by David Yeadon
She smiled and whispered, “I don’t feel unwelcome…but what do you think all the noise is about?”
“I don’t know, but watching how they fly and circle and float on the air currents, barely moving their wings…I’d like to think it was all for pure, wonderful delight…maybe they fly and cry out like that simply because they can.”
Angus guided the boat closer and closer to the towering cliffs until soon we were all looking up at the highest precipice of all—the gigantic rampart of fourteen-hundred-foot-high Conachair, the tallest sea cliff in the British Isles. This essay in pure raw, bold beauty is one of the primary bastions of the island fulmars. Countless thousands were nesting on its immensity. Every inch of ledge and rock-buckle was occupied by screeching white bodies, often lined up like uniformed militia on parade. Guano mounds, dribbles, splatters, and splodges gave the soaring rock face the exuberant aura of an action painting thrown against the rock face by some Pollock-inspired, drug-laced expressionist exhibitionist. And it was down into these tumultuous cliff-worlds of screech and flight that the intrepid Hiortaich cragsmen once lowered themselves, snatching up the young fulmars and gugas (young gannets)—unable to fly from the ledges—collecting eggs, and noosing the larger birds with simple rope lassos attached to fishing rod–like poles.
A visitor here in 1908 was overawed by their skill and courage:
The natives were the finest climbers I have ever known; they were absolutely fearless on the steepest cliffs. I have seen them perform feats which would make our hair stand on end in fright. They worked in pairs, one man attached to a rope, and the other in charge at the top of the cliff. I watched one man take a run at a cliff, eight hundred feet high, with a sheer drop to the sea, fall face downwards when he reached the edge and, while his brother at the top allowed the rope to run through his hands, the climber actually ran down the cliff side, then, when the rope had almost run its full length, the one above put on the brake, and the one below gave a twist, turned on his back so that he could see us above, and waved.
We learned later to our surprise that such activities still continue today on the island of Lewis. Against increasingly strident objections from naturalists and “Greens,” a small group of tradition-honoring climbers set out annually in a small boat in late August for the rugged, deserted islet of Sulasgeir, thirty-five miles north of the Butt of Lewis, on a “guga hunt.” While such activities are still very much a valued part of local life in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, this particular two-week event on dangerous four-hundred-foot-high cliffs is the last remaining vestige of true fowling in Britain today. The fowlers claim that their catch is strictly limited to two thousand birds (less than twenty percent of the colony) and is justified as a “sustainability harvest” to prevent devastating “overnesting.” However, when the bird lovers heard that the hunt was to be celebrated that autumn by a formal “international conference and dinner” with boiled guga as the prime delicacy on the menu, their outcry against “this barbaric ancient ritual” reached crescendo pitch. Nevertheless, the event, organized by the Islands Book Trust in Ness (a fascinating repository of books and research materials on the Western Isles near Point of Ness), went off as planned.
Boreray and The Stacs
One participant likened the guga flavor to “a very pleasant roast pork”; another described it as “rather overgamey venison with fishy undertones.” Others adamantly declined to comment.
The precarious activities of fowlers on St. Kilda constituted a major part of their lives, their livelihood, and their proof of manhood. To fail as a fowler “at the crags” relegated you to a kind of social purgatory here. You were not a true Hiortach, and in an island community so small and interwoven with generations of inbreeding, that must have been as close to a living death as any man could experience.
Back at the village we’d explored a touching remnant to this form of social ostracization—the remains of a house set high above the village by the head dyke wall. It was built single-handedly in a day, according to local legend, by a man named Calum Mor to prove his strength and manliness after the village fowlers had insultingly left him behind on one of their cliff-scaling forays.
Seasickness has also been described by sufferers in similar “living death” terms. And as Angus turned the boat northward for the four-mile ocean crossing to the most outlying of the archipelago islands, Boreray, the floppy chop at the base of the cliffs now became a wallowy, stomach-churning maelstrom.
“Nothin’ to worry ’bout,” Angus called out from his seat at the wheel. “Tide’s turnin’ a bit but it’ll soon calm itself. It’s often like this in the early evening.”
