The Blackhouse (25 page)

‘There she is!’ someone shouted, and I peered through the mist and rain to catch my first sight of this legendary place. And there she was. Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rising straight out of the ocean in front of us. Almost in that same moment, as the mist cleared, splinters of sunlight fell through fissures in the cloud, and the glistening rock was thrown into an instant projection of sharply contrasting light and shade. I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wingtips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air. This was one of the world’s most important surviving gannet colonies, and these extraordinary birds returned in ever-increasing numbers year after year to lay their eggs and raise their chicks in this forbidding place. And that in spite of the annual harvest by the men of Crobost, and the two thousand chicks we were about to take from their nests this year again.

An Sgeir lay along a line that ran approximately south-east to north-west. The towering spine of the rock dropped from its highest point in the south to a bleached curve of two-hundred-foot cliffs at the north end, like a shoulder set against the prevailing weather of lashing gales and monstrous seas that rose out of the south-west to smash upon its stubborn gneiss. Three promontories on its west side jutted into the ocean, water breaking white and foaming furiously in rings all around them as they dipped down into undersea ravines.

The nearest rib of rock was called Lighthouse Promontory, because of the automatic lighthouse built at its conjunction with the rest of the island – the highest point of which loomed over us as we approached. Beyond it, the second and longest of the promontories formed an inlet that cut deep into the heart of the island, open to the east, but providing shelter from the west and the north. It was the only place on An Sgeir where it was possible to land our supplies. Here, time and the relentless assault of the elements had carved out caves in the rock so deep that finally they had cut clean through to the sheer cliffs at the far side. It was possible, Gigs said, to paddle through them in a punt, or a rubber dinghy, great natural cathedrals rising forty and fifty feet into blackness, before emerging on the other side of the island. But only ever when the sea was flat calm, which was almost never.

An Sgeir was barely half a mile long, its vertebral column little more than a hundred yards across. There was no soil here, no grassy banks or level land, no beaches. Just shit-covered rock rising straight out of the sea. I could hardly have imagined anything more inhospitable.

The skipper steered the
Purple Isle
gently into the inlet they called Gleann an Uisge Dubh, Black Water Creek, and dropped anchor in the bay, a great rattling of rusted chain as it left its locker. With the cutting of the engines, I became aware for the first time of the noise of the birds, a deafening cacophony of screeching, calling, chattering creatures that filled the air along with the stink of guano. Everywhere you looked, on every ledge and stack and crack in the rock, birds sat in nests or huddled in groups. Gannets and guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmar petrels. The bay around us was alive with young shags, their long, snakelike necks dipping in and out of the water in search of fish. It was extraordinary to think that a place so hostile and exposed could play host to so much life. Gigs slapped my back. ‘Come on, son, we’ve got work to do.’

A punt was lowered on to the gentle swell, and we began the process of transferring our supplies from boat to rock. I went out with the first load, Gigs gunning the outboard and motoring us in to the landing place, cutting the motor at the last moment and turning broadside to allow the swell to lift us gently up against the rock. It was my job to jump out with the rope on to a ledge no more than two feet wide and secure it to a large metal ring set into the stone. I nearly went on my arse as my feet slithered under me on a slimy skin of sulphur lichens. But I kept my balance and slipped the rope through the ring. The punt was secured and we began unloading. We balanced boxes and kegs and sacks precariously on ledges and outcrops until it looked as if everything we had brought with us had been dropped from a great height on to the lower reaches of the cliffs. With each return of the boat, more of the team arrived and leapt ashore. Just beyond our landing point, the rock folded away into one of its cathedral caves. It was dark and creepy, with the eerie sound of water sucking on rock echoing from somewhere deep within its blackness like the rasping breath of some living creature. It was easy to imagine how legends of sea monsters and dragons had grown out of such places.

