk as much as nine metres in 5,000 years, in contrast to most Scottish coasts that follow a more usual post-glacial path of continuing ascent (‘isostatic rebound’ once freed from the weight of their Ice Age glaciers). The scale of this change, over so short a time, explains some of the extraordinary transitoriness of this coastline. This would be driven home even more strongly as I continued towards the final tidal barriers in my path.

The first challenge was Fitful Head. Yet again, the wind was low as I reached a point where any breeze would have spelled trouble, and yet again, this was enough to draw the sting from a possible threat. I bounced fast enough through the tidal overfalls at the Head to consider tackling the second challenge before dark. But Sumburgh Head was worth waiting for: it offered the possibility of whales and the chance to see one of Britain’s most spectacular tidal runs, da roost, in action.

As the sun rose over another subdued sea – the fading swell preserving the memory of long-departed breezes – I launched. Porpoises, closer than any I’d seen so far, edged along the coast ahead. I soon passed the largest stretch of sand on Shetland. There is no hint when paddling past that this was once the thriving village of Broo. Landowners and tenants in the early eighteenth century began to note deterioration in the quality of their land. Soon, it was ‘declared valueless’. By the mid-eighteenth century, the once-wealthy village had been obliterated beneath ‘a small dusty kind of sand, which never possibly can rest, as the least puff of wind sets it all in motion, in the same manner as the drifting snows in winter’.¹⁶ Caused by the climatic cooling of Europe’s ‘little ice age’ (the 1690s were one of the coldest decades in the last millennium), this tragedy was the most dramatic evidence I had seen so far of the scale and unpredictability of transformation on these coasts.

Passing this eerie site, I soon found myself sandwiched between tides, and forced to make split-second decisions about my route. At the first asking, I got it wrong, choosing not to go round the island of Horse Holm but to tackle the straits between the island and the mainland. This felt like taking a bike without suspension down a steep road of huge cobbles: the powerful tide was with me, but at times I was afraid the huge overfalls might bury or even break the kayak. My spare paddle was strapped to my deck in two pieces, but it was clear, as overfalls wrenched at the one I held, that a second without a paddle would be disastrous. I’m frequently surprised by how short these infamous tidal runs tend to be: I thought I was at the start of a long and harrowing ordeal when I found myself spat out into placid water. After this, Sumburgh Head itself was straightforward. The sun appeared as I made my way out to sea, south of the whole of Shetland, and for the first time in my journey I could see people gazing down, bird-watching binoculars raised to assess the small yellow form scraping across the sea. They were there in numbers, I soon discovered, looking for orcas that had been sighted the previous day.

I landed at the launch of the tiny Fair Isle ferry and crossed the narrow neck of land behind Sumburgh Head. This took me to a spot rich in historic remains, including Shetland’s most dramatic Viking tourist-draw: Jarlshof. The Norse traditions of this southern tip of Shetland are nearly as rich as those of Unst. Even the tidal stream I’d just swept through is rich in story. The Orkneyinga Saga is a tale of competition between Norwegian earls for the coasts and archipelagos of the North Atlantic; like most such sagas it is gripping and evocative but fiercely elitist, with barely a glimpse of perspectives beyond those of its entitled male protagonists. In 1148, the saga says, Earl Rognvald Kali Kolsson, ruler of the Northern Isles, was travelling between Orkney and Norway. With breakers all around, he was forced to run ashore at the south of Shetland. Rognvald wandered local settlements, enjoying anonymity and frequently (as was his habit) breaking into verse. One day, he met a poor elderly man near Sumburgh Head. Learning that the man had been let down by a rowing companion, Rognvald (disguised in a white cowl) offered to help him fish. The two rowed out to Horse Holm making for the ‘great stream of tide … and great whirling eddies’ that I’d just swept along. As the old man fished, Rognvald’s task should have been to skirt the tidal stream by rowing the boat against the eddies. Instead, he guided them deep into the turbulence where the fisherman began to draw up enormous fish, but soon cried out in terror ‘Miserable was I and unlucky when I took dee today to row, for here I must die, and my fold are at home helpless and in poverty if I am lost.’ Shouting ‘Be cheerful man!’, Rognvald rowed like a man possessed, eventually drawing them clear of the chaos and back to shore. Still incognito, he gave his share of the catch to the women and children preparing the fish on land, but then slipped on the rocks, provoking howls of mocking laughter. Rognvald muttered one of his verses, rendered here by the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown:

You chorus of Sumburgh women, home with you now.

Get back to your gutting and salting.

Less of your mockery.

Is this the way you treat a stranger?

Think, if this beachcomber

Hadn’t strayed to this shore by chance

Your dinner tables

Would be a strewment of rattling whelkshells today.

Sumburgh women, never set staff or dog or hard word

On the tramp who stands at your door

It might be an angel,

Though here, with the Sumburgh querns grinding salt out there,

It was only a man in love with the sea,

Her beauty, her rage, her bounty,

One who knows that, all masks being off,

In heaven’s eye

Earl is no different from a pool-dredging eater of winkles.

‘They knew then’, Mackay Brown writes,

that the reckless benefactor was Earl Rognvald Kolson (nephew of St Magnus), one of the rarest most radiant characters in Norse history. A fragrance and brightness linger about all Rognvald’s recorded doings and sayings, as if the long sun of northern summers had been kneaded into him.¹⁷

But da roost and Rognvald’s antics are unusual: old stories tied to Shetland landscapes are few, and documentation of Shetland’s early history is far sparser than that for other parts of Britain. From the centuries when much of the landscape would have been named we receive only the barest skeleton of events. The Orkneyinga Saga says that Shetland was split from Orkney in the 1190s after a rebellion of the ‘Island-Beardies’ (as Orcadians and Shetlanders apparently called themselves). From then on, Shetland was largely left to its own devices, although it changed hands (from Norway to Scotland) in 1469. Only when the conditions of medieval Shetland began to collapse, in the dire economic circumstances of the late sixteenth century, are there detailed written records of what life here might have been like: bitter complaints at the loss of order and well-being. By this point, Shetland was an exceptionally cosmopolitan place, the islands frequented by merchants from around Europe and the North Atlantic, so that Shetlanders often spoke some German and Dutch as well as their own Norn language.

The reason for the dearth of early Shetland stories is the eighteenth-century death of Norn. In literary terms, this loss was total: remarkably, no Norn literature survives except in second-hand fragment. Yet Shetland’s dialect tradition is a worthy successor to the Norn heritage and a key impetus behind the wealth of current literature. This is undoubtedly the richest dialect in Britain and a constant presence in the experience of visitors (few, I imagine, leave Shetland without succumbing to the temptation to call small things ‘peerie’ or to replace ‘th’s with ‘d’s and ‘t’s). It is among Shetland’s greatest assets and the source of much of the archipelago’s distinctiveness.

Once Norn died, dialect flourished. The nineteenth century has an awful reputation where dialect traditions are concerned: the bureaucratisation and centralisation of British life led many autocrats to think like Thomas Hardy’s mayor of Casterbridge, who labelled dialect words ‘terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’. Yet Shetland bucked the trend, forging – as always – a path all its own. By 1818, the crofters visited by Samuel Hibbert used words and grammatical constructions substantially the same as those employed by Shetlanders today (although, as the Shetland archivist Brian Smith puts it, ‘naturally, the vocabulary is different, since we live in a society where dozens of words for small-boat equipment or seaweed, are unnecessary’). But the 1880s and 90s, during which Shetland crofters and fishers were freed by national legislation from the worst exploitation of landlords, marked a particular moment of growth. The first Shetland newspapers were founded in 1872 and 1885, and both specialised in dialect prose. They ran long serials such as ‘Fireside Cracks’ (Shetland Times, 1897–1904) and ‘Mansie’s Rüd’ (Shetland News, 1897–1914) which used island language to offer subtle observations of island life. ‘My inteention’, says the narrator of ‘Mansie’s Rüd’, ‘is no sae muckle ta wraet o’ my warfare i’ dis weary world, as to gie some sma’ account o’ da deleeberat observations o’ an auld man, on men an’ things in a kind o’ general wye.’ As this suggests, these columns were not inward-looking things, but helped form distinctive island perspectives on the world at large. In this newly prolific era, Shetlanders such as Laurence Williamson began collating and categorising dialect words and phrases, while others, such as the Faroese linguist Jakob Jakobsen, began to attempt to recover the old Norn language.