Unfortunately, his reassuring words obviously failed to bolster two of our passengers, who sat, or rather half lay, on the deck by the cabin door, greened and cold-sweaty, and made abundant use of the little white paper bags handed to them by Duncan.
The rest of us huddled on the deck, keeping our eyes firmly locked on the horizon and sucking in great gobbets of sea air, as the boat floundered, lurched, and rolled toward the impressive hulk of Boreray. And toward something else. Something black and onerous that seemed to be shooting high out of the water like an emerging antiballistic warhead.
“Stac Lee,” shouted Angus. “My favorite rock!”
And now it’s ours too.
Stac Lee is a magnificent monolith—a creature that changes shape and mood as you circle it. From one angle it offers that ballistic warhead profile. From another, the rock striations tilt upward, giving it the thrust and menace of a huge attacking shark, jaws open and life-threatening, exploding out of the ocean. From a third angle it possesses the rather benign profile of an arrowhead chiseled into a series of flat facets. And as we edged around it, the gannets teemed above us in an almost impenetrable mass of wings and lean, javelin-tapered bodies. Once again came the strange feeling that we were truly in a different world, an unfamiliar place where birds were the dominant species and we were merely insignificant observers being treated with utter indifference and disdain.
And then, as we altered course around Stac Lee, a second, even more immense rock monolith—Stac an Armin—arose beyond the cliffs of Boreray, a favorite bird-hunting site, and the torn, hacked 1,270-foot summit of Mullach an Eilean. From the south, Armin resembles an immense war galleon in full sail, its bulk leaning backward to emphasize its aura of sheer majesty and power. But as we moved in closer to gaze at its western profile, it suddenly became—just like Stac Lee—a jagged-pointed pyramid whose serrated pinnacle was echoed by a series of similar dagger-shaped peaks and fanged ridges on Boreray itself—a key, and very appropriate, location used for scenes in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
These sentrylike guardians of the huge Boreray cliffs could, with a few swirls of crevice-stuck clouds and a sheen of ethereal sea mists (neither, alas, present that day), quickly transform this already malevolently powerful place into something truly supernatural, laced with fantasy and fear. But then a squadron of Chaplinesque black puffins with their rainbowed bills suddenly skittered comically across the wave crests beyond our bow, their silly little wings beating frantically to keep them aloft—and the Tolkienesque/Potter mirage faded as we all giggled like a cluster of schoolkids.
Slowly the stacs and the islands began to fade into the evening haze as Angus set Interceptor 42 at full-knot speed and we sped eastward across a calming sea back toward Harris. An aura of melancholy suddenly settled over our little group. It was obvious that none of us—with the possible exception of the two seasick ladies—wanted to leave. Something of the sheer beauty, power, and wonder of the place had touched our spirits. We had all been guests in a complex kingdom of birds of which we understood so little and yet had been deeply moved. Collectively. You could sense our sharing of the experience in the way we all seemed to stand closer together, exchanging murmured insights and mutual sighs of awe and admiration…
“St. Kilda is one of those places you won’t ever forget,” said Anne softly.
I nodded and then smiled at our elderly friend with the trilby hat and the ram’s-horn walking stick. He was standing a little apart from the others, watching the islands slip away into the setting sun—a fiery miasma of gilded luminosity. He smiled back—a large and generous smile. Whatever he had done on the island in memory of his great-grandfather seemed to have made him very happy…
18
Artists and Creators
SOMETHING IN THE STARK, BROODING boldness of Harris, the gauzy infinitudes of the golden beaches, and the ever-present, ever-changing personality of the light and the weather, lures artists here like angels to the Holy Grail.
These are not landscapes for simpering watercolors, or ultra-high-definition digital photographs, although I’ve seen many of those. There are far too many powerful nuances here. Too many mysteries and moods for delicate aquatic or overdetailed renderings. Just the rocks alone—from the glacier-smooth strata ribs bursting through the dark peat beds to the ominous gneiss bulks of Clisham and its huddled compatriots, resonating with their 3.5-billion-year-old heritage—demand bold and muscular treatment.
