As they have revealed, the enormous main sill of Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe is itself made up of at least four different pulses of magma. These were not violent events but of great scale and immense power, slowly applied; a slow squeezing apart of an abscess the size of fifty city blocks. The Shiants laid on Manhattan would stretch from Wall Street to Times Square. These successive pulses are not, as you might think, laid one on top of another, in the way you would assemble a sandwich: mustard on top of the ham on top of the cheese on top of the butter on top of the bread. Not at all: each new one inserted itself, in a hot, licking tongue of new magma, within the body of those that had come before. They could only have done that if the preceding magma was still quite soft. In other words, here in this main sill, they must have followed, one from the other, quite quickly. The picture is of a gradually fattening sandwich, made in something like a piece of pitta bread. You begin with the bread alone, and one by one, butter, jam and peanut butter are squeezed inside it. The sequence you end up with, then, is: bread, butter, jam, peanut butter, jam, butter, bread.
In the Shiants, although the sandwich is 537 ft. thick, it is almost precisely like that, made up of four interleaved layers. The first, of a rock called teschenite, was 6 ft. thick (the top and bottom of this layer are now 531 ft. apart), the second (picrite), 78 ft. thick, the third (crinanite-picrodolerite), 440 ft. and the fourth (granular olivine picrodolerite), just 13 ft.
Beyond that, I fear, it becomes difficult for a layman to follow. I could tell you about the mineralogy of these islands, with the intriguing differences between picrite (which cooled slowly, so has big crystals and looks wormy, with an eroded surface like the mottled, liver-spotted skin of a toad or like penne in a pesto sauce) and picrodolerite (quicker cooling, a fine, granular porridge), or about the beauty in freshly broken rock of the tiny grape crystals of the olivine and the big black glitter of the pyroxenes, about the evolution of the magma over the years of its emplacement, so that the last spurts of it produce a strange, white, open-structured, vast-crystalled rock called syenite on Eilean Mhuire – but I won’t. This is not the place.
After the magma from the vast chambers below had finally exhausted itself, the Shiants, still deep underground, began to cool. From both above and below, the chill started to reach inwards into the heart of the semi-liquid mush, like the hemlock in the limbs of Socrates. It might have taken a century or so for the rock to become solid. As it cooled, it shrank, and that is the origin of the columns of which the Shiants are made. Any large body of shrinking material, contracting over its entire width, pulls apart from itself internally. Shrinkage cracks develop in the body of the rock identical to the network of polygons that develop on the floor of a drying lake. The columns are nothing more than a network of cracks extended into a third dimension.
If this cooling had been conducted in laboratory conditions, where the magma sheets were of equal thickness throughout and both upper and lower surfaces of the intrusions were level, then a structure of complete regularity would have emerged. All the columns would have been straight, the same size, and parallel. But this is not a laboratory. Some of the intrusions were clearly thin (in particular the one that formed the Galtas) and cooled more quickly. This has meant that the columns are themselves much thinner there. More intriguingly and beautifully, it is clear that the opening into which the magma squeezed was uneven. The columns would have formed by growing perpendicular to the cooling surfaces and here the unevenness of those surfaces has created columns that curve, twist and bend, are waved like the hair of art deco statuettes, fixed in the elegance of a geological perm, Jean Harlow turned to stone, Madonna having glimpsed the Gorgon.
Others, such as the upper sections of the north cliffs on Garbh Eilean, cooled so quickly that whole slaggy masses of rock became solid before columns could develop. Below them, deeply buried in the huge Garbh Eilean sill, the magma cooled very slowly indeed and here the Shiant rock-forms attain the great magnificence of the giant columns. These were the forms over which John Macculloch, the early geologist, enthused in 1819:
The lover of picturesque beauty will here, as in many other parts of the Western islands, be gratified with a display of maritime scenery combining the regularity of Staffa with the grander features of the coast of Sky. Towards the north it exhibits one continuous perpendicular face of naked rock. This face is columnar throughout, and forms a magnificent scene for the pencil; spreading in a gentle curve for a space of 1000 yards or more, and impending in one broad mass of shadow over the dark sea that washes its base. In simplicity and grandeur it exceeds Staffa almost as much as it does in magnitude; offering to the tourist an object as worthy of his pursuit as that celebrated island, and of no very difficult access from the northern extremity of Sky.
