‘Annaid’ is a term which came into use in the ninth and tenth centuries and Aidan Macdonald is unequivocal about the reasons for its sudden appearance: Norse raids. The Hebrides were first plundered in 798. Raids on Iona continued throughout the ninth century and Norsemen were living in the Hebrides by the 850s. The scatter of annaids were all readily accessible from the sea or river valleys or the routes between them. These abandoned sites marked, Macdonald thought, the terrifying destruction from the north.
Is that what happened here? Archaeology has yet to address that question, if it ever can. But elsewhere in the Hebrides, at a site called The Udal in North Uist, it is quite clear that the Norse arrived suddenly, comprehensively and violently. A settlement which had been there, in much the same form, for five hundred years was razed and immediately built over. Everything which the earlier inhabitants had used in the way of buildings, pots, bonework, metalwork, plates and buckets disappeared overnight in the middle of the ninth century, to be replaced by their Viking equivalents. In the new, high-stress environment, a small fort was built there, the first military architecture in two thousand years of human life at The Udal. The archaeologists looked for the faint, tell-tale traces of sand blown across the earlier levels before the new buildings were erected on the place. That would be the sign of a slow evolution, of natural abandonment and natural recolonisation. But there was nothing. It was a literal physical truth that the Norse buildings were put straight on top of the ruins of their predecessors. ‘The Vikings came without apparent cause, provocation or feud,’ Iain Crawford, the excavator of The Udal has written, ‘and they were speaking an unintelligible tongue, like visitants from outer space.’
You can imagine that at the Shiants: the sudden arrival, the keels on the beach stones, the leaping from the bow, the walk around the corner, and then the careless erasure of lives and meanings, the leaving of bodies for the ravens, as one Norse saga after another describes it, the destruction of buildings, the burning of their contents, the ridiculing of the odds and ends they might have found there, the laughter at the easy win, the excitement in slaughter. ‘Agony, death and horror are riding and revelling,’ one English sailor wrote after Trafalgar. ‘To see and hear this! What a maddening of the brain it causes. Yet it is a delirium of joy, a very fury of delight!’ Here on the Shiants, as the blood slopped on the shore and seeped into the grasses, those would have been the words in the air. It was a blood culture. Blood was the mortar of the Viking civilisation.
Soon enough, the Norsemen made their mark. Up above the coastal shelf on Eilean an Tighe, tucked into a fold in the ground so that it is invisible from the sea but commands a wide view of it to the west and the south, not calmly and confidently set on the domestic bench of flat land but hidden, nervous, aware of the possibilities of violence emerging from the Minch, is what might be a Norse house.
It is boat-shaped, using a natural cliff as one wall, and with the foundations of a dividing wall half-way along it. It has the look of a Norse building. There is another of the same form, also tucked into a hidden shelf, also invisible from the sea, two hundred yards or so to the north. Both buildings await excavation but here, perhaps, are the houses of the people who destroyed the church at Annat and who replaced Beccan’s ‘bright crowd of chancels’ with something that at this distance seems colder and meaner.
On the hillside above what is perhaps the Norse long house, is another enigmatic monument. Mary Macleod, the Western Isles County Archaeologist, who came over to the Shiants for a day to inspect what Pat Foster and his team had done, was reluctant to accept this arrangement of stones as anything more than the fragmentary rubble of a couple of field walls, meeting at a corner. Her professional scepticism was proper enough and any more explicit identification can only be tentative. Nevertheless, the romantic landowner, wanting to see in his islands a reliquary for all that is most glamorous in the past, persists in reading these stones in the best possible light.
They are loosely arranged in the form of a boat, about eighteen feet long, just outreaching Freyja, with a wide, flat stone set crosswise at the stern, another for a thwart amidships and a third, taller, at the front, curved up and back in the way of the Viking stem post found on the island of Eigg. Pat Foster will describe this as nothing more than a ‘Boat-Shaped Stone Setting’. Similar structures in Scandinavia, if far more precisely and neatly made, have housed Norse graves. This one is aligned on Dunvegan Head in Skye, thirty miles to the south, the seamark on the Viking route to Dublin. There is another Boat-Shaped Stone Setting high on the far end of Garbh Eilean, almost on the lip of the northern cliffs, arranged on rising ground, as if breasting a wave coming down from the north.
