Not that the island life was for everyone. There is the revealing story of Declan, a fifth-century Irish Saint, who with God’s advice and guidance had decided to settle on a remote western island called Ard Mor. He and his small band of disciples arrived at the beach opposite the island and found that all the boats had been stolen by the local people. The monks were frightened and told Declan that they would prefer to go elsewhere. They had to travel back and forth to the mainland if they were going to survive and that was not going to be helped by the hostility of the local people. When Declan died, as he surely would, and was no longer there to protect them in person, the situation would be even worse. They made an urgent appeal to the saint:
We implore you with heart and voice to leave that island, or to ask the Father in the name of the son through unity with the Holy Spirit … that this channel should be thrust out of its place in the sea, and in its place before your settlement should be level ground. Anyway, the place cannot be well or easily inhabited because of that channel. Therefore there cannot be a settlement there; on the contrary there could scarcely be a church there.
Declan was angry and told the monks that God alone would know whether or not Ard Mor could support a community. They all prayed and Declan struck the ground with his staff. The waters duly receded. Ard Mor had become a beautiful, habitable and accessible peninsula.
Remote islands, even then, were for extremists. If one has to abandon the picture of the early hermits as a set of filthy tramps, one must also get rid of the idea that they were somehow ecosolitaries a thousand years ahead of their time. The motivation of the hermits (the word derives from the Greek for a ‘desert’ – ereme) was the very opposite of the modern. Nothing resembling a Romantic desire to come close to nature and to see in that closeness a form of salvation can be found anywhere in the seventh or eighth centuries. The extreme and difficult desert of the Shiants (and the Latin desert or disert was the word used by the Irish churchmen for places such as this) was attractive in the seventh century precisely because of its horrors. Almost certainly, at this period, the Shiants were part of the territory controlled not by the Irish but by the Picts. Any hermit coming here (or for that matter to St Kilda, the Flannans or North Rona) had put himself far out into dangerous territory.
The sea itself terrified them. It was the zone not of divine beauty but of destruction and chaos. Only God and the saints could control it. Others were at its mercy. In the opening prayer of an Irish Mass written in about 800, the sea is the testing ground where God alone can save the pitiable: ‘We have sinned Lord, we have sinned. Spare us sinners and save us: You who guided Noah across the waters of the flood, hear us: and who by a word rescued Jonah from the deep, free us; You who stretched out your hand to the sinking Peter, help us.’
The animal world was no better. One hermit, finding himself on an island which would now be thought of as a bird sanctuary, was unable to pray because of the noise the birds were making. Only with God’s help was he able to silence them and, in the blessed quiet, address himself to the Creator.
Suddenly you can see the hermit there. He stands on the shore. This island is the only garden he has but the garden is his and it is God’s gift for him to use. The first chapter of Genesis is quite explicit and these are verses that are still quoted in the Hebrides:
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
Life in the seventh- or eighth-century Hebrides was not and could not be conservationist. Anything less than full access to the fruits of the earth on these margins of viability would tip life over from survival to suicide. Again and again, conditions in which crops might normally grow could turn catastrophic. In 670 a snowfall blanketed the whole of Ireland and brought on a universal famine. Snow fell again in 760, 764 and 895 and hunger followed. In 858 a rain-drenched autumn destroyed the entire harvest. In 1012 terrible rains wrecked the standing crops and in the following spring farmers had to choose between planting their seed corn or eating it, leaving nothing for the following year.
On islands it would be worse. The biographer of the Irish Saint Berach told the story of how in one of these years of scarcity a farmer on an island decided that he had to leave his wife and child while he searched for food on the mainland. As he left, he told his wife to kill their new baby because they could not hope to feed it.
Of this entire thought-world, only the pillow stone, apparently, survives on the Shiants. Can the stone itself be interrogated? Can one read from the stone anything of the mind of its maker? Of course, in the cross itself, it carries the full burden of Christianity. It is the symbol of Christ’s death, resurrection and continuing presence. It also carries the faint echo of a Roman imperial memory. The ring, which on this stone, and in many Irish stones, either surrounds or intersects the cross, has its origins in the imagery of the laurel wreath. Early examples found in Germany show the ring around the cross carved with the laurel leaves that would surround the head of Caesar. The ringed cross, then, is an elision of empire and the martyred Christ, of the majesty of the father and the suffering of the son, of imperium and humility, of greatness descending to the condition of martyrdom.
More precisely than that, though, it symbolises both the suffering and ambition of the life of the hermit himself. It is an extraordinarily self-sufficient object. It needs no context or frame to achieve its effect and was surely intended to be portable, to be carried from one place to another, to do its work wherever it might be, much as I have driven it around Britain, and sailed it back and forth across the Minch. The stone is a manifestation of holiness carried into the desert. But it also embodies holiness found in the desert. The carving, so laboriously done, not by an expert, draws life and meaning out of the inert lifelessness of rock. It is, in that way, a model of the way in which a man, isolating himself in a stony place surrounded by the sea, arrives at a new understanding of divine power in the world. Like Christ’s passion on the cross itself, it is the emergence of spiritual life from bodily death. Its beauty is not in itself but in the transformation it represents.