The Shiants languished in obscurity, while their more famous, and more accessible cousin-rocks off Mull became ever more visited. Perhaps the open waters of the Minch protect the Shiants from fame. Perhaps the nearness of Staffa to Iona creates its public success. And having witnessed, from the deck of a boat, Staffa sagging one summer’s day under the weight of its geological trippers, I can only say; ‘Thank God’.
A Gothic fate awaits the Shiants. There has been a steady geological drizzle over the millennia which has created the huge scree slopes at the feet of the cliffs. Giant pencil stubs the size of small houses lie tumbled like the aftermath of an earthquake. Sometimes, groups of them still hang together as if thrown in a clump on the rubbish heap. The birds live in many-storeyed tenements among them. If you walk across them, the lorry-sized rocks wobble and creak beneath you. Shiant dynamism is not over. The cliffs themselves are a symptom of the slices being taken out of them and the hard edges of the islands are signs of destruction in progress. ‘The upper millstone heaven,’ Ted Hughes once wrote, ‘Grinds the heather’s face hard and small.’ It isn’t only the heather. Fergus Gibb reckons that ‘a million years or two should see the Shiants off.’
Every spring, I look for the new scars, the beds from which the lumps of rock have broken away. They are unnerving places. Where the splits have occurred, the remaining edges are as sharp as knives. You can cut your hands on them. For some reason, the bare unlichened stone smells of iron or even blood, because blood smells of iron too. The smell is one of deep antiquity, a release into the nostrils of elements in the rock which have not been volatile since the rock was made. It feels as intimate as poking your fingers into a wound.
I have never witnessed something which I have spent hours in a boat waiting to occur: the collapse of an entire column from a cliff. Fergus has only seen it once, and then not here but in the similar rock formations in Trotternish, the northern wing of Skye, twelve miles or so to the south. He too was in a boat on the quiet sea. Alerted by a shuffling, a distant rumbling in the silence which on still summer days hangs around these places, Gibb looked up from his notes. Across the bay, an entire thin pencil, perhaps three hundred feet high, six or eight feet across, was slipping in slow motion into the sea. The base of the column, like many of them, must have been eaten away by the sea. Incredibly, the columns of which the islands are made are scarcely more bound to each other than pencils in a box and once the base has gone, knocked out by a winter storm, there is nothing to withstand the force of gravity. That morning, the column slid down, buckled and then fell, not like a felled trunk but with the shaft snapping in two places in mid-air before the three giant sections crashed like stone hail into the stillness of the Minch. The birds clattered away from the impact, the wash ran up to Gibb’s boat and on past it and the silence pooled back in. Fergus said it was like a glacier calving.
These rocks are killers too. In 1796 the Reverend Alexander Simson, the Minister of Lochs, described the Shiants in his statistical account of the parish:
There is one family residing on the largest of the islands. The head of this family has been so unfortunate as to lose, at different times, his wife, a son, and a daughter, by falling down great precipices; the mother and
son met with this catastrophe in following sheep, and the daughter, by going in quest of wild-fowl eggs.
There is no further explanation of why they should have fallen. It is easy enough to slip on the dew-wet cliff-top grass, or to be blown away in a sudden gust, or for a rope to fail, but it seems likely enough to me that the collapse of part of a cliff might be to blame.
More recently, the sheer instability of Shiant rocks killed a boy. On 28 June 1986, a party of teenagers and their teachers from Cranbrook School in Kent had just arrived for a summer expedition to the islands. It was a beautiful evening, and as they were putting up their tents, one of the boys, Simon Woollard, an experienced alpinist and gifted climber, decided to climb the small cliff just behind the house. It is no more than twenty feet high and I have often climbed it myself, pushing up past the bunches of wild thyme, the purple knapweed and the hart’s tongue ferns, without ropes, for fun. We had given names to some of the routes – ‘Grassy Chimney’, ‘The Squeeze’, ‘Crab Lunch’ – ‘a naughty little climb with pretentious reaches’, as I wrote in the visitors’ book when I was seventeen.
