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

grants further cause for prayer.

Donald S. Murray, ‘The Cragsman’s Prayer’ (2008)

SHETLAND (#ulink_9b79709f-173e-5dad-bcee-7a4df1440f83)

(July) (#ulink_9b79709f-173e-5dad-bcee-7a4df1440f83)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.