The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (11 page)

A second consequence is that today’s national boundaries shiver and collapse. Instead of belonging to particular nations that happen to possess coastlines, these outward-facing coastal settlements – from the Shetlands and the Orkneys all the way round and down to Galicia in Spain – become a continuous territory of their own: Atlanticist in nature, sharing culture, technologies, crafts and languages. A dispersed occidental continent, if you like, whose constituent areas are united by their common frontage onto the same ocean. As Cunliffe argues, a shared cultural identity developed over ten millennia along this Atlantic facade, such that Galicians, Celts, Bretons and Hebrideans might be said to have had more in common with one another than with their ‘inland kin’. Kenneth White proposes the recovery of ‘
lost wavelengths
’ and ‘Atlantic sensations’, the suggestion that there are ways of feeling and thinking that are inspired and conditioned by the fact of long-term living on an ocean edge. There are, White writes, ‘events of the mind’ that could have occurred only on these Atlantic coasts, where ‘strange winds of the spirit blow’: another version of the idea that so attracted Edward Thomas, of inner landscapes being powerfully shaped by outer.

Up and down these sea roads, from the Mesolithic era onwards, travelled people (raiders, devouts, migrants, traders, craftsmen) and their ideas (technologies, languages, dialects, beliefs and values). Along the seaways in the Neolithic moved beakers and battleaxes, oval pendants and stone beads, lance-heads of honey-coloured French flint, funerary practices and architectural techniques. Along them in the Bronze Age moved gold lunulae, pigments, jet, amber, copper, faience, bronze torcs and itinerant bronze-smiths (carrying their bags of scrap, their beeswax, their refractory clay). Along them in the Iron Age moved Cornish tin, art motifs, domesticated animals and precious metals. Along them in the Dark Ages moved the heavy freights of violence, trade and religion. Along them in the Middle Ages moved stone, lime, rope, pantiles, timber, wood-carving techniques, vernacular violin-playing, songs and airs (
one of Robert Burns’s most perfect songs
, ‘The Gallant Weaver’, is set to a Scandinavian tune).

The growth of the Roman imperium and the consequent growth of the European road system transformed the political geography of Europe, and for a time the importance of the seaways as routes of travel was diminished. But in the fifth century a new form of worship – physically demanding on the practitioner, and founded on an ideal of solitude, or
desertum
– spread from Gaul and arrived by means of the seaways into western and northern Britain.
Peregrini
– wandering devouts – travelled by boat on their pilgrimages, making landfall on distant islands and headlands (Iona, North Rona) long before the Norsemen reached such places. White has written well about this extraordinary moment in Christian history, when the monks – a-sail in search of their
desertum
– ‘
suddenly began to move
further afield, flying in a great … migration, their heads full of grammar and geography, verb tenses and tempests, quick thinking and poetry’.

Some of the Celtic Christian literature that emerged from these centuries took the form of the
immram
, a word which might be translated perhaps as a ‘wonder-voyage’, a sea journey to an otherworld.
*
The
immrama
–
The Voyage of
Mael Duin’s Boat
,
The Adventure of Bran
and
The Voyage of Brendan
being among the best known – are set on the seaways. They are narratives of passage, which move easily from the recognizable to the supernatural, fading from known into imagined geographies with minimal indication of transition. In these tales, the actual territories of Scotland, Iceland, Orkney and Shetland are connected by the sea roads with fabled places such as the Hesperides, the Island of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles (an archipelago that was still marked on charts of the west Atlantic into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and Hy-Brazil, the island of happiness off the west coast of Ireland, where sickness is impossible and contentment assured.
*

These, then, were waters in which the geological and the theological mingled, zones in which ‘
metaphor and reality merged
one into the other over time’, as Cunliffe puts it, and they were the waters that I set out to sail with Ian Stephen.

Ian and I stood side by side on the Stornoway quay, looking across at the little boat he was proposing we take to sea. Ian, hands in pockets, relaxed. Me, hands on hips, apprehensive.