That evening in 1986, Simon Woollard did it by the book. He was belayed from below, wearing a harness and a helmet. His friends were watching him from among their tents on the grassy level behind the house. The Shiants on a summer evening like this, as the sun begins to drop towards the hills of Harris, and the two Galtas stand out as a pair of black moles against the colours of the evening, and as the birds come in from their fishing for the evening wheel between the islands, is the happiest and calmest of places. It could not hurt you. It was then, at about twenty to nine in the evening, that, towards the top of the cliff, a block of dolerite over which Simon was pulling himself came away in his hands. It was about the size of an armchair. He fell with it for a moment but was then held by the rope and the rock sliced through his helmet and into his head. He died there, at the foot of the cliff where he had fallen, and later that night, after many hours’ delay and unspeakable distress for those who were there, a helicopter from RAF Lossiemouth came to take his body and some of his friends back to Stornoway. The others left thirty-six hours later, when Donald MacSween collected them from Scalpay. There is a small plaque at the place where Simon died and none of us has ever climbed there again.
That is not quite true. I came to the islands a couple of weeks after Simon Woollard had died. The evidence was still there: shards of broken rock on the turf at the cliff foot, still sharp, a huge and horrifying stain on the boulders which the rain had not yet washed away. On the evening of the accident, Adam Tozer, the master in charge, had written in the visitors’ book that there had been a fatality. With big, slashing, diagonal lines he had crossed out the pages in which we had described the various routes. ‘DO NOT CLIMB’, he had written across the sketch of the rocks on which the boy had died.
For the first day or two I did what he asked and kept away, but reluctantly. Not to climb what we had always climbed would mean the cliff would be haunted by a kind of denial. These islands were a place in which, if you took care, nothing had ever been denied. You could risk a storm if you knew what you were about, you could happily expose yourself to weather which at home you might have hidden from. I decided to climb the cliff again. I went up to the foot of a familiar route, the Grassy Chimney, an adder’s tongue fern in the cleft above me, a cushion of thyme on either side. I reached up for the first hold, pulled my body up six inches, perhaps a foot, and as I did so, as I applied my weight, I felt the block, a cubic yard of dolerite, ease out a little from its bed. I let go of it as if it were a burning coal and dropped those few inches back to the turf. Never again.
6
I HAVE SAT FOR HOURS on the bench in front of the house – it’s a plank of driftwood on a pair of stones – watching Donald MacSween trawling for scallops (or clams as they are called in the Hebrides) in the waters a mile or two away just south of the Galtas. He has a new boat now, the Jura, but in the 1980s, it was the Favour, a steel thing, not, it has to be said, the greatest beauty that Scalpay has ever known, painted red and white, with its name in huge letters on the wheelhouse.
Sometimes, he and Kenny Cunningham, his crewman also from Scalpay, went on deep into the night and on a quiet evening all you could hear for hour after hour was the groaning monotone of the diesel, a slow surging in its note, as the Favour pulled the heavy clam dredge across the sandy floor of the Minch fifteen or eighteen fathoms below them. It was long work and by the late 1980s most of the scallops here had been fished out. Every few hours Donald and Kenny would haul up the dredge and pick one or two of the valuable shells from its heavy metal mesh. Money was short.
The dredge always brings up other things: boulders, wreckage,: the odds and ends with which the floor of this littered sea is covered. Early in 1991, they spotted a piece of straightish, gold-green wire about two feet long. It had been caught up in the gear. Kenny picked it out and thought little more of it. It was a curiosity.
The length of wire spent a year or so alongside the spanners and heavy screwdrivers in the toolbox of the Favour. Fishing boats are high-maintenance creatures. Donald leaves for sea at four every morning, a little later in the winter, and is back in the North Harbour at Scalpay by early afternoon. But that is not the end of the day: there is always several hours of mending and maintenance to be finished. The tool box is as critical as the rudder. Month after month the wire was shoved aside by hands looking for a wrench or a jemmy. At one point it was hung on a hook in the wheelhouse, remaining there for the summer.