That one is aligned precisely the other way, on the dominant outline of Kebock Head in Lewis, en route to Stornoway and the north. In the summer, purple orchids are clustered next to the stones and the fulmars from the cliffs below cut easy discs in the air above them.
Are these Norse graves? I can only say, in the face of professional scepticism, that I hope so. If they were ever excavated, it is unlikely that anything would be found. The acidity in the turf will have eaten away all evidence.
That doesn’t matter to me. The Shiants are a place where the deep past seems more nakedly present than any other I know. Perhaps it is because the islands are so pristine in their silence. Perhaps it is this landscape’s ability to retain the marks of previous lives. Little here is overlaid, as it is elsewhere, with the thick mulch of recent events. The physical remains lie just beneath the surface, scarcely skinned in turf. Modernity is almost absent, cut off by the Minch. Crossing that sea, whether in Freyja or in any boat, pares away the fat. The surrounding sea makes you, for some reason, more attuned to habits and ideas that are unlike all the usual daily traffic of the mind.
This is almost undiscussable. It is a strange effect, existing only at the margins. Try to hold it or define it and it slips away like mercury between the fingers. Sometimes I have felt, especially in Freyja, and above all when out on the sea late in the evening, that I only have to look to the other end of the boat for some other figure to be there, sorting out the ropes, wrapping the plaid around them. Of course they never are. Of course not. The world is not like that, but there is often something else in the wind, which is, I suppose, the potential that they might be there, quite ordinarily, without any kind of fuss being made. If this were a film, the camera would move casually past them, panning around the black bodies of the islands, the lace of surf and the green glow of the evening sky, catching the hunched figures on the forward thwart as no more remarkable a presence than my own in the stern or the creels amidships, the tide running with us or the long, haunted wailing of the seals.
Being out on the sea at night brings some kind of connection with an older and more essential world. It is not as foreign as people tend to imagine. Men have been at home on it since the Stone Age. The Hebrides are littered with the remains of Bronze Age farms, whose inhabitants must often have crossed these waters with their implements and their stock on board. Imagine cattle in those ancient boats, how impossible that must have been! At least you can cross the Minch or the Sea of the Hebrides in a day, and you can see your destination as you begin. What amazes me more is the idea of the Vikings bringing their herds of cattle with them in open boats across the North Sea, plunging for days across that hostile grey territory, navigating by instinct as much as anything, with the animals increasingly restless, trussed presumably, longing for the destination.
Stripped as it is of context, and with the modernity of the world sliced away, it is easier to imagine the past at sea at night than in any other circumstances. Fixing the tiller with a length of rope, I leant over the bow late one evening and put my head right down there where the water rose and broke around the stem post. Freyja sailed herself in the quiet breeze of the night. The loom from the lighthouse on Scalpay swept out across the Sound, three white flashes once every twenty seconds. The buoy marking Damhag flickered its quick uninterrup
ted green. The surf on the Galtas came and went, the teeth of a long, white smile, and the boat sailed on as though another hand were on the helm.
9
SUMMER HAS COME. IT is mid-June. I lie on the grass on the north front of Garbh Eilean and feel the abundance around me. Shut your eyes and the shadows of the passing birds flicker across your lids in a film of profusion, each blip another life, another energising presence. I sometimes dream of the Shiants without the birds and it is like finding a child dead.
These islands are one of the great bird places of the world, with so many birds that counting them is nearly impossible. According to the best estimates of modern ornithologists, struggling with densely packed, mobile, teeming and pullulating masses of identical bodies, all of which come and go at variable rates and in undependable patterns, attempting to identify them from boats below the colonies or with telescopes on distant cliff-tops, there are between fifteen and eighteen thousand guillemots here, eight to eleven thousand razorbills, between four and six thousand fulmars, two thousand kittiwakes, roughly fifteen hundred shags, a few hundred gulls of various kinds (whose numbers are rising), twenty-six great skuas, also on the increase, and two hundred and forty thousand puffins, about one in eight of the British total and two per cent of all the puffins in the world.