In this atmosphere of renewed self-confidence, some Shetlanders, such as the dialect poet William Porteous, began to use English to evangelise the islands to those mainlanders who, if they thought of Shetland at all, pictured a dreary scene. Poetry ‘advertising’ Shetland to the urban south embraced a flamboyant romantic aesthetic that wouldn’t have been possible a century earlier. This marks, perhaps, the beginning of the idea that Shetland is the northernmost and fiercest expression of a frayed Atlantic edge worth celebrating. Ferocious storms, wind-whipped seas and bleak, unpeopled headlands could be romanticised, rather than being dismissed as incompatible with progress or politeness. In Porteous’s descriptions of the ‘strange exultant joy’ to be found in confronting ocean weather, many touchstones of later evocations of the North Atlantic sublime can be found.

Two days after completing my descent of Shetland I found Porteous’s verse in the local archives and was struck by his heroic efforts to make storms not just poetic, but an actual tourist draw. I felt that, having kayaked this far in improbably blissful calm, I still lacked a crucial aspect of the Shetland experience. But there was no need to have worried: five days after I rounded Sumburgh Head a brief but grisly weather front was forecast. I’d already decided, thanks to Sally Huband’s influence, that my last Shetland venture had to be to Foula. Given the risk of rough weather I chose not to paddle the crossing but booked my kayak onto the twice-a-week passenger ferry. At thirty feet long this is essentially just a diesel sixareen with a lid. It was perhaps surprising that only the youngest of the eight passengers was sick as, rocking and rolling, we meandered a slow course across the sea’s contours. Minutes after disembarking in Foula’s tiny harbour I launched the kayak and was paddling up the island’s east coast. By the time I reached the north-east corner, I was in a sea terrorised by breakers three times my height, from which I could look east to the whole Atlantic coast I’d paddled down. That night I wandered through the Foula coastline’s meadows of ground-nesting seabirds, taking great care to find myself a spot to sleep away from any chicks (figure 2.7).

It was on the second of my three days on the island that I finally met the force that Porteous had pronounced Shetland’s true ruler: the ‘Storm King’. That morning I’d climbed the island’s tallest cliffs and lounged, lodged among puffins, with my feet dangling 1,200 feet over the sea (figure 2.8). I sat gazing north while clouds gathered in the west and large, cold drops of water began to fall. Hundreds of screeching kittiwakes took to the air, disturbed by eddies in the wind, while spindrift skimmed the sea in all directions. The real arrival of the storm was preceded by minutes of strange, thick warmth. Then lightning flashed across the ocean, lending the swell fleeting new patterns of light and shadow, before rich, deep thunder reverberated through the rock. Puffins and fulmars joined the kittiwakes in panicked flight, and the booming cliffs themselves seemed to have come to life. The whole spectacle was as sublime and life-affirming as Porteous had, a century before, promised his urbane readers it would be:

And when the Storm King wakes from his sleep in the long, long winter night,

And, robed in his garment of silver spray, strides southward into the light –

At the sound of his voice ye shall see the waves race in for the land amain,

Then, broken and beaten on cliff and beach, fall back to the sea again.

Ye shall see the tide-race rise and rave, and rear on his thwarted path,

Till stack and skerry are ringed with the foam of the hungry ocean’s wrath.

Ye shall watch with a strange, exultant joy, the winds and waters strive,

And your hearts shall sing with the rising gale, for the joy that you are alive.¹⁸

ORKNEY
(August)

Thermometer and barometer measure our seasons capriciously; the Orkney year should be seen rather as a stark drama of light and darkness.

George Mackay Brown

LATE SUMMER BRINGS uncertainty. It was mid-August by the time I resumed my journey and, in contrast to the long calm days on Shetland, the Orcadian sea changed hour by hour. Sun, squall, sea mist, rain and rainbow passed across the coastlines fast enough to make each morning feel like a time-lapsed month. When winds shifted, water responded: weather was conducted through the shell of the boat and into me, dictating the experience of each new stretch of coast. Not just perception but emotion drifted with the moods of sky and sea. This ranged from the giddy joy of lurching along, propelled by a following swell, or the anxious focus when gusts brought side-on breakers, to serenity on flat seas that seemed perfectly safe and infinitely spacious.

Phases of transition from calm to chaos were often the most sublime, binding beauty and fear together. Not for nothing are the islands of Orkney said to evoke sleeping whales: they are peaceful mounds with awful potentials. As the month progressed I saw, felt, and, for the first time, photographed, parts of waves that seemed more the habitat of surfers than paddlers. These were not the long strafing breakers that come with heavy swell (I still had some leeway before the truly wild weather of autumn); they were the standing waves that twist and coil over any obstacle to a running tide.

Atlantic waters are deceptive in changing weather. In the midst of a tidal maelstrom, hospitable seas can seem beyond the reach of imagination; yet unseen gentleness might be just a few wave crests away. This was driven home to me at the north-west corner of the island of Rousay, where the sea’s tidal features are named with the detail of a city suburb’s streets. Here, emerging from a tide race called Rullard’s Roost I hit a mesh of tide and swell so fierce that I had to head for shore: I thought my day was done within an hour of setting out. Yet five minutes later a more coastal line allowed me through: I could barely see evidence of conditions to cause concern. Much of successful kayaking is in the choice of routes between the shifting waves. As important on the water as arms or balance is a cool head through the roaring, swirling, chilling and grinding that batter the senses in a threatening sea.

Not just the weather, but also the landscapes were now defined by contrasts. On the first islands I passed, transitions from thundering cliffs to the placid undulation of cattle farms are sudden yet somehow seamless. No single landscape lasts more than a few hundred yards. On the most north-westerly island, Westray, the imposing, sixteenth-century edifice of Noltland Castle looms over a large modern farm; seen from the sea, the two occupy the same small space. Beside them, near the spot where surf meets sand, a sprawl of tyres and polythene marks a recently excavated sauna, built by the island’s Bronze Age inhabitants.

This landscape looks at once spacious and cluttered. Centuries and functions, whether sacred, industrial, defensive or recreational, are pushed together at sparsely situated sites. Around them, in wide fields that are almost moorland, the earth is loaded with low-lying detritus of millennia. When I wandered ashore, I found myself watching each inch of ground for traces of the past until every broken plastic bucket or scrap of rope became an artefact. The sounds of breakers, cattle, lapwings, tractors and voices also took on that character: items in the soundscape felt as distinctive of this place as did objects in the landscape.

After making my way north by roads and ferries I had kayaked out from Pierowall, Westray’s capital village. Its small grey buildings perch around a colourful little bay: tall yellow hawksbeard flowers and bronze kelp line an arc of golden sands and green sea. Pierowall was known to the Norse as Höfn and a row of pagan graves suggests it was a Viking-era market. When Rognvald Kali Kolsson stopped here there was a clashing of cultures: he met Irish monks whose hairstyles he mocked in verse. This pretty, ancient port was my place of departure but it wasn’t northerly enough to be my true starting point.

