The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (13 page)

At the high point of Eilean an Taighe was a slung hammock of rock that had been heated by the sun. At noon or so I lay shirtless and shoeless in it, a comfortable Crusoe, looking eastwards over the main channel of the Minch. Tide and wave were writing their scripts upon the blue water: white wind glyphs, curled from the air in markings that reminded me of the patterns on the backs of spiders or of Arabic lettering.

Later in the afternoon, I sat facing west towards the dropping sun and read Adam Nicolson’s fine book
Sea Room
, a study of the islands by one of their former ‘owners’, a copy of which I had found in the island’s only current habitation, a whitewashed bothy. Nicolson had inherited the islands from his father, but had never considered himself anything other than their temporary paper-possessor. He had left them free for visitors, and kept the bothy hospitably maintained and open.

‘
The Shiants
… are not really a lonely place,’ Nicolson remarks in the first chapter of his book. ‘That is a modern illusion … for most of their history … they were profoundly related to the world in which they were set.’ Their position in the centre of the Atlantic seaways meant that they had been a stopping-off point for sea journeys for 5,000 years, a safe harbour in the mid-Minch. ‘Our modern view of such [islands] as orphans or widows, drenched in a kind of Dickensian poignancy of abandonment, is, on the whole, wrong,’ he continues. They are in fact:

the hub for millions of bird and animal lives, as dynamic as any trading floor, a theatre of competition and enrichment. They are the centre of their own universe, the organising node in a web of connections, both human and natural, which extends first to the surrounding seas, then to the shores on all sides and beyond that, along the seaways that stretch for thousands of miles along the margins of the Atlantic and on into the heartlands of Europe.

I like that image of the ‘web of connections’: the seaways leading, like Thomas’s land paths, ‘from everywhere to everywhere’, joining deep ocean to coastal shelf to estuary to river to back country. I also recognize Nicolson’s account of having been chronically ‘shaped’ by his ‘island times’ on the Shiants. ‘
The place has entered me
,’ he wrote adoringly, ‘it has coloured my life like a stain.’

Small islands have often inspired dreams of total knowledge in those who love them. I have read the work of several islomaniacs over the years – Tim Robinson’s deep topographies of the Irish Aran islands, Nicolson on the Shiants and Lawrence Durrell on Corfu, as well as Nan Shepherd’s study of her inland-island of the Cairngorm massif, and Gilbert White’s record of his Hampshire parish of Selborne. All these people had been animated at first by
the delusion of a comprehensive totality
, the belief that they might come to know their chosen place utterly because of its boundedness. And all had, after long acquaintance, at last understood that familiarity with a place will lead not to absolute knowledge but only ever to further enquiry. For Shepherd, the Cairngorm massif was not a crossword to be cracked, full of encrypted ups and downs. Greater understanding of the mountain’s interrelations served only to reveal other realms of incomprehension. She did not relish her discoveries so much as her ignorance: ‘
The mind cannot carry away
all that the mountain has to give,’ she wrote, ‘nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’

Down on the storm beach, as dusk approached, I spent an hour building a small domed and chambered cairn out of dolerite, for the pleasure of the act of construction. It was two feet or so high, with corbelled sides curving up to a capstone roof, and its open doorway – lintel-topped and buttress-braced – faced due east, ready to be flooded by the rising sun. The smoothed dolerite boulders were shiny black when I brought them out of the sea, but they dried to a wolf grey. I found and kept a transom-ended stone of gneiss, fist-sized and coopered with a quartz band. Scouring the beach, I discovered a single white stone, the size and shape of an ostrich egg, and I placed that upright in the centre of the cairn. I was pleased when I’d finished the structure: it looked like a miniature Maes Howe, which would last until the next big tide or visitor’s boot.

