I then took it on to one of the world’s leading experts in early Christian sculpture. Ian Fisher works at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland and he has, among other multifarious interests, made a lifetime’s scholarly study of the crosses which are littered around the lochs and islands of the west coast. Many of them are free-standing grave markers, the entire stone cut into the shape of a cross. Others are carved on to boulders or cliff faces, above landing spots or next to wells, sanctifying the daily acts of existence. Ian is known to have a buzzard’s eye for these things, spotting them in obscure mossy declivities where no one has thought to look before. The map of early Christian presence in the Hebrides has thickened and grown thanks to his years of labour.
When I brought the Shiant stone into his Edinburgh office, Ian’s eyes quite literally shone with delight. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, his hands grasping it, moving his palms carefully over the roughened surface. ‘Yes, yes,’ as if it were a home-coming. The stone had only been out of the ground ten days and had already found a godfather.
Straight away, of course, he knew the provenance. ‘This reminds me very much of the stones on Inishmurray,’ Ian said, half-cradling the stone, allowing his fingers to explore its rough and dented surfaces. A book came down from the crowded shelf, was flicked open to the relevant page, and there was a photograph and an engraving of this very stone. But it wasn’t this stone. It was its near twin, along with a large collection of about sixty others, in a Columban-age monastery on the small rocky island of Inishmurray off the coast of Sligo. ‘What is Inishmurray made of?’ I asked Dr Fisher. ‘A sandstone, I am told.’ I rang the office of the Geological Survey in Dublin. ‘Hallo, Solid,’ the Irish voice answered. The Solid Geology department could provide the information but it was disappointing. The Inishmurray sandstone is part of the Mourne series, grey and fine-grained, quite different from the Shiant stone.
Nevertheless, the connection was undeniable. In form and in atmosphere, the Inishmurray stones, from a tiny, bare and windswept rocky island three hundred and fifty miles away in Donegal Bay, were, apart from the material itself, indistinguishable from the one we had dug up on the Shiants. The route between them was, quite simply, along the flyways of the barnacle geese. Given good weather, and favourable winds, even Freyja could do it inside a week, or certainly two. And the Inishmurray stones had been long known as beautiful. Many were in the National Museum in Dublin. Another, very like the Shiant stone, had ended up in the Duke of Northumberland’s collections of antiquities in Alnwick Castle.
The stone then went on for yet another interview with another Edinburgh archaeologist, the Irishman John Barber, who has excavated extensively at Iona. He too took the thing into his hands like a doctor with a patient, a stroking investigation in his handling of the relic. He runs a private archaeology company now, hired out to developers, but he was treating this like a sculptor with another man’s work. The ring around the cross had clearly, he thought, been ‘pecked’ with some pick-like tool. But the arms of the cross, had at least in part been made by grinding, perhaps with a piece of flattish stone and some water and a little sand, rubbed backwards and forwards along the chosen line. Very slowly, it was perfectly possible to grind away the lines of which the cross was made. You could see where the inner parts of the v-shaped incision had been polished in the very process of grinding. The work, Barber thought, looking down through his half-moon glasses, might not be entirely finished. One of the arms had been ground deeper than the other. It was ‘country work’ and so was not something, you could safely say, that had emerged, as had the high-figured stone crosses of Iona or the sculptures and illuminations of the great monasteries of Ireland, from a rich and powerful centre. ‘It’s a cross all right,’ he said, ‘no two ways about that. But it is such a simple thing. You couldn’t found a monastery on the basis of this.’ Instead, the Shiant stone had all the other virtues: naivety, simplicity and the unadorned directness of work done by a man on the margins of the known world. This looked, in other words, like the work of a hermit and as likely as not had been done on the Shiants themself.
Still no one knew where it had come from. The sheer spread of Torridonian sandstone made sourcing it a near impossibility. But I needed to know. This thing was the most resonant object ever found on the Shiants and I continued worrying at the problem. Eventually, I realised that if I could find the right person, I could ask one intersecting question which might throw up the answer: was there any place in the Highlands where cobble-making Torridonian sandstone coincided with an early Christian presence? Ian Fisher didn’t know. John Barber didn’t know. I asked John Wood, Senior Archaeologist at the Highland Council in Inverness. He didn’t know but he passed the query on to Patricia Weekes, archaeologist at the Inverness Museum. She didn’t know but asked her colleague, the natural historian Stephen Moran. Moran remembered something, a place he had last seen in 1979, on a footpath along the coast between Applecross and Coillegillie in Wester Ross, on the mainland opposite Skye. There, a few of miles south of Applecross, was a section of the coast on which, as he told me on the phone, ‘the Torridonian outcrops in lovely cushions, in large piles of brownish, pinkish cushions, heaps of them on the shore. They are all sizes, six or eight inches thick, any length you like. I think that might be where your stone comes from.’