After four hours the last of the supplies was brought ashore, and the rain began again, misty wet sheets of it, soaking everything, making every algae-covered surface of every rock treacherous underfoot. The last thing we took on to the island was a small rubber dinghy, which four of the team dragged up the slope to secure about fifty feet above the bay. It was to be used for emergencies, although I could not think what kind of emergency would make me want to put to sea in it. To my astonishment, I saw that Angel had crouched down in a shallow cleft in the cliff, and using his body as shelter had built a small fire of peats. He had a kettle close to boiling on it. The
Purple Isle
blew her foghorn out in the bay, and I turned to watch her pull anchor and head towards the open sea. It was a dreadful feeling watching her slip away like that, the skipper’s mate waving from the stern as she went. She was our only link with home, our only way back. And she was gone, and we were left here on our own on this barren lump of rock fifty miles from the nearest landfall. For better or worse, I was here, and all that remained now was to get on with it.

Miraculously, Angel was now passing around mugs of hot tea. Tins of sandwiches were opened, and we crouched there on the rock, the smell of peat smoke in our nostrils, the sea snapping at our feet, and drank to warm ourselves, and ate to restore our energy. For now, all these boxes and barrels and sacks had to be manhandled two hundred and fifty feet to the top of the island.

What I had not expected was the ingenuity of the guga hunters. On some previous expedition, they had brought out wooden planking and constructed a chute, two feet wide and nearly two hundred feet long. It was built in ten-foot sections, which they wrapped in tarpaulin and stored on the rock for each successive year. Piece by piece the sections were retrieved and slotted together, braced against the rock by stout legs and stays. It looked like one of the old wooden flumes you would see in black and white photographs from the goldrush days of the Klondike. A dolly on castors came thundering down from the top at the end of a length of rope, and the process of hauling up kegs and sacks and rolled-up mattresses began. Smaller boxes were passed hand to hand in a chain of men all the way up to the top of the rise. Artair and I passed boxes between us in silence, and then up the chain to Mr Macinnes, who kept up a constant commentary, explaining how the chute would be kept in place for the two weeks we were on the rock, and used at the end of it to slide the gugas – plucked, singed, gutted and cured – one by one to the boat below. All two thousand of them. I could not begin to imagine how we could kill and process so many birds in just fourteen days.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we had transferred all our supplies to the top of the rock, and Artair and I climbed our way wearily up to join the others. There we saw for the first time, crouched among the rocks and the boulders, the remains of an old blackhouse, built more than two centuries before, and maintained each year by the guga hunters to provide their shelter. It comprised just four walls, and the sun- and salt-bleached struts of a non-existent roof. I could not believe that this was to be our home for the next two weeks.

Mr Macinnes must have seen our faces. He grinned. ‘Don’t worry, boys. In an hour we’ll have her transformed. She’ll be a lot cosier than she looks now.’ In fact the transformation took less than an hour. To reach the blackhouse we had to stumble across the chaos of rocks on the top of the island, slipping and sliding in the spinach of lichen, guano and mud that covered them, trying to avoid the nesting fulmar petrels tucked into nearly every crevice. The whole crown of the rock seemed alive with birds, nests woven from frayed scraps of coloured string, the debris of broken and discarded fishing nets scavenged from the sea. Green, orange, blue. Entirely incongruous in this most primeval of places. As we blundered among them it was impossible to escape the vomit of the fledgling petrel chicks, an involuntary response to our sudden and unexpected presence. Their vile green bile spattered over our boots and oilskins as we passed, the stink of it almost as bad as the shite that coated every treacherous surface.

Within the walls of the blackhouse, great sheets of corrugated iron wrapped in tarpaulin were recovered and unwrapped, and we set about nailing them in place between the angled beams of the roof. Then we threw the tarpaulins over them, and fishing net weighed down by boulders that were left to hang all around the walls. Now our blackhouse was weather-tight and waterproof. Inside was dark and damp, the smell of guano almost overwhelming. The floor was strewn with discarded nesting materials, and our first task was to clear it out, and remove the nests built into every nook and cranny of wall space, carefully re-siting them somewhere out among the rocks. Half a dozen peat fires were lit in open-hearthed barrels to dry out rain-soaked walls, and we transferred all our supplies into a room at the far end of the blackhouse where, in a traditional home, the animals would have been kept.