I began by kayaking north-east. The small island of Papa Westray, known locally as Papay, thrusts a rugged and disruptive head north of Westray and into the Atlantic’s flow. As I paddled into the mile-wide sound between islands I found myself grinning with pleasure to be back among the waves. I’d missed the ocean’s noise, the tension in the arms as they pull a paddle through water, and, most of all, the sense of unrooting that rocking over waves creates. I kayaked carelessly, enlivened by cold splashes from the bow and paddle. Yet before I’d even really got started, I felt the lure of Papay’s past.

This island proved to be the most improbable place I’ve visited. Its history emerges from waves and grasses in ways that feel surreal. Sometimes traces of the past are recent and mundane but still evocative of island life. My route reached the island at a pretty place where low cliffs are topped with a small, strangely situated structure that is blackened by burning. It stands on its isolated outcrop because this picturesque inlet faces directly into south-westerly wind and swell. For decades the vulnerability of this spot made it the ideal rubbish dump. Litter on the scale of cars and sofas would be thrown down the rocks and carried away by winter storms that were more muscular and reliable than any binmen. Local lobsters still dwell, perhaps, in the rusted boots and bonnets of Ford Cortinas.

As I rounded the island, the surprises became more venerable. I passed an enormous kelp store, a remnant of the decades round 1800 when Papay was a global centre of this major industry. Paddling past, and beneath one of the most spectacular chambered cairns in the world, I landed on a sandy beach beside a small and unassuming isthmus of stones and seaweed. I’d intended to wander up the cliffs and visit a monument to the extinction of an Atlantic seabird. But the spot I’d landed at was not what it seemed. At first, I thought I was hallucinating as I saw patterns in rocks where seaweed was strewn like tea leaves. But the more I stared, the clearer the geometry became: a cobbled platform took shape, then hints at a low stone wall. These sea-smoothed structures were centuries older than the era of kelp but, for now, the nature of their making remained a mystery.

I wandered up the cliffs to find the monument I’d stopped for. In 1813, ‘King Auk’ was the last great auk in Britain. These birds – penguin-sized relatives of the razorbill – were once prized for feathers, meat and eggs, but by the early nineteenth century the collection of stuffed birds had become a favourite pastime of Europe’s elite. What could possibly cement a wealthy collector’s status like the large, impressive corpse of ‘the rarest bird in the world’? There are many discrepancies in narrations of the events of 1813, but it seems that ‘local lads’ had killed King Auk’s mate by stoning the previous year. Now William Bullock, impresario and keeper of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, had written to the lairds of Papay requesting the very last bird for his collection. The obliging lairds tasked six local men to row to the third cave along the north Papay crags. King Auk leapt from his perch into the sea and a marksman, Will Foulis, fired and fired again. But the auk was agile in the water. Eventually cornered, King Auk was bludgeoned to death with oars. The bloodied prize was soon in the hands of couriers to London where it became a feature of Bullock’s ever more elaborate displays, to which another one-off, Napoleon’s carriage from Waterloo, was later added.

The cairn I visited on the cliffs above King Auk’s perch was put in place by local children. Concealed in the memorial, beneath a bright red sculpture of the royal bird, is a time capsule containing the message they wrote to the future:

We wish there was still a great auk to see. We hope that people won’t have to build more cairns like this to remember things we see alive now. We humans gave a name to this bird, now only the name is left. If you who are reading this message are not human, remember us with kindness as we remember the great auk.¹

The fate of King Auk marks Papay as a place of endings. But after I’d battled round the island’s violent northern headland, I reached sites that spoke instead of beginnings. The most famous is the Knap of Howar. This is the earliest known constructed house in Europe. Built as a family farm around 5700 BC the land its occupants tilled and grazed has been eaten away by water until the Knap is nestled in reach of sea spray. Its concave walls and intricate cupboard-like enclaves are missing only soft furnishings and whale-rib rafters. Rabbits burrow all round. As they dig, they disinter refuse from ancient human meals: worn oyster shells, and great-auk bones, whose flesh was stripped millennia ago. Like so many sea-lapped sites, the Knap of Howar inspires conflicting responses. Thoughts are easily lured towards ideas of timelessness, yet everything about this site has been transformed: the quality of its earth and the nature of its foliage have been slowly altered by the creeping proximity of ocean. If timelessness exists anywhere on earth, it is not in sight of the sea.

Even the Knap of Howar is not the most immediate and affecting spot here. A little to the north, St Boniface’s Kirk stands on the site of older holy places. Northerly gales flay earth from every inch of coast, changing topography by the week. Grasses and wildflowers cling to steep sandy soils where summer respite from storms provides the fleeting chance of growth before roots are ripped away and flung into autumn. It’s easy to sit and stare into the ocean without comprehending the structures of rock and shell around you. From every inch of land the ocean takes, there appears a new facet of a large medieval settlement.² I’d glanced around layer upon layer of exposed walls and floors before I began to notice the refuse beneath them: thousands of shells of limpet, oyster and winkle clustered where they’d been littered after feasts. Storms here have disinterred whale vertebrae, from even grander feasting, and red quernstones for grinding grain, made of rock not native to the island. Remnants of the processing of pig iron and fish oil imply a community that worked the coast in sophisticated ways.

There’s something evocative about the daily changes occurring at this unmarked, uncelebrated site. The configuration of buildings and shells seen on any visit is immediately taken by the ocean, never to be witnessed again nor recorded. It’s impossible to categorise such places. Most of this island fits both poles of many binaries depending on the light you choose to see it in: human/wild, timeless/changing, productive/barren. Everything seems both out of place and perfectly positioned, and our frameworks for comprehending the coastal past feel entirely inadequate.

Unable to imagine what it must be like to live in a landscape so immediate but so inscrutable, I knew I needed help. Before setting out I’d contacted Papay’s ‘biographer’, Jim Hewitson. Jim told me he and his wife Morag intended to travel no further than the Old Pier, 500 metres from their home, for the rest of the year: when I passed, he said, I’d find them at home or in a nearby field. In the early afternoon, I knocked on the Hewitsons’ door and was led into an old schoolhouse. On one wall was a large map marked with Papay’s historic place names. Elsewhere were images from the island’s past including a painting of King Auk. This was pinned beside a memorial to a French kayaker who visited when paddling north. He’d planned his journey with his wife before her untimely death. Having undertaken the voyage alone, he disappeared, presumed drowned, before reaching Shetland; I didn’t dare ask whether he and I were the only kayakers to have visited the Hewitsons.

I sat with Morag and Jim, consuming tales of island life along with tea and croissants. Then we wandered the coast. I was soon told, in no uncertain terms, that my desire to find explanations of the coast’s mysteries was not an acceptable approach to the island. Life on Papay, they insisted, involves coming to terms with mystery, not seeing it as a problem to conquer. Jim and I revisited the strange cobbled structures of the beach I’d landed on. He told me that archaeologists call it a medieval fish farm, used by monks from a monastery that may or may not have existed when Papay might or might not have been the centre of an eighth-century bishopric founded by Iona monks (or someone else). Yet Jim and Morag’s children have found antlers in this ‘fish farm’; perhaps this was actually a spot for trapping deer whose movements would be impeded in the soft coastal ground. I was left wondering about the boundaries of ‘mystery’. Without Morag and Jim’s help it would have been impossible for me to write about the island at all. Before our conversations I had answers to bad questions; I was left with much better questions but no hope of answers. And I’d been given a reminder that archaeology is rarely about discovering or confirming facts, but more often a process of inventing the most plausible possible stories.

