The question remains, of course: what happens when you pass them on? Does Tom believe in this? Will his son? And his? New Scottish legislation produced in 2001 will mean that whenever property of this kind is sold, the local community, funded by Lottery money, will have the right to buy it at a market price. That is fine by me: if for whatever reason we have to sell the Shiants – and I hope it never comes – then community ownership is as good an idea as any. But that legislation will not apply to a transfer of land within the same family. Nor do I want to hedge Tom’s freedom about with covenants and restrictions on what he can do with the islands. If he doesn’t have any sense of the social obligation which ownership of land entails, or of the vitality of the tradition to which ownership of these islands gives us access, then no restrictive covenant is going to teach him. But I know him. He grasps as clearly as anyone the need to be generous. The question is not, in the end, one of regulation but of a culture of mutual respect and decent regard, not only because the history in these islands is of eviction and dispossession, but because respect and decency are absolutely good in themselves.
As the winter comes again, the gales return. The wind blows pieces out of the big cairns on the top of Eilean an Tighe, and the stones lie as lumpy grey hail around them on the grass. When you get up in the morning, it is to a wind-combed world. The surface of the sea is woolly with the spray and there’s a haze above it like the fine hairs on a cashmere jersey. In the house, the roof space roars as the wind sucks and tugs at it and outside, there’s a fierce clarity, a denuded air, to the islands, as if they were on the butcher’s slab and the wind was slicing the flesh away.
There are days when the strength of wind can scarcely be imagined. I was talking to Bullet Cunningham about Freyja. What did he think of the boat? Did it look well made? ‘Oh yes, it looks like it’s all right. You’ll have to tie her down though. You’ll have to put some weight in her. And tie her well. Or in a bad gale of wind the wind will lift her up.’
‘But it weighs six hundred pounds,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, the wind will lift it, no bother. We had three boats on the Shiants once, on the beach there, tied together and we went over from the cottage where we were staying and the gale was bad and they were like that.’ He put his hand vertically in the air like a blade. ‘They were standing on their bows like that, the three of them upright. We had to pull them down and put more stones in them.’
The wind is inescapable here. Its relentlessness more than its strength is what can make you unhappy. I have been here with my wife Sarah at times when the rain and wind have slapped against us day after day. We were staying in a tent – the house felt too ratty – and we went to bed in the wind and woke up in the wind. Every voice was blurred by the wind, every minute besieged by it. It did not go well. She wanted to leave. She was unable to see the point in being out on a shelterless rock in a meaningless sea, under a muffled grey sky, where there are no loos and no baths, where there is not even a little copse or spinney in which one can sit down to read, where the house itself is little better than a shed, where the wind blows and blows and where your husband is for some reason obsessed with every fact and detail of this godforsaken nowhere.
So I took her, on one of these unhappy, disconnected days, to a place on the spit of rock through which the natural arch is driven, at the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean. It is quite a scramble to get there, down a crumbly half-cliff face, across some weed-slithered rocks at sea-level, and then up again over barnacle-encrusted boulders. But once there – and this only works in a long, old swell – you can find yourself suddenly in the presence of something marvellous. All is quiet; you are for a moment in the lee of the island and the air is able to mimic stillness. Then, from nowhere, it happens. I suppose it is some effect of air and water, the compression of one by the other, but it is not science you encounter. Quite casually, and with no fanfare, no advance warning, from between your feet the islands start to groan. A long, deep moaning emerges from the slits between the dolerite slabs. It begins slowly and builds, a deep and exhausted exhalation. It is like finding a room in which you thought you were alone suddenly occupied by another, a voice emerging from a long dead body.
Did that make things better? Not really. It was scarcely a Martini advertisement, nor perhaps the most appropriate way of convincing a disenchanted spouse that the Shiants were wonderful. Where were the sandy beaches? Where the machair, the sweet, shell-sand pastures, the fertility, the richness, the sense of life beyond the bone?
I was not finished. On the next quiet day, we went cave-visiting. One, just beyond the natural arch, is a huge fretted cavern, forty yards long, the water inside it invisibly deep and turquoise blue, gurgling and slopping against the pink, coralline-encrusted walls. You can reach it only by boat, and if you tethered a raft in there, you could hold a dance inside, candelabra suspended from the dripping roof, shags and black guillemots alert to the music.
But even that is not the greatest of the Shiants’ sea displays. Out at the far north-western tip of Garbh Eilean, where the Stewarts attempted to kill their shepherd and where Mrs MacAulay fell to her death, where you can go only in a calm, is the most haunting sea cave of all. Its mouth is covered except at low tide. Even then, not much of it appears. A little jagged-arched orifice opens above the guano-thick green of the sea. The birds hawk and hiss, gab and gibber above you. The echo of their voices runs three times around the little amphitheatre in which the cave is set, rising to its own small crescendos and then dropping into silence. Down on the sea, the noise ricochets around you, the fishwives of Hell on a weekend outing. It is dark and cold in here. The sun never reaches this place.