It may, just, be possible to make that stone speak. By chance, two poems survive in manuscript, one copied out in the sixteenth century and now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the other a century later and now in the National Library in Dublin, which are almost certainly the work of a hermit living on a sea-battered island in the Hebrides in the seventh century. The name of the poet-hermit is Beccan mac Luigdech. He is a scholarly man, and an aristocrat, profoundly versed in the ways of Irish heroic poetry, a member of the same Irish family as Columba. Beccan is devoted to Columba’s memory, as his leader, his spiritual father and his saint. The poems are themselves a rare enough survival, but what makes them more extraordinary is that they are joined by a letter, addressed to him as ‘Beccanus solitarius’, Beccan the hermit. It was written in 632 or 633, by an Irish churchman on the subject of the dating of Easter, the controversy then dividing the Columban from the Roman church.
A richer and more subtle world than one inhabited by ‘sulky, selfish, egotistical fellows’ emerges from Beccan’s verses. His is a landscape and seascape of immense richness and passion and through him the full depth and power of Latin Christendom reaches up into these stormy waters. Beccan may have been on the Shiants, but it is by no means certain that he was. There is, in fact, a possibility that his hermitage was on the island of Rum, south of Skye, halfway between the Shiants and Iona. But if Beccan was not the hermit here (and his connection to Columba points more at Iona than at Applecross), he was exactly contemporary with the ma
n who was, he would almost certainly have known him and would have inhabited the same world. This is, quite legitimately, the voice of the stone.
Looking southwards from his island fastness, Beccan, as translated here by Thomas Owen Clancy, surveys the holy kingdom that Columba has created. Seas surge through the poetry and Columba, or Colum Cille, the Dove of the Church, both ascetic scholar and courageous adventurer, as much prince of Connacht as saint, the light of the world gleaming with sanctity, triumphs over them:
He brings northward to meet the Lord a bright crowd of chancels –
Colum Cille, kirks for hundreds, widespread candle.
Connacht’s candle, Britain’s candle, splendid ruler;
in scores of curraghs with an army of wretches he crossed the long-haired sea.
He crossed the wave-strewn wild country, foam flecked, seal-filled, savage, bounding, seething, white-tipped, pleasing, dismal.
Fame with virtues, a good life, his: ship of treasure, sea of knowledge, Conal’s offspring, people’s counsellor.
Leafy oak-tree, soul’s protection, rock of safety, the sun of monks, mighty ruler, Colum Cille.
Age does not diminish this. As passionate as Emily Dickinson and as power-driven as the Anglo-Saxon sea poems, Beccan suddenly vivifies the seventh-century Shiants.
In his only other surviving poem, as Columba appears again, all elements of the hermit world are brought together. Sea-heroism, austerity, skill in extremis, persistence, the princeliness of Columba’s holy enterprise, the imitation of Christ and the love of learning rise together in a moment of heroic completeness:
He left Ireland, entered a pact,
he crossed in ships the whales’ shrine.
He shattered lusts – it shone on him –
a bold man over the sea’s ridge.
He fought wise battles with the flesh,
he read pure learning.
He stitched, he hoisted sail tops,
a sage across seas, his prize a kingdom.
This poetry is not, as later medieval Irish poetry can be, the wan appreciation of Nature’s delicate charms. This man is not looking out of a window. Nor is it mystic. He is not contemplating another world. He loves this one and his love of it and of his patron saint has emerged from struggle. Beccan seems to be purified by his understanding. He has been out in the storm and has felt the waves beat for days and months on his shore. His mind now is as clear, unadorned and direct as the holy ringed-cross stone which this poet, perhaps, may also have made.
I have often walked the Shiants wondering where the hermit may have lived; which of the favoured five or six spots he might have chosen. It might well be at the place called Annat, a soft and welcoming nick in the ragged west side of Garbh Eilean. It is where I would have chosen. The long gentle valley called Glaic na Crotha, ‘the valley of the cattle’, runs across the island here from the north cliffs to the south-western shore. The little stream in the valley gathers pace as it drops and the buttercups and watermint cluster around it. Down at the bottom, the land flattens out into a little seaside meadowy apron beside a sharp rocky inlet. It would be a beautiful place to live and I have sometimes brought a tent here to spend the night, seeing the last of the light falling on the mountains in Skye to the south (they are hidden from the house on Eilean an Tighe) and waking in the morning to find the sun warming the turf. There’s a stony beach here which always has driftwood on it and the smoke from the breakfast fire slowly spirals upwards. All morning you can lie with your nose buried in the tweedy scents which the warming grasses give off. Beccan’s seas stretch out in front of you to the southern islands of the Outer Hebrides, trailing off to Barra Head, and you can imagine what this place might have been like thirteen hundred years ago.
It is a numinous place and the feeling here is quite unlike any other on the islands. This is not a wild corner. It is calm but not quite as domestic as the settlements on House Island. It has a sense of privacy and of removal from the peopled world of Eilean an Tighe. Annat bears the same relationship to the Shiants as the Shiants do to the rest of the world. I like to think of it as the place the hermit chose. It has certainly been lived in for a long time and, as Pat Foster showed me, there are clear signs of prehistoric buildings here: a large platform for a neolithic house, a round Bronze Age house and a D-shaped enclosure which may have been to keep stock in. So it might be the ideal place for a hermit: somewhere that had been lived in in the ancient past and was suitable for human occupation but in the seventh or eighth centuries happened to be empty.