From the depths and fires of time, the rocks arose and still remain as mute reminders of the tenuousness of human existence. Simon Rivett, a Lewis artist admired for his powerful moorland oils, claims, “The coloration and starkness of the wide-open spaces provide me a real challenge.”
James Hawkins, creator of tumultuously churning canvases of rocks, lochs, and mountains, loves living in this remote country “with its constantly changing scenery, bathed in calm beauty or wild with furiously wrathful storms.” In his works you can almost hear the power of moorland streams in full torrent and feel the scratched and broken profiles of the ancient hills in virtual tactile reality.
A similarly evocative but more stylized reality permeates the boldly composed watercolors of Anthony Barber, which are sold in the form of greeting cards and prints throughout the islands. More moody and visually dramatic are the heavy impasto canvases of Jolomo (John Lowrie Morrison), who draws inspiration “tied to memories of childhood…the dark, brooding mountains and dazzling moorlands…reflected in vivid layers of pure color.” A similar spirit permeates the impressionistic works of Vega, which capture the vibrant tones of weather, light, water, and wild landscape here.
Marian MacPhee, on the other hand, celebrates some of the more legendary underpinnings of the islands, particularly in her furiously dynamic depiction of The Blue Men of the Minch, those demon creatures of the deep off the Shiant Islands who rise up during raging storms to challenge terrified boat crews to knowledge contests of Gaelic songs and verse, and then, if the men prove inadequate (which, I assume, it’s hard not to be in a roaring gale), drag then and their boat down into the dark waters for eternity.
One of our favorite Harris artists, Willie Fulton, seems to be able to capture all these nuances and more in his ethereal canvases, often featuring mists, mountains, moonlight, and moods so intense that you can do little else but stand and stare, and, in my case at least, admit to a combined admiration and envy for his evocative techniques.
Willie laughed when I tried to say something like that as we stood with Anne inside his own tiny Ardbuidhe Cottage Gallery at Drinishader, deep in the jumbled moonscape of the east coast Bays. His smiling, open face, neatly trimmed white beard, and dismissive attitude toward overpurpled praise, suggested a man at peace with himself and in love with his own life.
A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art and an art teacher, mostly in Tarbert, for “precisely twenty-nine years and one hundred and sixty-nine days,” he has a philosophy and a wisdom (neither are words he would choose himself) that are disarmingly simple. “It’s all about looking, really. If you look, you’ll see and if you see, you’ll discover. Every single day can be a voyage of visual discovery—exploring and experiencing the wonderful qualities of light here, the ever-changing moods, and that incredible sense of space.”
And as he talked, Anne and I were looking out from the studio across to his house lower down the slope and the rocky arc of his Bays croft. The key elements of his art lay right there in front of us. All he had to do when seeking inspiration was look out of his window—and paint.
Willie seemed to sense what we were thinking: “Yes—it’s great, isn’t it. I’m always swimming in ideas here—they’re all around—coquettish, dancing, laughing, fighting, having the time of their lives with my head. But once I’m latched onto an idea, I try to whittle it down. Find the essence. Simplify it. I try to keep the focus. I honestly feel it’s through simplicity that we can perceive beauty and through beauty that we’re drawn into those fleeting moments in nature—they can come and go so fast—they’re all too easily missed. Sometimes I find achieving this kind of ‘simplicity’ is the most difficult thing to do. But then again, a constant challenge like that is what keeps me painting.”
Willie talks and gestures with a spirit of suppressed energy. I had a feeling that if he really let go, his little studio would literally explode. Even in his paintings, despite their beguiling “simplicity,” you sense the existence of other forces, other dynamics within the canvas. There’s a sense of something about to happen, even though the mood in many of them is mistily ethereal, bathed in calm—and yet not so…
I tried to explain these reactions to him and told him that I was reminded of something Rodin said: “That which is more beautiful than a beautiful thing is the fading of a beautiful thing.”