‘The traditional ballast for boats such as
Broad Bay
,’ Ian said, ‘was boulders. She’d be laden with boulders of
gneiss
; folk would make a chain and pass the rocks along, and they’d be laid all along the keel like a clutch of heavy eggs.’

Ian’s tone suggested that this was information I should find reassuring. I did not. Even though I was familiar with the logic of ballast, I simply could not find it sensible to load a boat with boulders before sailing her out into the open ocean.

I had first met Ian in Stornoway a year or so previously. He is – well, he is many things. A sailor before all else, determined by and for the sea, living mostly hand to mouth and with his eye always on the next adventure. His love of the sea is so keen that it might seem like greed, but it is more imperative than greed. Born and brought up on the Isle of Lewis, he was a coastguard in Stornoway for fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, before he gave the job up because it bound him too much to the desk. He is now a sailor, an artist, a storyteller and a lyric poet of real worth. For much of his life he has been fascinated by the sea roads that lead to and from the Outer Hebrides, and he has spent years sailing them, and researching the tales and songs that have moved along them. ‘There are stories you meet different versions of at different points up and down the Atlantic coast,’ he told me. ‘When you encounter them, you know well that this is a story that’s travelled by the sea roads.’

Following the stories is for Ian a way of mapping the routes of the roads, and sailing the roads a way of mapping the routes of the stories. He has tracked mutations of sea tales – ‘Three Knots of Wind’, ‘The Blue Men of the Minch’, the ‘
Selkie
’ and the ‘Fin-Men’ legends – as they have been carried about over the centuries, making their landfalls here and there, finding retellings in different accents and different places. In 2007, he helped to sail three traditional boats along routes suggested by three Gaelic songs and stories, one of which was the ‘Fraoch à Rònaigh’, a song based on the air of a pibroch whose lyrics consisted mostly of the place names of the graveyards in North Uist. It was an exile’s song, a lament that lists the places where the writer’s ancestors lie. To Ian, traditional stories, like traditional songs, are closely kindred to the traditional seaways, in that they are highly contingent and yet broadly repeatable. ‘A song is different every time it’s sung,’ he told me, ‘and variations of wind, tide, vessel and crew mean that no voyage along a sea route will ever be the same.’ Each sea route, planned in the mind, exists first as anticipation, then as dissolving wake and then finally as logbook data. Each is ‘
affected by
isobars
, // the stationing of satellites, recorded ephemera / hands on helms’. I liked that idea; it reminded me both of the Aboriginal Songlines, and of Thomas’s vision of path as story, with each new walker adding a new note or plot-line to the way.

Ian in appearance: curly silver hair, a shallow white stubble, two thin silver earrings in his left ear, too fine to be piratical. Ian in manner: sharp, fox-like, generous, mischievous. Ian in voice: lilting, Gaelic-inflected. Ian in stature: small, almost boyish. He has an air of youthfulness to him, seems younger than me, though he’s more than twenty years my senior. His physique, like his language, is compact and wiry, capable of reach and strength. Physically, he’s whipped tight, made of hawser and halyard wire, but his character is full of flex. He passes in and out of moods of intense concentration, whose endings are marked by a quick grin, a
register
shift, an agile impiety. He doesn’t take well to fools or frauds. The first time we met I felt gauged, appraised, quickly read. Eyes moved up and down me. I had the same sense of apprehension as when stepping through an airport scanner. Then – clear. Green light. No improper goods. Nothing falsely hidden. A test passed, for the time being at least.

Ian lives thirty feet from the quayside in Stornoway, in a former customs house that had been converted into a sail-loft, then a net-loft, then a gas depot, until it had fallen derelict for years, and eventually been restored. This is his dockside crow’s nest.

When I first visited him there, one late-summer evening, I was shocked to see that he had just been burgled. The door was wide open, and objects spilled out from it as if from an overfull cupboard. Foot pumps, dry-bags, clothing, toolboxes, oars, a quiver of rigged fishing rods in a tube, down whose tight lines light ran in beads as we approached. Ian picked his way unconcernedly through the mess towards the open door. ‘Don’t mind that,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it always looks round my front door. Come away in and meet whoever’s around.’