As we walked, pieces of Papay stone continually issued from Jim’s pockets. One contained fossilised raindrops. Another was a Neolithic hammering tool. A third had been scratched at some inestimable date with a design that echoed the hills of Westray as seen from Papay. This was Jim’s illustration of the power and persistence of island mysteries: it was probably – almost certainly – nothing, but it might be a rare piece of millennia-old representational art. I was reluctant to abandon a place with so many surfaces to scratch, and it was chastening to think I’d been tempted to kayak straight past. As a parting gift, Jim gave me an oyster shell. This was one of the many extravagantly ancient relics unearthed by the Knap of Howar’s rabbits. Or else, perhaps, the oyster was alive and well until last year, when a black-backed gull had torn it from the seabed.

Orkney is often celebrated for the balance its people have sustained between the industries of land and sea. In comparison with Shetland, the more fertile earth shifts, slightly, the balance of subsistence onto the land and away from the ocean. To the islands’ great bard, George Mackay Brown, Orcadians are ‘fishermen with ploughs’ although others suggest they’re better described as crofters with lines and nets. The most celebrated Orkney historian, Willie Thomson, addressed the same theme with reference to the Orkneyinga Saga. He introduced Orcadian trade by evoking an ally of Earl Rognvald – Sweyn Asleifson – who is sometimes labelled ‘the ultimate Viking’.³ Like centuries of later Orkney folk, Thomson insists, Sweyn whiled away the year on his home island attending to agriculture; he only set out on ocean voyages in the interstices of the farming calendar. As I paddled from Papay to Westray, a tiny fishing boat motored back to Pierowall over flat blue sea; soon I saw a Westray woman herding cattle from a sea cliff to a gentle field a hundred yards inland. A huge bull bellowed its resistance. Never on this island was I out of earshot of either cattle or the chug of inshore vessels. Never did I find a coastal spot to sleep where I was certain cattle wouldn’t appear around me.

Yet as I kayaked I became increasingly uncomfortable with the tradition of emphasising the contrasts and complements of land and sea. These coasts were thickly marked with remnants of industries at the margins. For centuries, every job at sea was matched by a dozen people working not the land, but the shore. If boats were constant protagonists in Shetland story and history, then the intertidal zone plays that role in Orkney: it runs through island literature in ways that are entirely unique. Memoir after memoir of Orkney life makes the shore a major character when boats are only incidental presences. A striking example was published by the poet Robert Rendall in 1963. This memoir, Orkney Shore, sold well on the islands, yet is almost unreadable today because of the knowledge it demands of Latin and dialect names for coastal species. Rendall compares his memoir to old-fashioned sugar candy held together by a central piece of string; his life, he says, is the uninteresting string, his depictions of the Orkney shore the delicious candy. A far more palatable, if emotionally challenging, memoir of coastal life, Amy Liptrot’s account of recovery from addiction in The Outrun, brings the tradition of identifying Orkney with its shoreline up to date.

It’s tempting to trace the origins of this theme back centuries. Whereas in most of Britain land ownership ended at the high-water mark, a different custom prevailed in Orkney: Udal Law, imported from Norway in the ninth century, extended kindred land rights to the lowest tidelines. Where in Scotland the intertidal zone was sea, in Orkney it was land. According to Ruth Little, director of a 2013 arts project called Sea Change, ‘Orcadians are thresholders’ whose access to the margins has defined their identities.⁴ Even today, the conventions of Udal Law are sometimes successfully evoked against commercial threats to coastlines.

Many shoreline activities that families undertook related to fishing. Limpets were knocked off rocks for bait, nets were mended and lines prepared. Island women carried home the catch in heather creels before cleaning, splitting and drying fish. In a community where men were often offshore, Westray women performed many tasks that were elsewhere gendered male. 1920s photographs show women waist-deep in water hauling boats up Orkney beaches. They cut and carried peats, brought in hay and collected seabird eggs. Groups of neighbours in this deeply social community would go down to the shore and collect seaweed, whelks and spoots (razor clams) or lay nets across the fields to dry.⁵

Many coastal tasks were distinct from both fishing and farming. My hope as I kayaked Westray’s coasts was that I might teach myself to see the shores as resources. That leap of imagination into the perspectives of Orkney’s past involved putting aside modern attitudes to eating puffins, bludgeoning seals, or spending the evening in a room lit and fragranced by blubber or fish-oil lamps.

As I reached Westray from Papay I passed a tiny skerry called Aikerness Holm (figure 3.2). This is nothing more than a flat pile of shattered flagstones in the ocean, yet a crudely built structure, like a misplaced garden shed, is perched upon it. I landed and looked round. Today, this would be unpleasant, cramped conditions for one; but here, in the nineteenth century, four or five men would spend their summer collecting seaweed with rakes and barrows, returning to Westray only at weekends. They’d burn heaps of seaweed, sending huge palls of blue-beige smoke floating to the island and obscuring sights and smells behind the infamous ‘kelp reek’. The result of their burning was an alkali used in distant cities to make soap and glass.

Yet this tiny skerry is more famous for another major industry of the shoreline. On this spot, countless ships were wrecked. Later, in the archive, I’d listen to recordings of Westray folk describing aspects of island life.⁶ The windfall of goods from Aikerness was prominent among their recollections: the most infectious guffaw to issue from an islander came from Tommy Rendall when asked the question ‘Did any pilfering go on?’ He told of errors made with things washed up from wrecks, such as the time when half the stoves of Westray were ruined because anthracite was mistaken for domestic coal. He told of customs men, whose task – to prevent the contents of wrecks from ‘disappearing’ – made them the most hated people in the islands (besides perhaps the lairds). Customs men were the butt of endless plots, tricks and jokes. Known locally as ‘gadgers’, these snooping officials are still recalled in Orkney descriptions of unruly children ‘running round the hoose like a gadger’. But Westray’s ‘bounty of the sea’ was in fact hard-earned. The people of the islands saved countless lives, rowing small boats out in all conditions to extricate crews from stranded vessels. Like much of island life, this was an improvised affair. Even in the early twentieth century the region’s only sea rescue equipment was on Papay, because of the coincidence that the City of Lincoln, a ship large enough to carry such gear, had been wrecked there.

The first sea creatures I saw as I rounded Westray’s northern headlands were seals. Whiskered snouts protruded from surf in almost every inlet. I’d soon discover Orcadian seals to be the friendliest and most playful I’d ever crossed paths with, but that’s not because their relations with humans have been peaceable. Two days later I suddenly realised how many small structures I’d been paddling past were placed with sight lines to intertidal rocks where seals lounge. They were shooting stations (figure 3.3). Seal killing was once an enticing pursuit for Orcadian crofters: a single sealskin sometimes had the monetary value of a week’s farm labour. And a seal served many other purposes, providing food, warmth, light from oil lamps and even protection for harvest machinery: anything vulnerable to rust was coated in seal fat for the winter. There is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to see use of these marine-life fats and oils as ‘traditional’ or even ‘barbaric’ rather than ‘modern’: it was oil from north-east Atlantic basking sharks that lubricated moving parts in the Apollo moon missions.

It was not so much the import of cheap oils as new passions for wild animals that put an end to the seal trade. But recordings in the archive suggest the economic benefits of the seal to have changed rather than died out. One Westray resident, Alex Costie, recalled the end of seal hunting:

All the greenies, the likes of Greenpeace, were protesting so much … that totally destroyed the markets, but I have discovered nowadays how easy it is to get money for showing a tourist a seal that I am now the most reformed seal hunter you would ever come across.

By the time I reached the end of my first day’s travel I was at the end of Westray’s western peninsula, Noup Head. I climbed the cliffs of this dramatic promontory and slept beneath an imposing Victorian lighthouse. I was back among gannets. Shortly before I came in to land, one eccentric bird approached my kayak and clamped its beak around the bow before swimming alongside for a while (figure 3.6). When I watched them from the cliffs, these tardy birds – the last of the colony to leave for the ocean – were exceptionally bad-tempered, like autumn wasps, protecting their enclaves from each other with a noisy vigour I hadn’t witnessed before.