It is the best possibility. The monastery at Applecross was founded by the Irish prince and saint Maelrubha in 673. He had been born a Derry man, was educated at Bangor in County Down – no direct connection there with Inishmurray on the Sligo side – and came north with his following of monks to Ross when he was thirty. Having founded Applecross, Maelrubha became the Apostle of Skye and perhaps of Harris and Lewis. The Shiants sit in the very centre of his province. Did a follower of Maelrubha’s, seeking his hermitage in the desert of the ocean, bring a holy stone with him from the founder’s monastery on the mainland and keep it with him at his island hermitage as a symbol of sanctity in a wild world?
As that stone sat in the car beside me and above all as it rested with all my other gear in Freyja’s bilges, acting its part as holy ballast, leant on by the dogs and cushioned by my sleeping bag as I sailed to and from the Shiants that summer, I came to see in it a focus of the kind of eremitic Christianity which had produced it between ten and thirteen centuries ago. As a talisman and companion, I carried the stone with me every time I crossed the Minch. It is a wonderful and powerful object. Its symbolisms are highly concentrated and it sits beside me, now as it must always have done, as a capsule of sacred intensity. It came with a halo of questions. Could I, in any way, approach the mind of the man who had made and treasured it? I could feel his presence on the islands, but could I know in any way what he was like, what ideas filled his mind, what his reasons might have been for being in this place at all? Could I, in other words, draw this individual out of the silence of the past?
8
ISLANDS FEED AN APPETITE for the absolute. They are removed from the human world, from its business and noise. Whatever the reality, a kind of silence seems to hang about them. It is not silence, because the sea beats on the shores and the birds scream and flutter above you. But it is a virtual silence, an absence of communication which reduces the islander to a naked condition in front of the universe. He is not padded by the conversation of others. Do you want the padding or do you feel shut in and de-natured by it? Do you love the nakedness, or do you shiver in the wind? Do you feel deprived by your island condition or somehow enabled and enriched by it?
Those are the questions for the solitary, now or at any time. Nothing is as envelopingly total as aloneness in a place like this but the silence, paradoxically enough, is far from empty. Whenever I have been alone on the Shiants, it has been a continuously social experience. If I am scrubbing the floor of the house, or out in the boat trying to catch some pollack or cod for my supper, or taking water from the well, or trying to make sense of the perplexing fragments from the past which litter the ground
like the remains of a party no one has bothered to clear up, the whole time, in my mind, I am discussing with people I know everything that is going on around me. Isn’t it frustrating, I say to them, how when you wipe lino, you can never get it clean? Isn’t that wonderful how the water boatman sits within the meniscus of the well head pool? Do you see how that surface bows down to the pads of his feet? Think in the past how people must always have sat here in their boats, just at this point, hauling out the coleys where the flood tide rips on the unseen reef. Do you think the wind might be getting up? Is the darkness of that cloud a signal of the gale tonight? Is the mooring safe? Will the boat survive the storm? What, in the end, am I doing here?
All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisers, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding. It is tempting in these circumstances to turn Crusoe in the face of loneliness. A hermit will force himself to confront that crowd of critics. The followers of the great St Antony, the third-century founder of Christian monasticism, who immured himself for twenty years in the ruins of a Roman fort in the Egyptian desert, could hear him groaning and weeping as the demons tested him one by one. Defoe’s hero does the very opposite. He is endlessly busy, endlessly adapting the world as he finds it, building new shelters or planting new crops or finding new aspects to his island. He fills his solitude with business. He constructs boats and digs canals. I have spent weeks on the Shiants like that, making enough noise in working on, mending and setting creels, repairing fences, digging a vegetable patch in one of the old lazybeds, setting up winches on the beach, putting wire netting on the chimneypots to keep the rats from scampering down them, painting the house inside and out – all this, in the end, to keep the silence away.
Always at the back of that hurry is the knowledge that it is a screen against honesty. More than on anything else, Crusoe expended his energy on fences. He built huge palisades around both his island houses, the stakes driven into the ground, sharpened at the top, reinforced, stabilised, all designed to keep the world out. It was not the world he was fencing out but his own profoundly subversive and alarming sense of isolation.
That crowd of critics is the reason that even now, in the Orthodox church, which is the most direct descendant of the universal church of the seventh and eighth centuries, the life of the solitary is seen as the higher calling. A monk needs to qualify to become a hermit, through years of discipline and training, and of social acceptance within the monastic community. The hermitage, in other words, is only ever occupied by a profoundly cultured mind.
That is the first step towards understanding the man who lived in the Shiants a millennium ago and who made the stone. The hermit is no primitive. He may be primitivist – in his engagement with essentials, in his exposure to extreme honesty – but primitivism is one of the more sophisticated forms which civilisation can take. One needs to leave behind a great deal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking about these early churchmen. Gibbon thought monks as a whole a ‘race of filthy animals, to whom [one] is tempted to refuse the name of men.’ Compared with the elegance of Roman paganism, Christianity, with its filth and self-abasement, its adoration of nauseous relics and its elevation of the criminal to the holy was, Gibbon thought, a descent into barbarism.