One Sunday evening, Kenny happened to be watching the Antiques Roadshow on the BBC. A woman produced a piece of jewellery which seemed to resemble the wire that had been dredged up the previous year. Cunningham was going to Glasgow for a wedding and so thought he might take it to an auctioneer’s to get a valuation. At Christie’s, he brought the wire out of the deep, inside pocket of his jacket. It was in the shape of a walking stick, a long straight section with a curve at the top. Miranda Grant, Christie’s gemologist, who had done a thesis in early Celtic jewellery, was called to the desk. She was mesmerised by what she saw and took it in her hands. Kenny said he thought it might be gold because it had been in the sea but was quite uncorroded. It was only gold, wasn’t it, that could lie in the sea and remain unaltered? Without thinking quite what she was doing, on automatic pilot, as she says, Miranda Grant grasped the object and bent it into the shape she thought it should have, a looped circle. The wire was of very pure gold, probably between twenty-two and twenty-four carat, and in her hands, it was softness itself. ‘It went like butter,’ she said. She suggested quite calmly that it should go straight away to the National Museums in Edinburgh for a further view. Cunningham left it with her and the next morning she took it there in a briefcase.
Trevor Cowie, the curator in the National Museums, ‘almost died’ when Miranda Grant brought the object out of her briefcase. The piece of soft gold wire was the only surviving late Bronze Age gold torc ever to have been found in Scotland. Another three had been recorded in the nineteenth century (from Edinburgh, Culloden and Stoneykirk in Wigtownshire) but were now lost, one certainly and the others probably melted down for their gold. This was the only Scottish survivor of a kind of body ornament, probably made in about 1200 BC, for the neck or, if twisted into a double spiral, the upper arm, of a prince or priest or chieftain. It is a kind of jewellery which in a sparklingly twisted golden trail has been found scattered throughout Celtic Europe: one or two from near Carcassonne in the stony world of the Mediterranean, another in the Pyrenean foothills south of Toulouse, one from Jaligny in the wide, flat meadowlands of the Bourbonnais in central France, one from the orchards of Calvados in Normandy, another from the bed of the Seine in Paris itself. The trail runs on through Brittany and the Channel Islands, across wide swathes of southern and eastern England, one found in the Medway at Maidstone, another at Mountfield in the Sussex Weald and a cluster of them in the Fens. Their heartland is in Wales and across the Irish S
ea. Two were found at Tara, in County Meath, the capital of the Irish High Kings, and one at the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim. The gold of this torc is probably from Wales or Ireland, or perhaps a combination of the two. Throughout the Bronze Age the metal was extensively recycled.
Excitement rippled through the archaeological community and the MacSween and Cunningham households. (Although scarcely beyond them: this is not the kind of news which is immediately shared on Scalpay.) But whose was it? The proprieties had to be observed and the assumption made by the authorities was that this object came from a wreck. The wreck might have been more than three thousand years old but it was still a wreck. The government employs an officer in ports all around the British shores with the title ‘Receiver of Wreck’. Wreck, in this instance, is not a description of a ship but of a category of goods, a cousin to flotsam (goods washed off a ship at sea and floating) and jetsam (goods deliberately thrown off a ship to lighten it in a storm).
‘Finders,’ the Receiver of Wreck’s official document states, ‘should assume at the onset that all recovered wreck has an owner.’ Finds must be ‘advertised as appropriate to give the owner the opportunity to come forward and claim back their property. If no owner is found within one year from the date of the report, the material becomes unclaimed wreck. In the majority of cases the finder is then offered the material in lieu of a salvage payment.’
For a year, the torc discovered by Kenny Cunningham and Donald MacSween remained in the custody of Her Majesty’s Receiver of Wreck, Stornoway, waiting for a naked, dripping Bronze Age chieftain to walk into his office, next to the Fishermen’s Co-Op a few yards from the town quay, and claim it as his own.
Sea Room Page 9