Next morning I awoke surrounded by half a dozen curlew and, further away, a flock of lapwing. I steeled myself to the task of imagining them as breakfast. Westray folk once used dried strips of seal hide as rope for lowering islanders down from precisely the spot I’d slept to snare birds on the cliff face. In the archive, I listened to discussions of the subtle ethical considerations behind the collecting of eggs and wildfowl. The first brood of lapwing eggs, Tommy Rendall said, was always gathered in, but then lapwings were off limits for the year: the second litter, being further into the summer, was more likely to be raised successfully than the first. I was intrigued to find that some of those interviewed had not entirely shaken off old habits of seeing wildfowl as food:

The guillemots that came here, they still come here … you’ll no get any more here unless you build more cliffs because the cliffs are full of them … It was always a great source of food for the old folk you see. No expense, you didna have any vets’ bills or anything … you know it is very dark-coloured flesh that’s in them … sometimes they were just stewed but usually they were just boiled, you know boiled until the flesh fell off the bones, fried up with onions.

We used to eat eider ducks more than guillemots because there were more eider ducks in our area … and cormorants was better still, especially the brown ones, the juvenile ones. The meat in that is tender, better than any of the other birds I would say, apart from curlews … but nobody seems to eat that sort of thing nowadays. They are just dying of old age and going to waste.

As subsistence activities, these practices tend to evade the historical record. Never in British history has there been a market for the meat of young brown cormorants, however tender. The community activity of catching spoots on the biggest ebb tides of the year (for which children were even taken out of school) could produce a huge surplus of razor clams, but without refrigeration there was no potential for that to be exported either. Children might make a few pence from collecting whelks or catching coastal rabbits but that was the limit of such trades. These shoreline practices, unrecorded in tallies of import and export, are the great forgotten industries of Atlantic coasts. They were local, but far from peripheral because life itself depended on them.

The most marketable of traditional coastal pursuits is unsurprisingly the one that has survived. Every day I saw small creeling boats, most of which gave me a hearty wave as they motored through the tides. The potential to exchange lobsters for money means that not just fishermen or farmers have kept creels; for two centuries at least, almost everyone could supplement their income in this way. Many islanders recall collecting lobsters with particular pleasure: ‘The smell o’ the sea, a creel coming in with a lobster flopping, the tail banging about, it is a grand sound, a grand sight.’ Some added that they didn’t eat lobsters themselves (‘well, perhaps just a small one’): these were seen not as food but money.

After Noup Head, Westray’s dark cliffs alternate with gentle grassy slopes and long white sands. Farmed extensively but spectacularly un-intensively, each of these landscapes is stalked by sheep and large tawny cows. Between the modern farms on my skylines were many other abandoned buildings dating from a time of much more intensive usage of this landscape. Such ruins, with their sagging and crumpled flagstone roofs, attest to the slow exodus from the island. From over 2,000 residents in 1880, Westray had around 1,000 by 1940 and little over 500 by the turn of the millennium.

The 1930s were key to this process because two island industries collapsed. One was herring. From the mid-nineteenth century, fleets of drifters, like pods of orcas today, followed herring from the Western Isles to Orkney and Shetland. Their crews lived on ship and had limited contact with islanders, but Westray men took on the task of keeping fleets supplied with coal. The herring season saw the arrival of hundreds of women who gutted the fish. Unlike the men, they became fleetingly, precariously, integrated into Orkney life. As one islander, Jack Scott, recalled, ‘suddenly, one beautiful day in summer 300 girls would appear … they were Gaelic-speakers and we didn’t know what they were saying to us’. Scott went on to recount the pranks these women played on young island boys. The gutters were also associated with the arrival of exciting things: new Harris tweed suits for schoolboys and, for adults, exotic goods like cherry brandy and peppermint wine. After a summer of singing and accordion-playing the women were gone: ‘it felt as flat as a flounder when they went’. Another island resident, Meg Fiddler, recalled the legacy they left behind in knitwear to last the year. Many photographs of these 1920s gutters show fashionably dressed women who look more like film stars than modern prejudice against the smell of herring might lead people to assume. A slump in herring numbers signalled the industry’s demise. In 1939, the buildings used by gutters and sales agents were commandeered for the war effort and, for Orcadians at least, the industry was dead.

Kelp was another rich trade that hit hard times: this was an export entirely dependent on the whims of distant industries. At the peaks of a kelp boom whole families helped build huge piles for burning. Westray and Papay were as alive with the smoke and fire of industry as Manchester or Coalbrookdale. Orkney was unique in making large local fortunes from kelp. Elsewhere, aristocratic lairds considered trade unseemly so rented the shore to incoming kelp crews. But Orkney’s merchant lairds pursued the trade with their resident workforce. These landowners could manipulate labour with ease because many Orcadian tenants paid rent in labour rather than money or goods. Their lives involved being constantly on ca’, moving at the laird’s command between tasks of land, coast and sea. This is one reason why remnants of the kelp trade litter Orcadian shores. Most such ruins are from the first kelp boom after 1750; the end of this glut, in the 1830s, sowed some seeds of Westray’s downward demographics. But other structures belong to a second boom when demand for iodine between 1880 and 1930 resurrected the trade.

Few people undertook the hard, unpleasant work of making kelp unless they were forced to, but the experience of compulsion varied according to the character of the lairds. The Balfours who owned much of Westray were not, it seems, especially unkind: ‘You never got good lairds’, Tommy Rendall noted, ‘but the ones we got here were maybe the least bad ones.’ Across the narrow Sound of Papay, the Traills were fierce autocrats who worked their tenants hard. Countless grisly stories are still told of them. There’s the tale of a cruel Traill who was thought to have died until knocking was heard from the coffin at his burial; without a word exchanged, the only people close enough to hear – the crofters forced to carry the box – lowered him into the ground anyway. Another Traill was supposedly so corrupt that plants refused to grow on his grave in the Papay cemetery.

These stories were just a few in an array I heard while on these islands. Storytelling is, in fact, among the biggest and most beguiling industries of this shoreline. Few forces generate the serendipity of story as prolifically as the capricious and connecting sea. Even my boat provoked tales. When I arrived on the island, a Westray man looked my kayak up and down and told me that this was the first place in Britain to see such a thing. He dated this improbable event to an even more improbable date: 1682. Foolishly, I mistook this for an odd joke and failed to press him with questions. Yet the idea stuck with me enough to look for it in the small archive on the island. I found that the story of ‘Finn-men’ arriving by kayak in the 1680s was a venerable one. In a book of 1939 Iain Anderson wrote:

Their appearance was, of course, almost unaccountable to these islanders, who recorded that their boats appeared to be made of fish skins, and so built that they could never sink. I think it may be accepted that these strange visitants must have been Eskimos who had been blown to sea when fishing off their own coasts. What seems to be most remarkable is that the Finn-men when seen in the vicinity of this island were still alive, and that when the islanders attempted to catch one of them, he escaped with ease owing to the speed of his kayak.⁷

These kayakers, if they were truly here, were as likely to have been Sami people from Finland as Inuits brought by the North Atlantic Drift. But by the time I reached the archive I’d come to terms with the idea that a historian’s critical faculties needed to be used for purposes other than sifting truth from falsehood: deciphering the meaning of Westray stories was a subtler affair altogether. I’d met a dark-haired man who claimed to be descended from ‘dons’ of the Armada stranded here in the sixteenth century. I’d heard tales of Westray ‘whale shepherds’ herding pods of 300 cetaceans into local bays to take their teeth, and I’d heard the strange story of Archie Angel. This young boy had been discovered on the Westray shore after the wrecking of a Russian ship. He was named when the name plate of the ship, The Archangel, was discovered in the sea. Archie was integrated into Westray society so that generations of islanders had the surname ‘Angel’. A host of things make this story unlikely (how did the islanders read a Cyrillic name plate?), but they are all beside the point. In a place where people washed ashore have so often played roles in the community, and where many houses have timber from wrecked ships built into their structures, sea stories shape island identity: the Just So stories of Westray life. In these tales, facts that can neither be verified nor falsified, yet have a certain pedigree, are the most powerful ingredients of all. The way in which history shapes Orcadian identities through stories and everyday artefacts feels somehow more immediate and pervasive than in anywhere else I’ve travelled.