That night we laid plans and plotted adventures up and down the sea roads. His house was, as I would later learn, run in a manner close to a commune. Financially, it survived mostly on barter and gift. People – sailors and fishermen in the main – passed in and out, sleeping in the loft, behind sofas, or paddling out to one of the boats that were moored in the harbour, and kipping in the berths there. Others would turn up in the kitchen, stopping by for an hour or two, for a coffee or dram. There was Michael ‘The Boat’, who turned up with a bucket of orange gurnard. There was Michael ‘The Hat’, who appeared wearing tweed and holding a monograph on the Scottish Enlightenment to his chest like a clipboard, as if he had come to inspect our intellects. There was an Englishman called Colin, who wouldn’t tell me much about his life apart from that his business had taken him to many different countries (‘import/export’ – the old spy’s alibi), and who worked cleverly with wood.

Ian lives on Lewis, but from there he has travelled far. He is an islander who’s lived an international life. The Outer Hebrides are to him a crossroads, not a margin, and in that sense he is living proof of the surviving importance of the sea roads. The result of his ocean journeys is a knowledge and world view that are anchored in one place, but cosmopolitan in their range. His lines of connection are the dotted lines on the charts that run north and east from Stornoway to Norway, Orkney, Sula Sgeir and North Rona, the Baltic countries; or south down the Minch to Islay, Dublin, the Scillies and the Breton coast. He has friends and watch-mates from all over the Atlantic facade. ‘
If it’s about anything,
it’s this,’ he wrote in a poem:

the taste of the relations, out of town,

the watch-mates met again …

The way one phrase talks to another.

The history of your way through weather.

The touch of your people.

Mid-morning departure, Stornoway harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel.
Broad Bay
’s wake through the harbour – a tugged line through the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk. Big seals floating here and there, their nostrils and eyes just above the water, their blubbery backs looking like the puffed-up anoraks of murder victims. Nostrils up,
snort snort
, duck to rinse, and then dive with a final flip of the flukes. Out we went – by oar, sail and tow – past the drug-money pleasure-gardens and castle of James Matheson, who in 1844 used half a million pounds of the money he made pushing opium to the Chinese to buy the whole island of Lewis. Out past the lighthouse, out past the headlands, the sea opening like a cone into the Minch.

The sun above us, bright and high, but the sky darkening swiftly further out. Black sky-reefs of cloud to the east. The sea: graphite, lightly choppy, white-stippled. The wind: a near-southerly, Force 3 or 4, with just a touch of east in it. A good strength for a little boat like ours, but from the worst of directions. Our sea road led us south-south-east, but it’s impossible to sail directly upwind: we would have to make long tacks. Two other boats left the Hoil with us: a full-size
sgoth Niseach
, called
An Sùlaire
(
The Gannet
), with a crew of five, and a sea-going yacht to keep watch over us in case of trouble. Ian and I were together in little
Broad Bay
.

‘Let’s get the sail up, show the people that we’re leaving well,’ said Ian. So I hoofed and hauled the big
yard
to the spar-top, the mainsheet was tightened and lightly jammed, the terracotta sail
luffed
then filled,
Broad Bay
surged southwards through the water, and my heart leapt in my chest. Our wake spooling white behind us, our track record. The water going past fast with a hiss like poured sand.

We would sail for nearly twelve hours that day, almost south into an almost-southerly. It was never certain until we reached the Shiants around dusk that we would make it to them at all. Our little boat with its two-man crew couldn’t keep up with the other craft. Within a few miles of clearing the Stornoway headlands, the yacht and
An Sùlaire
were far ahead. We watched
An Sùlaire
’s swooping lugsail take a long tack out into the shining haze of the Minch, until she disappeared. Then it was just us, the water and the way. I felt no worry at being out there in that sea because I knew that I couldn’t be with a more experienced sailor, and because this was a boat that had lasted a century and there was no good reason why she should founder now.