We look at the mouth of the cave. Inside, as the swell slops back from the entrance, you see the pink and dangling innards, rock tonsils thickened with coralline reaching down to the tongue of the sea. It is the gullet of the monster. The opening is too small for a boat to enter – I have slipped the nose of a canoe in there, no more – and you must wait outside. And wait you must because this cave will in time, not with every swell, work its magic. It comes soon enough. The swell withdraws, and after it a barrel-deep, reverberant, bass-booming of the rock, followed, and this is the moment at which you abandon all critical distance, by a breath of foggy air, rolling and curling out of the mouth, expelled ten or twenty yards towards you, enveloping you, your boat and your wife in its salty, geological folds. Who needs a flowery meadow when islands can do that for you? Who thinks of legislation or designation or clan history or the politics of landscape when the wild can so easily step outside any frame designed to encompass or reduce it?
October is buffeting onwards. I am alone, writing in the house, with the light of the two paraffin lamps on the table beside me, the dogs curled into doughnuts by the fire and the waves breaking on the shore outside, less than a stone’s throw away. The places in which I swam between the anemones and the bladderwrack in the summer are chaos now. From time to time, a handful of the sea spray lands on the windows and rattles them. Sarah is at home with the girls and the wind shuffles through its endless conversations outside. A gannet is sailing above the storm, in close beside the beach so that I can watch it above the stirred and stained green-and-white surface of the sea. The day is dark and the gannet is lit like a crucifixion against it. I could never tire of this, never think of anything I would rather watch, nor of any place I would rather be than here, in front of the endless renewing of the sea bird’s genius, again and again carving its path inside the wind, holding and playing with all the mobility that surrounds it like a magician with his silks, before the moment comes, it pauses and plunges for the kill, the sudden folded, twisted purpose, the immersion, disappearance and the detonation of the surf. The wind bellows in my ears as if in a shell. No one can own this, no individual, no community. This is beyond all owning, a persistence and an energy which exists despite the squabbling over names and titles, not because of it.
I had wanted to have my son Tom with me at this end
of the year. I am here to see the geese returning from Greenland and I wanted him here with me, but he is at school and I couldn’t take him away. Perhaps these moments are better alone, anyway. What would he have done as I sat for hours at this table writing about the islands which, I am sure, come for him with all the burden of my own expectations attached? I sometimes wonder if they are not too much of a parental landscape for him. Will my own presence not loom too much over them?
It didn’t happen with me and my father. He made the gift a real one, allowing me freedom from the moment the deed was signed. A connection remained. I told him once that buying the Shiants was the best thing he had ever done and I could see that the words moved him, more I think because I had said them than because he believed it. The Shiants have been a conduit between us for years, a way of talking about something we both loved without ever having to say that we did. He wrote to me once at school about ‘a cloud of midges hanging around your head on a still evening you-know-where’ – and I can still remember the feeling that enveloped me then of an almost overwhelming sense of connectedness and significance, of this deep intimacy which a common affection for you-know-where could provide. Nothing else was quite so free or rich. That is the feeling which has fuelled the writing of this book and which I want to give Tom: not the islands but our shared attachment to them.
It may not happen, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t need Tom Nicolson to live with the intensity of Shiant-love that his father has known. All populations go through their cycles of dearth and wealth and there is no reason why my own closeness to the Shiants shouldn’t diminish for a lifetime or two. It is for him to do what he will. Even in prospect, I love the idea of Tom being on the islands with his friends, discovering it all, feeling his way into its heart, making all the mistakes that I and my father made, slowly acquiring the odd, deep, distant attachment to a place of such unresponsive rock. But if that doesn’t happen to him, I don’t mind. His best and repeated joke to me is that When The Time Comes he is going to put a generator in and have a Sky satellite dish attached to the roof of the cottage. I will leave it ten years but in a funny way, I can’t wait to be his guest here.
The time I have had on the Shiants is coming to an end. I know the islands now more than I have ever known them, more in a way than anyone has ever known them, and as I sit here in the house I have a feeling, for a moment, of completeness and gratitude. My love affair with these islands is reaching its full term. Yesterday, one of those early winter days opened, when the whole of the Hebrides lies cold and still around you, the hills in Skye washed purple, the mountains in the Uists a faded, sea-washed blue. A big, slow swell was travelling the length of the Minch, as though the muscles were moving under the skin of the sea. I went up to the far north cliff of Garbh Eilean and lay down there on the cold turf where the tips of the grasses are reddening with the acid in the soil. I put my head over the edge of the cliff and watched the sea pulling at the black seal reef five hundred feet below me. I had my mobile in my pocket. The reception is good up there and I rang Tom at his sixth form college in Chichester. ‘Listen, Tom, listen,’ I said and held the phone so that he could hear the sea.
‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Have you seen the geese yet?’
‘No, nothing yet. But it’s lovely here.’
‘I know it is, Dad. I’ve gotta go. I’ve got History. Talk to you soon. Bye.’
I was left alone in the silence, with the pale sun on my face, and, as the dogs nosed for nothing in the grasses, I started to fall asleep there to the long, asthmatic rhythm of the surf. The islands embraced and enveloped me. Twenty yards to my left the Viking was asleep in his grave and the words of Auden’s poem ran on in my mind:
Look, stranger, at this island now …
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
If you enjoyed Sea Room, check out these other great Adam Nicolson titles.