As the sun finally fell, I lay on the machair, hands behind my head. Time, briefly, felt not absent (the islander’s dream of ahistory) but rather multiplied in its forms. Orange mites traversed boulders.
Xanthoria
parietina
photosynthesized. Puffins shifted in their roosts, the tide gathered northwards pace. Rainwater that had fallen three days earlier filtered down inside the fissures of Eilean an Taighe, the body of the pollock stiffened in the black bucket by the bothy’s door, and the sun loosed its summer light, as it had done for uncountable years, across the sea, the island and my body, a liquid so rich that I wanted to eat it, store it, make honey of it for when winter came.

That night Ian cooked the fish on the bothy stove. Whisky was passed around. A fire was lit, the wood spat. Ian spoke of a friend who had sailed a
currach
, the hull of which was made from hazel wicker and eight cow-hides, from County Mayo in Ireland across to Iona on the Scottish west coast, following the route taken by St Columba in the sixth century.

The fire died. Ash frosted the logs. The light dimmed. Late gold rip along the horizon line.

I slept again that night on the machair ledge and heard geese crying as they passed through the wind gap, over the storm beach.

Dolphins, a school of seventy or eighty of them, met us head-on as we sailed from the Shiants on the morning tide, a dozen or so breaking from purpose and coming to play, folding back on their set course to swim with us, swerving round and under the bow – briefly our outriders, our police escort.

We had rowed to
Broad Bay
not long after dawn, raised the sail, then at high water had sailed over the rock teeth that jag up in the northern gap between Eilean Mhuire and Garbh Eilean, the wind fluky, spooky in its sudden shifts. The weather had changed. Rain-squalls ahead, the wind higher but still from the south, so we reefed the sail and ran downwind, straight into the oncoming dolphins.

What a sail home it was! We made five knots, probably the top speed of
Broad Bay
, though in our little boat in that wind it felt far faster. Ian smiled proudly at the way she was taking the pace of hull on water. Our blue-white wake was brief behind us, broken quickly up in the chop. Ian taught me how to ‘surf’ a boat when running downwind in a decent swell. ‘Just two slow little flicks of the tiller,’ he said, ‘
this
way, to steer off the wind a touch – and then
this
way, to fill the sail again, so the boat boosts on and catches the wave that’s passing under you. It’s like a surfer kicking off to pick up a crest.’

I nodded, unsure.

‘The only way to learn, really, is to do it.’

He was right, and once I’d learnt the trick of it I couldn’t get enough. It felt as if a current or charge, the summoned energy of the ocean, were rushing along the helm, up my arm and down my spine. The feeling of connection to the water was immense, muscular, as if the Blue Men were lending their strength to my shoulder.

‘Aye, we’re cooking with gasoline now,’ said Ian gladly. I surfed, and he started to tell me more old sea stories, bawdy and salty, well travelled along the sea roads.

By Kebock Head the rain set in. Hard rain plucking up the sea, and blistering on the creosoted thwarts. I shivered at the helm, and to keep my mind from the cold Ian talked me through
Broad Bay
as a boat, starting at the bow and ending at the tiller. He knew her biography as well as that of any long-term lover, and he told it to me as a story: how she had been built in Deerness in Orkney in 1912, and then registered in Kirkwall. How her hull was clinker-built, with ten overlapping planks of larch on each side of the keel, a method which has not changed since Viking days, and which suited the working boats of the northern and western Atlantic, making it possible for them to manage steep seas and strong tides while carrying substantial loads. How the port and starboard frames of
Broad Bay
’s hull were subtly different because of the builder’s response to the particular qualities of each larch plank.

‘
Broad Bay
was a 1912 boat; at least, she was made new in 1912,’ said Ian, ‘and as far as the insurance company is concerned she is just shy of her century, but in fact the only original part of her left is the keel, the spine of the boat running bow to stern; that and sections of the stem and stern posts.