There are more puffins on St Kilda, and in one or two offshore islands further north in the Atlantic, but nowhere, it is said, are they more densely packed, or do they make a more extraordinary sight, than on these islands in the Minch.
This is the puffins’ summer outing. They begin to arrive in the first days of April. Malcolm MacSween, Lord Leverhulme’s, Compton Mackenzie’s and, for a while, my father’s tenant on the Shiants, told Mackenzie that ‘the Puffin comes, always on a Sunday night and remains for a week to clear out his burrow and prepare his nest.’ It is a tentative beginning. They have been at sea all winter, dispersed from here to Norway and Greenland, to Sicily and the borders of Morocco with Spanish Sahara, scattered in their unseen millions across the width of the winter ocean, perhaps one puffin per square mile of Atlantic, muted in their winter plumage, with last year’s coloured beak fallen away, a safe and wintry privacy on the sea. I have, once, seen a couple of puffins in December off the rocky west coast of Majorca, sullen, grey-faced things. We looked at each other and then looked away.
Now they are back. To begin with they do not come ashore. Crowds of them, increasingly busy in enormous rafts, float in the bay between the islands and in front of the big north cliffs, clustering there in small conversational groups, as engaged, as social as the people in a Canaletto square. You can take your boat in among them. They scatter to start with, but then slowly seep back in, soon enough clustered around you like a crowd waiting for the pub to open.
In little groups the puffins and other auks come ashore, standing around on rocks for a few minutes before heading back out to sea. They are dipping a toe in the land. Suddenly, one becomes aware of it, a repeopling of the islands. All along the back cliff of Eilean Mhuire, the guillemots cluster in their thousands, standing on shelves and sloping boulders down to the very edge of the sea. On Garbh Eilean, the screes of tumbled hexagonal rocks along the east shore, and on the grassy banks around the corner on the north face, and in one or two places along the east cliffs of Eilean an Tighe, everywhere begins to fill with summer birds. The wrens continue to hop about in the screes while the vast number of far larger seabodies gather around them. It is as if a corpse has come alive. The Shiants flutter with their sudden vitality. Now, for months, the place is never still. Look up and it will be filled with wings passing. The air is whisked into life. There is a shared thickness of coexistence here, a palpitating, repercussing, gyrating co-presence. How it must have been blessed in the past! The bird arrival comes at precisely the moment in the year when the crops stored from the previous year would have been running thin. This was manna on wings.
When John Harvie-Brown, the late nineteenth-century naturalist, came in the 1870s, he could scarcely contain his excitement. The puffins were around him
in countless thousand. The sea, the sky and the land seemed populated by equal proportions, each vast in itself – constantly moving, whirring, eddying, a seething throng of life, drifting, and swooping, and swinging in the wind, or pitching and heaving on the water, or crowding and jostling on the ledges and rocks, arising from and alighting on the boulder-strewn slopes, or perched like small white specks far up in the cliff face amongst the giant basalt columns.
Many of these puffins have been coming here as long as I have. A puffin never moves house if it can help it and soon the returning birds begin to reinvestigate last year’s burrow, poking into it, starting to clear it out. You see puffin and wife sharing the labour. The birds are soon spattered and slick with mud, especially if it has been raining and the burrow is leaky. They emerge from their sodden homes like squaddies at Passchendaele. Little sprigs of grass are brought back to line the end of the burrow, or lengths of orange and blue fishing twine.
By the middle of May eggs are everywhere, the most beautiful ones, turquoise-flecked and scribbled in dark brown like a Jackson Pollock, tucked under the feet of guillemots, single white eggs hidden deep inside the puffins’ burrows, a clutch of three or four laid in the chaos of the shag nests. (If you alarm a puffin in its burrow, it creeps to the far end, a yard or so, and turns its face to the wall, placing the egg between you and it. It is a straightforward calculation: better to lose the egg than the puffin.)