Every month of my journey introduced new aspects of the Atlantic. The most immediate difference between kayaking Shetland and Orkney was the sea crossings. The main island chain of Shetland is packed tightly together. Although deep and treacherous, the drowned valleys that bisect the ancient mountains are narrow. In most places, crossing as the tide turns means there’s little to worry about: each tricky stretch can be traversed in the time it takes the tide to reassert itself. Not so in Orkney. Although the islands are smaller, the distances between them are greater and the behaviour of the sea is more complex as it fills and vacates the inter-island gaps. Whether in ebb or flood, tidal flows coil back upon themselves. These eddies draw beguiling patterns on the water. Shimmering silver discs like pools of mercury pass through zones of dark ruffles. Bubbles, as if from the snout of a giant sea beast, rise where eddies meet. Veins, ridges, crests and watery fins drift slowly across the surface. The forces of swell, chop, tide and eddy sometimes work in concert, amassing as great heaps of sea. At other times they work in counterpoint, becoming complex cross-rhythms in an oceanic fugue.

Centuries of Orkney seamen have each spent years learning the major ‘tide sets’ of their area because – contrary to popular belief – tides aren’t regular or predictable. As one seasoned Orcadian, Gary Miller, puts it:

You get a tidal prediction book but that’s all it is … they could be a lot stronger, if you’ve got a higher or low air pressure it can alter the tides, or the temperature of the water or the weather or if it’s been windy … there’s that many variables.

Learning tides meant learning which movements arrive early if a headwind is blowing, and in which regions water might run against prevailing flows. Local seafarers can explain everything of the tides around them. But for a kayaker passing through, these performances are yet more Orkney mysteries: tidal events defy logic like the acts of some inscrutable and wayward will. It’s hard to believe this pulsing, breathing sea isn’t alive. It feels far more superstitious to think that the interplay of cosmic orbs is weaving localised motions that – in this very moment – force your bow to buck and twitch.

Leaving Westray to cross to the island of Rousay was my first tidal challenge. From Westray’s western cliffs I headed east between the headland at Langskail and the rocks called Skea Skerries. From here I could see the skerry of Rusk Holm, where the ‘holmie’ sheep graze seaweed, and a nineteenth-century tower was built for them to climb to safety when seas submerge their ‘pasture’. I continued until almost at the south-easterly extremity of the island, then turned my bow south into the firth and steeled myself to paddle hard for Rousay’s north-east headland. The golden sun was low, casting dazzling light across close and foamy ridges of sea, and with wind entering the firth from the east, a messy chop moved against swell that came in from the west. Small waves crossed large waves, merging and birthing pyramidal wavelets. These conditions conspired to make tidal movement impossible to read but easy to feel: the kayak’s bow and stern took on minds of their own and my energy was spent less in moving forwards than in keeping my course. But the crossing was quicker than I’d feared (just a taste of what was to come). The particular local threat was that reaching Rousay offered no respite, because this island is the fixed point in a vortex of tides. Its headlands are sticks thrust between the spokes of a turning tidal wheel. It was here, after landing for the night, that I was forced to retry the tricky headland at Rullard’s Roost.

The Rousay coast is famous among historians. Known as ‘the Egypt of the North’, its number of ruins is matched only by the volume of stories that arise from them. The sounds to Rousay’s east and south are its relic-lined Nile. The small isles in the tidal river are as historic as Elephantine or the cataracts south of Aswan. Prominent among them are Orkney’s two holy islands, Egilsay and Eynhallow. There is no landscape in Britain, besides perhaps the Wiltshire henges, which matches this few square miles for historic depth and diversity.

After a tidal battle at Rousay’s north-western corner I kayaked through freaks of deep time. Wherever the joins in the Devonian sandstone are weak, caves, arches and gloups have formed. The grey, cream and ochre bands of rock – perfectly horizontal – are deeply pitted, leaving narrow pillars of stone, striped like Neopolitan ice cream, to support the cliff face. An airy space, the galleries of a dark drowned Parthenon, stands behind. The gaps between pillars have old, dramatic names like the Kilns of Brin Novan. The largest such ‘kiln’ is thirty metres deep by fifteen wide: within it, swell churns until it bubbles as if boiling. This movement threatened to pull me in as I hung at its mouth to marvel at the fracturing, scarring and sagging that the sea inflicted. These geological creations felt like the imaginary future ruins of a civilisation lost to the rising seas of the Anthropocene.

But the most remarkable features of this landscape belong to the shorter span of time between prehistory and the Victorians. I soon had vistas across the parish of Quandale, where old abandoned townships are sandwiched between the Atlantic and the hilly moorland called the Brae of Moan. It was only here that the true tragedy of the survival of Rousay’s archaeological heritage struck me. This landscape survives in historic forms because it was once emptied by force. The region I was now kayaking was the only part of Orkney subjected to large-scale clearances in the nineteenth century. It was never transformed by subsequent development, because it was rendered barren by the design of lairds. After its emptying, this became a spacious sheep run offering a few pounds a year for little effort and less responsibility. What remains is a tapestry of overgrown dykes, runrig and small kale yards from which remnants of ruined crofts and silhouettes of prehistoric earthworks loom.

This was once an ancestral landscape and a world formed round burial mounds: it was a sacred place. In the Bronze Age, barrows were built to be visible from dwellings so that the dead continued to occupy the world of the living. Burned mounds also punctuate the hillsides. These are large piles of stones that were heated to boil water (although, since food remains are not found with them, their ultimate function remains obscure). The placement and scale of those in Quandale shows that, like the burial mounds, they were part of the social landscape, acting perhaps to display wealth or status. And the remains of millennia are intertwined. Views from the doorways of eighteenth-century farmsteads were dominated by some of the biggest burned mounds in the world. On Eynhallow, crofts were even built into the ruins of a twelfth-century chapel. This clustering of buildings – sacred, ceremonial, domestic – is not just due to centuries of similar uses of land and sea, but also to active relationships with the past among later inhabitants: folk beliefs, cosmologies and identities were shaped by life in a Norse and Neolithic landscape.⁸ Quandale never ceased to be sacred.

To occupants of Northern Isles farmsteads, relics and monuments belonged as much to the present as the past. Ancient things were recycled into new buildings in ways that were ritualistic. Prehistoric axes were deposited in chimney stacks to protect houses from lightning strikes; Pictish symbol stones were built into thresholds and fireplaces, as were prehistoric cup-marks and spirals. Seasonal tasks, such as cutting peat, planting kale or bringing animals in for winter involved wandering different routes through the historic landscape. This resulted in a seasonally shifting geography of life that is sometimes called the ‘taskscape’.⁹ The farming cycle dictated which ruins were encountered day to day, encouraging seasonal repertoires of stories about the origins and meanings of ancient features. Communal memory was long, and stories that could explain how landscapes reached their present state were particularly resilient; since the end of the nineteenth century, Orkney has had an unrivalled number of folklorists, from Ernest Marwick to Tom Muir, who piece this scattered island memory back together.

