The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel

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 (http://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 (#ulink_c748985d-6906-5655-8a6a-05b7d27e0b2f)

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.

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,