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Note
Several Gibb and Henderson papers on the geology of the Shiants are to be found at www.shiantisles.net/geology.
Pat Foster’s full report on the first season’s survey of the Shiants is available at www.shiantisles.net/archaeology. The findings of later years’ investigations will be put on to the website as they become available.
Pat Foster’s report on the excavation is to be found at www.shiantisles.net/excavation.
If anyone knows of the whereabouts of the photographs taken by William Norrie of the Shiart Campbells please e-mail the author at [email protected].
Bibliography
ESTATE PAPERS, OFFICIAL
RECORDS ETC.
In the National Archives of Scotland
Seaforth papers GD 40; GD 427; GD
46
Stornoway Sheriff Court Records SC 33
SSPCK papers GD 95
Minutes of Skye and Lewis Presbyteries CH 2/273; CH 1/2
Customs Records CE 86
In the Library of the National Museums of Scotland
Harvie-Brown papers
In the National Library of Scotland
Sibbald Collections: Advocates’ MSS 33.3.20
In the Public Record Office
Log of HMS Triton 1746 ADM 51/1005
HMS Triton Muster Book ADM 36/4366 Pt 1
In Stornoway Library
Ordnance Survey Name Book for Lewis (microfilm)
At Museum nan Eilean, Stornoway
Sites and Monuments Record (digital archive)
OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS
Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1884
Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Possibility of Certain Sporting or Grazing Subjects in the Crofting Counties being occupied by Crofters or Small Tenants, 1895
Report to the Secretary for Scotland by the Crofters Commission on the Social Condition of the People of Lewis in 1901 as compared with Twenty Years ago, 1902
BOOKS AND ARTICLES
Adomnan, Life of St Columba, trans. R Sharpe, London, 1995
Anderson, James, An Account of the Present State of the Hebrides, London, 1785
Angus, Stewart, The Outer Hebrides, Strond, 1992
Angus, Stewart, and Hopkins, P G, ‘Ship rat Rattus rattus confirmed on the Shiant Islands’, Hebridean Naturalist 13 (1995). PP18–22
Armit, Ian, The Archaeology of Skye and the Western Isles, Edinburgh, 1996
Atkinson, G C, Expeditions to the Hebrides, ed. D A Quine, Lusta, 2001
Atkinson, Robert, Island Going, (1949), Edinburgh, 1995
Auden, W H, The Enchafed Flood: or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea, London, 1951
Bitel, Lisa M, Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland, Cork, 1990
Black, R I M (ed.), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, Edinburgh, 1999
Boyd, J M, and Boyd, I L, The Hebrides (3 vols), Edinburgh, 1996
Branigan, Keith and Foster, Patrick, Barra: Archaeological Research on Ben Tangaval, Sheffield, 1995
Brooke, M de L, ‘The Puffin population of the Shiants’, Bird Study, 19 (1972), pp1–6
Brooke, M de L, ‘Birds of the Shiant Islands, Outer Hebrides’, Bird Study, 20 (1973), PP197–206
Bryan, Amanda, The Minch Review, Stornoway, 1994
Buchanan, J L, Travels in the Western Hebrides, from 1782 to 1790, London, 1793
Burn, A R, ‘Holy Men on Islands in pre-Christian Britain’, Glasgow Archaeological Journal, 1 (1969), pp2–6
Burt, Edmund, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland (1754), Edinburgh, 1998
Caird, J B, Park
: A Geographical Study of a Lewis Crofting District, 1958
Campbell, J L, Canna, Oxford, 1984
Campbell, J L, A Very Civil People: Hebridean Folk, History and Tradition, Edinburgh, 2000
Campbell, Neil, ‘Fishing Tragedy, 1885’, Boillsgeadh, 1999, P32
Carmichael, Alexander, Carmina Gadelica (1900–71), Edinburgh, 1983
Cheape, Hugh, ‘Crogans and Barvas Ware: Handmade Pottery in the Hebrides’, Scottish Studies 31 (1992–3)
Cowie, Trevor, ‘Bronze Age Gold Torc from the Minch’, Hebridean Naturalist, 12 (1994), pp19–21
Cowie, Trevor, ‘The Bronze Age’, Scotland: Environment and Archaeology, 8000BC-AD1000, eds K J Edwards and I B M Ralston, London, 1997
Clancy, Thomas Owen, ‘Annat in Scotland and the origins of the parish’, The Innes Review, 46/2 (1995), pp91–115
Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Markus, Gilbert, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, Edinburgh, 1995
Cranston, Maurice, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity, London, 1997
Crawford, Iain A, ‘War or peace: Viking colonisation in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland reviewed’, Proceedings of the eighth Viking Congress, 1977, pp259–99
Crick, H Q P and Ratcliffe, D A, ‘The Peregrine Falco peregrinus breeding population of the United Kingdom in 1991’, Bird Study 42 (1995), pp1–19
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