Over time, townships expanded and the ancient features outside boundary dykes were drawn into the familiar and domestic world. These changes were never without meaning. Mounds, in particular, weren’t neutral features in the landscape: they were sites at which the world of humans intersected with that of supernatural creatures called trows and hogboon.¹⁰ The biggest mound in Quandale, the Knowe of Dale, figures in Orkney tales of human abduction by the trows. Throughout the British Isles, uncanny associations caused farm boundaries to be sharply diverted round prominent mounds. This is why, as I kayaked past, I was surprised to see farms and mounds in close conjunction: at least two Quandale farms were built with barrows at their entrances. One such farm is called Knapknowes, which in Old Norse means ‘Mound mound’. Even the Knowe of Dale is situated prominently within the township itself. The decision to do these things would not have been taken lightly: the barrows of Quandale, it seems, were given different meanings than those elsewhere. Because the long chain of Quandale memory was severed by the eviction of its people in 1848, even the most accomplished folklorists cannot reveal the nature of that difference.

Estate maps of this region around 1850 depict the area of the township, relabelled ‘Quandale Park’, as empty, showing nothing of the recently abandoned crofts or ancient sites. This was indicative of successive landowners’ attitude to the land: they took great pains to present it as a resource, not as a place with history, traditions and stories. When Quandale did, eventually, reappear as a focus of their interest it was as a playground for indulging antiquarian fads. Many Rousay mounds have indentations in the top where Edwardian landowners and wealthy tourists indulged their passion for relic-hunting. Yet this early excavation arrived later in Quandale than elsewhere: for two generations the land remained too contested for lairds to be willing to show interest in tradition. Walter Grant, the first new laird of the twentieth century, was one of a pair labelled ‘the broch boys’ for their efforts to recover Bronze Age monuments. To Grant, however, a mound was an object to be described in isolation: the subtlety of the sacred landscape, including the complex interplay of its remains from different eras, evaded him and those who followed. Only recently, in the hands of innovative archaeologists such as Antonia Thomas and Dan Lee has the full complexity of this island’s past begun to be understood. Today, the sacredness of Quandale is in its emptiness. The holiest sites, perhaps, are the nineteenth-century ruins: monuments to the victims of the lairds.

From Rousay I crossed to Eynhallow and wandered its short, circular coastline. The twelfth-century chapel here is another exceptionally atmospheric ruin. It is an intricate but crudely built holy place that looks out upon the fiercest tides. I climbed the chapel walls to view the terrifying overfalls that cut the island off from both sides. Folklore holds that Eynhallow was once enchanted and inaccessible to humans: its occupants were magical Finn-men. They called it Hildaland and were banished, by salt and the sign of the cross, only at the time the church was built. After its sanctification, Eynhallow earth was said to repel even mice and rats so that a bag of the island’s ground became a valuable commodity.

It’s still easy to believe that the fractious white water of the sounds is an enchantment made to hold Eynhallow at arm’s length from the human world. Fulmars and seals take advantage of the safety provided by the tides, patrolling every section of the shore like guardians. I hung around on a patch of still water in the island’s sheltered eastern bay, waiting for the tide to turn, as a group of tiny harbour seals swam repeatedly around and beneath. Glistening round heads came close enough for long whiskers to brush the kayak, their gentle breath audible as they surfaced (figure 3.5). With a warming sun and clear green water rippling over shell sand, this was the perfect tonic to trials by tide: my last moment within the sphere of the enchantment.

The contrast as I rounded the north-west mainland a little later couldn’t have been greater. The wind peaked at sunset, bringing untidy seas (figure 3.4) and forcing a crunching landing into a black, rocky shore. Swings in the weather didn’t let up until I left the islands. The next day, which took me down the western edge of the mainland, began in froth and sea spray. A scarred bull dolphin sped below, warning me away from its pod passing further offshore. Then I passed multitudes of rocky protuberances and crevices; these were bleak but colourful on an afternoon that truly was ‘a stark drama of light and darkness’ (figure 3.7). The day culminated in calm views over the final leg of the journey, including the most famous sandstone stack in Britain: the Old Man of Hoy. I turned inshore at dusk, with Hoy’s red cliffs reflected in the sea to starboard and to port the twinkling lights of Stromness. But before I could explore the bookshop, cafés and arts centre of the first substantial town on my kayak down the coasts, I had to face one of my biggest challenges: the journey between the unrelenting cliffs and tides of Hoy.

Hoy took me two attempts. On my first effort to breach this most treacherous stretch of waters, I tried to take the sting from the crossing by spending the night on Graemsay. I slept by a disused jetty on this small island in the centre of the sound, with Graemsay’s two lighthouses in sight and views across to the orange tinge of Stromness street lamps on the low blue clouds. Despite my precautions, I hit enormous overfalls at Hoy’s north-western corner and was forced back. Even the inglorious retreat to Stromness cost me all the energy, strength and composure I had. I couldn’t help but berate myself. On a sunny day with a gentle breeze my planning had been spectacularly poor. On the two days that followed, winds raged. I waited them out in town, taking the chance to talk with experts in aspects of Orkney and to plan Hoy properly.

On the third day, I set out in low wind but thick fog and rain. Visibility was poor and the waters starkly contrasting. In most regions of the sea, glossy and slowly rolling waves were gentle and rhythmic; but crashing cross-rhythms resulted wherever rock challenged the will of the water. Listening was my chief tool of navigation through the mist, and I was soon immersed in the patterns that lapped the edges of my boat. By the time I reached Hoy’s cliffs, I was surrounded by the boom of breaking waves, listening hard for corridors of silence through the noise.

I took one break during the day, in the only major breach in Hoy’s western cliffs. This wide bay is ‘the Orkney riviera’ of Rackwick, a collection of eighteen crofts and a schoolhouse where generations of Stromness folk once took summer holidays. My landing was through surf, and the launch back out from the beach of boulders was challenging. Rhythm was everything: processions of breakers a few feet tall alternated with short spells of waves at least twice their height. The troughs between waves revealed rocks beneath the water: obstacles that would make it hard to meet the waves head-on. If a spell of large waves and deep troughs appeared when I launched, my situation would be perilous: I sat listening for almost an hour, trying to find patterns and make predictions.

This day-long need to listen intently might, elsewhere, have been a chore. But here it felt like an opportunity. Hoy’s waves have perhaps the most famous patterns and rhythms in the north-east Atlantic; hearing their refraction through art had been, twenty years earlier, the start of my engagement with the islands. My dad was a violinist in the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, where the resident composer was Peter Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max. In my teens, Max had given me lessons in playing his Orkney-inspired music. Until he passed away shortly before my journey began, Max was one of the most significant composers of his era, and Hoy was pivotal to his career. Before he found Orkney, he was the enfant terrible of British music, scandalising metropolitan audiences. In 1971 Max moved to the most remote croft on Hoy, high on the cliffs above Rackwick Bay and a few hundred yards from where I’d landed today. From here he took a leading role in Orcadian life, founding the St Magnus music festival, developing a new Orcadian musical style and evangelising Orkney to global audiences. Each year, my dad’s orchestra would travel to the St Magnus festival and Max would come to Manchester to conduct works inspired by these waters.