He gave a sort of beard-and-twinkle laugh. “Ah, that’s me summed up to a T. I always was a bit mysterious, I suppose—even to myself. Fading in and out—changing directions. It’s like I heard a writer on the radio last week describe how he wrote. Forgotten his name…anyway, he said something along the lines of: ‘My books coagulate very slowly in a gloppy, primordial idea-soup.’ I liked that. Same as me, really. I never seemed to do what everyone thought I should be doing. Self-destructive, maybe. Bit of a family black sheep, I suppose. I had no silver spoon—very working-class background, so I had to make my own life. Always drawing, never exhibiting. I was a healthily antiestablishment kind of guy. Never really liked the academic side of things. Didn’t like the art world’s snobbism and game playing. But somehow we—my wife, Moira, and I—found ourselves here and I really enjoyed teaching in the school at Tarbert. But the bureaucracy eventually got me down. So I’d had this dream for years—I guess since I was a kid in love with art—that maybe I should one day pull away from the system and really do my own thing. Sounds a bit corny when I say it now but it seemed like the right moment—it was the right moment! So I concentrated on my own work. I decided it was my time now. Moira joined me too with her work. She’s a fine painter. Better than me in many ways.”
Anne and I paused to look at one of his latest works. “I like the way you’ve captured the illusion of a whale in this one in that mysterious cloud over the hills. Is that supposed to be symbolic of the island heritage as a whaling center?” asked Anne.
“Y’know, others have asked me the same thing. And it’s nice you’ve spotted the link, but actually it’s just supposed to be a cloud—I keep saying I’m gonna paint that bloody mouth out…and that stupid tail. I keep looking at it and thinking, My God! It does look like a whale!”
“You used whales—or at least very large fish—in some of your huge Spirit of Harris paintings at the Rodel Hotel,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” said Willie. “I spent the best part of a year creating that whole series. They’re not pretty-pretty landscapes. They’re how I felt about the island—its heritage and power—its uniqueness. Man’s existence in this place and the huge passage of time here. I was kind of declaring myself. And when I’d done it, I decided maybe it was time to exhibit. So off I went with my portfolio to the big galleries in Edinburgh and I kept thinking, What the bloody hell am I doing here?! I feel like a commercial traveler lugging a box of samples around. So by the time I’d arrived at the first gallery, I hadn’t even gone in through the door, and I was r
eady to say, ‘Look! Stuff your stupid gallery, I’m off back home!’ I was so full of self-doubt. I was thinking to myself, I’m hopeless, I’m no artist, certainly not with a capital A. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, ‘I can understand someone wanting to paint but I’m not sure I understand them wanting to be an artist.’ So I thought, What the hell am I doing here? And I expected to be patronized and told, ‘Oh, yes—quite nice, but it’s just not our kind of thing.’ But it didn’t happen that way. Not at all. She loved ’em. And she asked me what my expectations were for prices and I honestly hadn’t a clue—I mean, what is art worth anyhow? How do you set a price on something so personal? So she suggested some prices—based, I think, on the size of the canvases. There were a lot more zeroes than I’d ever conceived, so I guess I sat there trying to be cool—which she took, I guess, for obstinacy—so she doubled the prices and I said, ‘Well, I guess we could try them at that.’ And she sold six of them almost immediately! And then she said, ‘Would you be interested in doing a personal show at the gallery?’ And—well, what else could I do? So I said, ‘That’s fine with me.’”
Willie paused, smiling to himelf, still apparently bemused by the quirkiness of his first gallery experience.
“Anyway…so I came back to my rock here and really got going with the paintings. And the place is so hidden with no distractions except all the things in my paintings—the shifting light, the earth colors, the changing patterns and shades of the ocean, the great ancient rocks…and when I opened my own small gallery last year here, I was honestly bowled over! People kept coming and buying whatever I produced. I worried I might become a sausage factory—producing the same paintings over and over. But I knew I couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that. I’d be bored so fast I’d probably jump off the cliff here.”