Thick, choking smoke quickly filled the place, a fumigation, driving out the smell of shit, and forcing streams of earwigs out from every crack and crevice in the walls. Our eyes were streaming. Artair dashed outside, airways reacting to the smoke. He was gasping for breath. I followed him out to find him sucking desperately on his puffer, panic subsiding as his tubes reopened and oxygen flooded his lungs.

Gigs said, ‘Go and make yourself familiar with the rock, boys. There’s nothing more you can do here just now. We’ll give you a shout when grub’s up.’

And so, with the wind whipping around our legs, and the rain running in sheets off our oilskins, we made our way slowly and carefully across the rock, heading north to the third promontory, a huge arc of smooth rock almost severed from the mother island by a deep gully. We had seen the stacks of cairns there, silhouetted against the grey sky, piles of stones laid meticulously one on the other to create columns three feet high and more, like gravestones. Out there on the promontory, next to the cairns, we found the remains of a small beehive-like dwelling, its roof long since caved in. We found flat rocks to sit on and with some difficulty lit ourselves cigarettes. Still, it seemed, there was nothing for us to say to each other. So we sat in silence and looked back across the length of An Sgeir. We had a marvellous view of the rock from here, rising up to its peak at the lighthouse, a short, squat, concrete structure with a maintenance hatch, and a strangely structured glass roof to protect the light. Seabirds gathered around it in their thousands. Next to it was the only flat and level place on the island. A square of concrete laid into the rock to provide a landing pad for the helicopters that brought out maintenance crews twice a year. We could see the ocean all around us, grey-green and leaden, breaking against the rock in wreaths of creamy foam, rising and falling into a distance obscured by rain. Despite the presence of ten other men on the island, and my best friend sitting beside me, I cannot ever remember feeling so alone. Depression fell over me like a shroud.

In the distance, we saw a figure approaching across the rock. As he got nearer we realized it was Artair’s dad. He called and waved and began climbing up towards us. Above the sound of wind and rain battering my hood I heard Artair say, ‘Why the fuck can’t he just leave us alone!’ I turned to see if the remark had been directed to me. But he was staring straight ahead at his approaching father. I was startled. I had never heard Artair speak like that about his dad before.

‘You shouldn’t smoke, Artair,’ were Mr Macinnes’s first words when he reached us. ‘Not with your condition.’ Artair said nothing, but continued smoking all the same. Mr Macinnes sat down beside us. ‘You know the story behind the ruined dwelling?’ He pointed to the collapsed beehive. We shook our heads. ‘It’s the remains of a twelfth-century monastic cell inhabited, some say, by St Ronan’s sister, Bruinhilda. There’s another just like it on a rock called Sula Sgeir ten miles or so west of here, close to North Rona. Legend has it that her remains were found in one of them, whether or not it was here or on Sula Sgeir I don’t know. But her bones were bleached as white as driftwood by the elements, and there was a cormorant nesting in her ribcage.’ He shook his head. ‘Hard to believe that anyone could live out here on their own.’

‘Who built the cairns?’ I asked. From our position I could see now that there were dozens and dozens of them, stretched across the curve of the promontory like a cemetery.

‘The guga hunters,’ Mr Macinnes said. ‘Every one of us has our cairn. Each year we add another stone, and when we have been for the last time, they are the reminder to all those who follow that we have been before.’

A shout from the direction of the blackhouse drew our attention, and we saw someone waving us back.

‘They must be ready for us to eat,’ Mr Macinnes said.

By the time we got to the blackhouse, there was smoke billowing out of the hole in the roof left for its escape. The interior was surprisingly warm now, and less smoky than it had been. Angel had his cooking fire burning in an open keg in the middle of the floor, a pot hanging over it from a chain in the roof, a mesh grill set over the flames for making toast, a large frying pan bubbling with oil set on top of it. Gone was the stink of guano and bird vomit, to be replaced by the smell of kippers cooking in the pan. There were potatoes boiling in the pot, and Angel had made a stack of smoky toast for us to mop up the juices. There were two big pots of tea to wash it all down.