To say that these works were ‘inspired by’ the sea doesn’t do justice to the ways in which the Atlantic soaks them through. What separated Max from his peers was his sensitivity to the soundscapes of his environment. He arrived on Hoy in flight from the aural clutter of the city, but his new life wasn’t defined by an absence of noise. It took place in a soundscape that proved far more provocative than he could have imagined. Surf rolls in on both the right and left of the home he chose: the sea and wind here are constant and inescapable but infinitely various. Gradually, Max realised their potential not as surface details, but as the generative force of his art. The sea became his answer to the puzzle that faced all writers for orchestra in the twentieth century: how to compose in ways that resonate with audiences without retreading the classical patterns of previous centuries. Most new methods, such as the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg, proved to be rewarding games for composers but too abstract and cerebral for their patterns to be evident to listeners. Max’s epiphany on Hoy was that the movements of the sea contained a balance between regularity and randomness that was ideal for generating music. Wave forms and sea rhythms were familiar enough to root listeners in experience, yet complex and alien enough to cause shock, wonder and revelation.

Max’s seascapes are far from gentle and reflective, conjuring instead the roaring ocean thrashing at the Rackwick cliffs. Every cross-rhythm and complexity at the intersections of seas is intensified rather than simplified. These works are reminders that the ocean is only occasionally a soothing, pleasant place, and they capture the persistence of its presence in the Orcadian soundscape. When I listen to them now I’m drawn back into coastal nights in the sleeping bag, when the sea roared far louder than traffic outside any urban window. What the day sounds and feels like on Hoy is defined by the mood of the ocean. When the wind is up and the swell rolls in, the water’s power is impossible to ignore, even from inside a house or the island interior’s moorland. Ocean might be the background to all Orcadian life but it is the foreground to the sensory experience of Hoy. Tim Robinson, assiduous chronicler of the shores of Connemara, has perhaps done more than any other author to capture the noise of Atlantic coastlines in which, he states, ‘only the most analytic listening can separate its elements’. Robinson’s writing on this theme draws on the instincts developed during the training as a mathematician and career as an artist which predate his immersion in ocean soundscapes. These challenging sounds,

are produced by fluid generalities impacting on intricate concrete particulars. As the wave or wind breaks around a headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf, the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in narrows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness out of the reiterated fragmentation of pitches, and it can be terrible, this wide range of frequencies coalescing into something approaching the auditory chaos and incoherence that sound engineers call white noise. A zero of information content.¹¹

But no prose could pick out the order in the apparent incoherence of water-noise with the precision and richness of slowly unfolding symphonic music. Max was an obsessive observer, with the pattern-finding skills of a mathematician (there were far more books about maths than music in his home) and he studied these waves intensively over decades. As well as forming his music from the patterns of waves and of seabirds spiralling into the sky, Max filled his music with artefacts of the Orkney soundscape. Curlews, gulls and features of the weather suddenly emerge from the orchestral background. And fused with themes from the natural world are eight millennia of Orkney poetry and story. His subject matter included the runic inscriptions at Maes Howe, the tale of St Magnus, told as the story of a pacifist Viking, and the 1980s battle against the exploitation of Orkney uranium. His close collaboration with George Mackay Brown became the warm, social counterpoint to the cold inhuman ocean in an output of over a hundred musical seascapes.¹² And, like the Rousay crofters, he reworked millennia of Orkney history for present purposes.

Max isn’t alone among Britain’s leading composers in being drawn to Orkney: there’s something about these complex waters that seems uniquely inspirational for music. Once I reached the south of Hoy, the mist cleared into a rich, bright evening. To the south-west, I could see the Scottish mainland. A dazzling white shard on the horizon was the lighthouse at Strathy Point. Its old engine room is now the home of the composer Errollyn Wallen. Born in Belize, overlooking the islands in the Caribbean Sea, Wallen now lives at the other end of the Gulf Stream, on the Scottish coast overlooking Orkney. In a song cycle, Black Apostrophe, inspired by Scotland’s Caribbean connections, she set the seafaring poetry of a Bahamian-born sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose life had also followed the Stream. Finlay had briefly been a labourer on Rousay: an instinctual link to his maritime childhood pulled him north from Edinburgh in the 1950s.¹³ To both Finlay and Wallen Scotland is a sea zone and Orkney distils its archipelagic state. Given the power of water to this verse and music perhaps ‘aquapelagic’ is a better term: these island assemblages are defined by what lies between them. When Finlay left Orkney, he tried to take the waters with him.¹⁴ He named the windblown ash tree by his inland window ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea), noting ‘Tree and Sea are the same in Sound.’ He referred to Nassau as his birthplace but Rousay his ‘birthplace as a poet’. The rest of his life was lived in lowlands, but the boats and tides of Nassau and Rousay infiltrated all he did.

Wallen set two Finlay poems in Black Apostrophe. One was ‘Fishing from the back of Rousay’ which begins a thousand miles away where rollers, loud, relentless and unpredictable, ‘Originate, and roll – like rolling graves – / Towards these umber cliffs’. They crash into land among weed-robed rocks, ‘like sloppy ice (but slippier)’, where limpets are the only frictive aid against a sideways slide into waves ‘that rise and swell / And swell some more and swell: you cannot tell / If this will fall (Boom) where the last one fell / Or (Crash) on your own head’.

Like Finlay’s, Wallen’s sea joins land masses. It’s a conduit between elements of her aquapelagic experience: ‘I often ask myself “how did I get here?”,’ she writes, ‘and I always answer “the sea”.’ The music of Black Apostrophe is united by the sense of a rolling swell, over which evocations shift between Belizian ‘lush tropics’ and Orcadian ‘bleak majesty’, the latter conveyed as much by complex harmonies as by rhythm: ‘it was the sense of crossing the water for a world “out there” that I … wanted to capture’. The sea is a site of possibility and longing, evoking her parents’ desire, in Belize, to cross the Atlantic, and her own wish, in Scotland, to feel the connection between archipelagos.

In listening to the same sea, Max and Wallen sensed different histories. Max heard centuries of explosive dissipation on the Orkney shore: his waves are at their moment of fulfilment, when switches are flicked between violence and silence. Wallen heard instead the sea’s slow accumulation: its transmutation in the long course of travel bringing countless echoes of elsewhere. The Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite calls the motions of connecting waters ‘tidalectics’: ‘tossings, across and between seas, of people, things, processes and affects’.¹⁵ And it’s worth recalling that even the puffin – now emblematic of the north-east Atlantic – is a bird of the Pacific that, 50,000 years ago, crossed the cold waters that once parted North from South America before the Caribbean basin formed. Only with the birth of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea did the Atlantic puffin become distinctively Atlantic. Only then did the warm currents gather from which the Gulf Stream now surges: the gentle climate of Orkney is made by the shores of Belize.

The work of Finlay and Wallen is also a reminder that it’s misleading to think of Britain as a nation that had an empire or acquired an empire; Britain was born from an unequal union in 1707, when two colony-owning states – England and Scotland – were conjoined. From its beginnings, Britain was an empire and the sea was its medium. Money made from west-Atlantic slave plantations was used by British landowners to impose authority on Orcadian populations, and wealth made by those landlords from Orcadian kelp ran the machinery of slavery. Many families who owned Orkney land were connected as closely to India as the Caribbean. Indeed, the South Atlantic sea route, round the Cape of Good Hope, took ships to regions that had more places named after the infamous Traills than Papa Westray or Rousay where the family long held sway: Traill’s Pass, for instance, leads not through Orkney hills but above the Pindari Glacier in the central Himalayas. The elites of Victorian Edinburgh and Glasgow understood the specific textures of places in the East Indies and West Indies better than the diversity of Scotland’s seaboard and knew those places to be far more central to British fortunes than anywhere north of Scotland’s central belt. It’s no coincidence, then, that when Robert Rendall compared Orkney shores to the sugar candy of his childhood he unconsciously used a Caribbean staple to stand for the island nature of his home; in the sound of Rendall’s crunching candy, as much as in the music of Wallen, there echo a thousand stories of an ocean-wide, aquapelagic, world.

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