‘She’s all made of opportunities,’ he added. ‘See the oak pieces near the bow, for taking the strain of the tack-hooks? They’re laminated from oak taken from a house that stood along the route on which we’re sailing, right over there.’ He pointed westwards to the Lewis coast. ‘That house was owned by Sopwith, so the oak from an English aeronautical baron from Kensington is now being used to keep the Hebridean maritime traditions going strong away up here! And the knees are salvage wood, ancient oak preserved by mud, which were found in the mud of the Hoil. They had a fine curve to them and are superbly strong; I think they came from an old herring drifter.’

He explained the sociology of boat construction, the importance of having neighbourly or kindred materials next to each other. ‘You don’t want to put galvanized on bronze,’ he said, gesturing up at the bronze sheave in the lug-rig at the top of the mast. ‘Stainless is closer, a first cousin in the metal family. You need to make sure that the woods, and above all the metals, are compatible.’ I thought of how for Ian, objects and materials, like people and language, all had their fitness for purpose verified by use. Words and people, halyards and hawsers, they all got put under pressure. Some sheared, splintered and gave. Others held – and they were the ones to keep to hand.

Later, back into the Hoil. The tiller feeling like a bony extension of my arm. Slicks of fuel from the big boats making gneiss-patterns in the water. We helmed alongside the quay, and as we slid into the berth Ian was already talking about the next voyage, a voyage north.

Water – North

The men of Ness, the
guga
& the Rock — Green Rona, black Sula — ‘At the hazard of their lives’ — The dark arts — Map-reading as clairvoyance — Wind-histories — A weather window — Sailing from Port of Ness — Dilworth’s kist — Placation vs sacrifice — Whalebacks, stramashes & clutters — ‘Disturbances to the expected’ — ‘The face of the water’ — The bird-bung — Roomy darkness — Steering by the North Star — A stately quadrille — Raising Sula Sgeir — Circumnavigation by oar & sail — The gannet in the gneiss — Heart-squeeze.

In antiquity,
Irish scholars
were known … for their practice of ‘
navigatio
’ … a journey undertaken by boat … a circular
itinerary
of exodus and return … The aim was to undergo an apprenticeship to signs of strangeness with a view to becoming more attentive to the meanings of one’s own time and place – geographical, spiritual, intellectual.

Richard Kearney (2006)

Listen now. Listen to the singing of the
guga
men on the bare rock of Sula Sgeir, hunched in a stone bothy on that little island far out in the North Atlantic, on an August morning fifty years ago. If I could sing it or play it to you I would, but I cannot, so this will have to do. The scene: a rough hut, six feet high at its tallest, built out of blades of gneiss, its cracks plugged with rags. In its centre a peat fire, above which hangs a storm lantern that lends light to the space. Rough stone benches around the edges, on which the men are sitting, wearing tweed jackets and heavy wool jumpers. The mutter of the fire. The wind moving outside, testing the bothy.

The singing begins. First comes the leader, his voice low and rich, incanting the verses of the day in Gaelic – ‘
ach is e an gràdh as mò dhiubh so
’, ‘and the greatest of these is charity’ – his voice dipping then rising at the end of each verse. The lesson ends. A pause. A cough to clear the throat. Then the leader offers a high line from a psalm, his voice gaining in volume: pure notes sung from the throat and chest. This is the ‘throwing’ of the line. The other men answer in song, the sound swelling to fill the bothy. Another line is thrown, followed, completed. Shades in the singing of cotton-field gospel, and hints too of the muezzin’s call. These are fire-songs of worship, consolation and comradeship: song as devotion and as stay against the storm. These are the
guga
men of Ness, the gannet hunters, singing in the Year of Our Lord 1953.

Sula Sgeir sits around forty miles due north of the most northerly point of the Isle of Lewis; the same distance from the Outer Hebridean coast as St Kilda. Its form is geological-brutalist. It is a jaggy black peak of gneiss, the topmost summit of a submarine mountain, and it is home to around 10,000 pairs of gannets and – for a few years – the only black-browed albatross in the northern hemisphere.
*
The sea has bored clean through the southern part of the island to form a series of caves and tunnels. In big Atlantic storms, the waves break right over the top of Sula Sgeir.