It is possible to investigate this quite closely. On the maps it is called Airighean na h-Annaid, which means ‘the shielings or summer pastures of the Annaid’. Annaid itself, a place-name which in the form of ‘Annat’ or ‘Annet’ occurs throughout Scotland, comes from the early Irish word andóit, from the late Latin antitas, a contraction of antiquitas, meaning simply ‘the ancient’. In Ireland, andóit acquired the more particular meaning of the oldest church of a local community, founded by the saint who had first brought Christianity there and whose relics this church would often continue to enshrine. Tithes were due to this mother-church and in turn it had a duty of pastoral care over the parish that surrounded it. These significances did not need to be enormous in scale. There is no reason why the Shiant mother-church should have had any influence beyond the Shiants themselves.
The Celtic place-name scholar William J Watson wrote in the 1920s that ‘Annats are often in places that are now and must always have been rather remote and out of the way. But wherever there is an annat there are traces of an ancient chapel or cemetery or both. Very often, too, the annat adjoins a fine well or clear stream.’
The stream that runs down at the Shiant annat, trickling between mosses and over the hot rocks, with wild thyme and clover growing in the grass beside it, full of the cool of the moor that it drains, is indeed some of the sweetest of all Shiant waters.
So is this, in its sun-trap warmth on these wind-besieged islands, where the church of Beccan (or his contemporary) might have stood? Maybe. But, as Pat Foster established, the cemetery is on Eilean an Tighe and one might, as William Watson said, expect the cemetery to be in the place where the mother-church was. Thomas Owen Clancy has recently re-examined the question of annaids in Scotland. How come so many annaid place-names, he asks, which should, as the mother-churches, be central to the human geography of Scotland, turn out, as William Watson said, to be on the margins? He provides a possible explanation. Many annaid place-names are combined, as it is in the Shiants, with other elements: the pastures of the annaid, the bank of the annaid, the well of the annaid, the field of the annaid:
These places need not themselves be the places referred to as the annaid; they may express their relationship, by property, use or general proximity, to the local ‘mother church.’ We should not necessarily expect to find evidence of church-sites at the location of such names, but perhaps somewhere else, even at some distance.
So the Garbh Eilean pastures of the Annat might have been no more than the church’s glebe, a place called ‘Church Meadows’, and the church itself would have been where the graveyard is, on the island known until the mid-nineteenth century as Eilean na Cille, ‘the Island of the Church’. A careful examination of that site on Eilean an Tighe does in fact reveal a pair of banks, set at some distance back from the graveyard and its associated buildings, each bank running from the cliff foot to the shore, making an enclosure, as was the norm, around the holy site. Although there is nothing that can be firmly identified now as the ruins of the church, many nineteenth-century travellers had a few tumbled stones on Eilean an Tighe described to them as the hermit’s church-cum-residence. It looks, in other words, as if he did not live at Annat but on Eilean an Tighe, near the present house.
That is far from certain, though. The Gaelic scholar Aidan Macdonald has also looked at the annaid question and has come up with precisely the opposite answer to Thomas Clancy’s. Macdonald sees in the pattern of distribution of
the annaid name – remote, apparently abandoned, never the centre of later ecclesiastical development – evidence not of continuity but of disruption. The technical and legal sense of andoit can never have mattered much. ‘Place-names are usually simple, straightforward and descriptive, and specialist technicalities would tend to be forgotten, if ever properly appreciated, by a non-specialist population.’ The names mark the sites of ‘churches of any kind which were abandoned and subsequently replaced but not, for a variety of reasons, at the same sites.’ Annaid, in this version, means simply ‘old church’.
This, of course, is an intriguing possibility on the Shiants. The lovely Annat on Garbh Eilean is just the place a Beccan might have chosen: good soil, good water, a place where you can bring a boat alongside, even if hauling it up is difficult. People had lived there before and there was building stone to hand. It may be that the prime site near the landing beach on Eilean an Tighe was already occupied by Pictish pagans. Annat was the corner into which the hermit could squeeze, not perfect but not bad either and perhaps separated by a mile or so from the people on the other island.
For some reason, that old church was abandoned, but not forgotten, and a new one built on the island which then became known as the Island of the Church. The consciousness of the ‘antique’, of what had been there before, survived until the name was recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1851. It may also have survived in one other detail. George Clayton Atkinson, the Newcastle naturalist, was told in the 1830s that the island now called Garbh Eilean (Rough Island) was known as ‘St Culme’, a clear corruption of the name of Columba. Rumours of a dedication to St Columba had also reached John Macculloch’s ears ten years earlier. The church on Eilean an Tighe was said in the 1690s by Martin Martin to be dedicated to the Virgin. But is it possible that the old church at Annat on Garbh Eilean, Beccan’s church, for want of a better shorthand, was in fact dedicated to the saint he loved?
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