In the summer of 1841, a reader of Gibbon, or of his followers, dropped anchor at the Shiants. James Wilson, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Member of the Watercolour Society, was cruising the Hebrides as the future author of A Voyage around the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles:
On Eilan-na-Killy (the Island of the Cell) are the remains of some ancient habitation, the supposed dwelling of an ascetic monk, or ‘self-secluded man’ possibly a sulky, selfish, egotistical fellow, who could not accommodate himself to the customs of his fellow creatures. Such beings do very well to write sonnets about, now that they are (as we sincerely trust) all dead and buried, but the reader may depend upon it they were a vile pack, if we may apply the term to those who were too unamiable to be ever seen in congregation.
The Enlightenment saw only the vulgarities of asceticism, the disgustingness of existing, for example, on the Eucharist alone, or limiting oneself to a daily ration of a single fig, or even one small piece of dry bread every other day. A fourth-century Egyptian called Evagrius lived in a cell, in isolation for fifteen years, ‘eating only a pound of bread and a pint of oil in the space of three months.’
The Syrians, as Gibbon delightedly described, went further. Chains were worn around the neck and loins, often hidden beneath a hair shirt or a tunic made of wild animal skins. Others had themselves suspended from ropes so that they could never lie down or sleep in comfort. Some endlessly reopened wounds in their bodies or shut themselves in skin sacks, with an opening only for the nose and mouth. Still others lived as beggars, prostitutes or transvestites in the cities of the eastern empire, as holy fools, or famously on the top of columns for decades at a time.
These practices would almost certainly have been known to the Shiant hermit whose stone we found. The example of the early monks and hermits, through the hagiographies and collections of sayings which were held in the large library at Iona and other monasteries, would have been constantly in his mind. But it is scarcely the whole picture. The marginalised brutalism of the extreme Syrian ascetics, which held an almost pornographic fascination for Enlightenment rationalists, was not part of the mainstream monastic tradition. Even in Egypt, the wearing of chains, perpetual wandering, or living exposed to the elements without a cell, were disapproved of.
If I think of the hermit who lived on the Shiants, a more humane picture comes to mind. The world from which he emerged was profoundly literate. Most of the monks of whom there is any knowledge were highly educated and usually members of the ruling princely families of Ireland. Much of the standing which they enjoyed, and of the fame which allowed the reputation of the Shiant hermit to last more than a millennium, derived from the fact that they were great people in the world, who had voluntarily submitted themselves to the condition of exile and permanent pilgrimage. Martyrdom was only significant for those who could have chosen an easier path.
The idea of ‘a desert place in the ocean’, which emerged in Ireland in the sixth century, was fundamentally metropolitan. It is an outgrowth, in the end, of the urban civilisation of Europe and the Near East. No indigenous inhabitant of the Shiants would conceive of the islands in that way. Only a man who knew of the power of cities and the glories of courts would think of them like that. The hermit’s presence here is a reaching out of that Roman idea into the margins of the Atlantic. And there is something theatrical about it, self-dramatising. The turbulence of the seas, the visual violence of the cliffs, the way in which the islands stand out so tall on the horizon, ‘three lofty and desolate ones’ as the young naturalist George Clayton Atkinson described them in the 1830s – all of that makes the Shiants a setting for metaphysical drama.
It was a canny choice, for underneath the surface imagery, there is plenty here that can sustain life, that can ensure the hermit was not going to starve. No hermit chose the near-sterility of, say, Scalpay, which has neither the same visual drama nor the Shiants’ richness. Throughout the Hebrides the same pattern emerges: the relics of early Christianity tend to be on the best remote places. They ignore the acid ordinariness of Harris and Lewis and choose instead the fertility of Canna with its Columban sites, Berneray and Pabbay by Barra, the beautiful, easily worked machair of Barra itself and the Uists, Boreray, the other Berneray and Pabbay near Harris, the ecstatic beauties of Taransay, the huge wealth of birds on St Kilda and the Flannans, the Shiants and the rich fertility of North Rona, forty miles out in the Atlantic, north of the Butt of Lewis. Richness in extremis: the definition of the Celtic church.
Highly cultured, attuned to the meanings of the landscape, astute, and not, it emerges, radically alone. The Hebridean
hermits, much like their models in the Near East, were in touch with each other and with the network of Columban monasteries here and in Ireland. Iona, in particular, was a centre of learning and spiritual civilisation. Greek was known and probably read there. A yearly chronicle was kept. Abbot Adomnan wrote a famous guide to the places of the Holy Land. At Iona, the abbot employed a baker, a butler and gardener. The abbey had lay tenants on the island. The governing spirit of Columba, an Irish prince, while majestic in its power over many centuries, and in the foundation of a holy austerity, was also pastoral, affectionate, social and generous. As they had done in the Egyptian desert, monks and hermits visited and cared for each other. Here, as there, the hermits were never truly independent. All were at least spiritually, if not physically, living with an elder. In the Hebrides that spiritual father, who had proved himself in the discipline by spending many years in solitude, fasting, praying and meditating, would have been the abbot of Iona or perhaps of Applecross on the mainland. As Thomas Owen Clancy has written, ‘Even among the early Desert Fathers who valued solitude and were called to “flee women and bishops”, there are countless tales told of the futility of a monk seeking mystical union with God if he is not merciful and attentive to his brother.’
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