All of this for the ancient Shiant Islanders was the pulse of wild protein for which they had been longing all winter. As late as the Second World War people came out to the Shiants from Lemreway and Scalpay in the summer to supplement their government-controlled diet. I must confess, I have never taken any of the eggs to eat, not through any sense of its wrongness but having been put off by a famous experiment conducted in the early 1950s by the Cambridge zoologist HB Cott. How tasty, he wanted to know, were wild bird eggs? A panel of heroic gourmets was assembled and presented with plate after plate of scrambled eggs, each from a different species. None was labelled and no salt or pepper added. Cott then asked the tasters to score what they had eaten. The scale ranged from 10.0 for ‘ideal’ to 2.0 ‘repulsive and inedible’. Cott, wartime expert on camouflage, later knighted for his services to zoology, ranked the eggs of birds found on the Shiants as follows:
9.0 Very good
8.3 Lesser black-backed gull
8.2 Kittiwake
8.0 Good
7.9 Herring gull
7.8 Razorbill
7.7 Fulmar, great black-backed gull, guillemot
7.2 Great skua
7.0 Barely perceptible off flavour
6.6 Puffin
6.0 Definite off flavour
6.0 Common eider
5.4 Gannet
5.0 Unpleasant
4.4 Shag
4.0 Off
If the shag egg lurks between ‘unpleasant’ and ‘off’, shag meat can make a delicious and healthy soup-cum-stew, or so Kennie Mackenzie, the uncle of John Murdo Matheson, the Gravir shepherd, assured me. The Shiants are the second biggest shaggery in the British Isles – only Foula, the loneliest of the Shetland Isles has more – and so, one day a year or two ago in early summer, I took a large stick with me to one of the headquarters of the shags, high up on the west coast of Garbh Eilean, with the idea of getting some lunch.
I headed off for the colony. The wind was coming in riffles off the sea and swirling under the cliffs. Whiffs of shag life, that ammoniac fug of fish and foulness, the smell of seaweed as rotten as manure and filled with creeping bugs the colour of decay, came to me on the wind in heavy doses. A dead puffin, its body turned inside out by a black-backed gull and the breast meat picked away, was slopping to and fro in the shore surf, its sodden wings flapping as the water stirred. A big grey seal was lying on its back on the pebbled beach, long dead, its jaw twisted open, half sideways as though in mid-chew. The molars looked human. Th
e flesh on the body, where the fur had rubbed away, was half-rotten, half air-dried, bresaola on the turn. On its flippers, the fingernails, which were five inches long, hung stiffly together like the fingers of a paralysed hand. Involuntarily, my nostrils closed against it. In the nooks of the cliff below the shag-fest, I found a dog-rose in bud the colour of a pink iced gem, bunches of meadowsweet and tall flowering sorrel, the weeds and flowers of sweeter places, surviving here only where shelter allowed them space from the gales. Beside them, the sea pinks and the sea campion were over, the flowers no more than wisps of brown paper on the end of six-inch stalks.
I climbed towards the shag rocks. The turf is a bright skin across the underlying bone. Tormentil and self-heal alternate in a tiny, rich, repeating pattern of yellow and purple among the watermint and the irises. The shags are up towards the top of the big boulder scree. Lower down, there are puffins standing about on the rocks near their burrows in what ornithologists call ‘clubs’, groups of young puffins, less than five years old, and so not old enough to have a wife or a burrow. Ludicrous and lovable puffins! Their sociability is as stiff and predictable as an evening in an Edwardian London. Gestures of deference are required of any newcomer, and a little accepting dance of stamping feet is made by those already settled with cigars around the fender. They walk around by the mouths of each other’s burrows as if on eggshells; or bat their bills in little love displays, one puffin of a pair always apparently keener than the other, his mate slightly bored with this love thing, particularly when he goes on too long; or make little threats with their mouths agape; or suddenly jump into a tussling, angry clinch with a neighbour, bill to bill, turning each other over and over as they tumble down the slope towards the sea, suddenly realising at the last minute what a spectacle they are making of themselves. They are more capable of looking embarrassed than any bird I have seen. So polite is this world, in fact, that most of its members seem struck dumb by their sense of propriety. Puffins remain monogamous (or at least about ninety per cent of them are, because both spouses remain loyal to the same burrow) throughout their extraordinarily long and stable lives: up to forty years of politeness and tedium, the whirring of wings and the ritual stamping of little orange feet.
Sea Room Page 17