The Outrun

by Amy Liptrot

  In different ways, whales have been used by people in Orkney for millennia. A whalebone hammer was excavated from the five-thousand-year-old settlement at the Knap of Howar on Papa Westray. One theory about the coverings of the now roofless Neolithic houses at Skara Brae suggests that, in the absence of much wood, the inhabitants used whale ribs as rafters, stretching animal skins between them, perhaps turfed on top. Bones twice the height of a man made a warm home, like a heart inside a ribcage.

  In the late eighteenth century, whaleships called at Orkney on their way to Arctic waters, to take on fresh provisions and skilled oarsmen. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, says: ‘How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too.’

  On 14 March 1955, around the spring equinox when the winds are often strong and seas high, sixty-seven pilot whales were stranded at Point of Cott on Westray, beached when they followed each other hunting or in rough weather. I try to imagine this sight and the excitement on the island at the unexpected event. On 7 December in 1994, when whales were now seen in terms of conservation rather than hunting, eleven sperm whales were beached at Backaskaill Bay on Sanday, where, collapsing under their own weight, they died the next morning.

  At the furthest north-west point of the Orkney mainland, near a tidal island called the Broch of Birsay and fishermen’s cove Skipi Geo, there is a local landmark, ‘the whale bone’: an upright of a rib and a cross-piece of part of a skull. It was set up about 130 years ago by local people after they’d used the other parts of a washed-up whale. It is well loved and over the years has been blown down and reinstated many times, now marking the turning point at the end of a dog walk. I see a photograph of the whale bone with the Northern Lights and the Milky Way in the background, a raw, grisly sculpture with yellow lichen growing on the eroded bones.

  A few weeks ago, Dad was chatting to a beachcomber friend and asked him to name the best thing he could imagine finding on the shore. ‘Ambergris,’ he replied. Ambergris is a rare and highly valuable substance, produced in the stomachs of sperm whales, either vomited or excreted, and found floating on the sea or washed up on the shore. Dad’s friend described the substance – waxy, between white and grey and amber – and Dad said, ‘Oh, we’ve got some of that.’ A lump of waxy material fitting the description has been in the tractor shed for decades, ever since my parents bought the farm more than thirty years ago.

  We’ve been reading everything we can about ambergris. Melville writes that it is ‘soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastilles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavour it.’ On the internet, we wonder at parfumiers’ descriptions, of a ‘pheromone’ with ‘a transformative quality’ that ‘seduces particularly feminine noses, who instinctively recognise the odour that will attract males’, read claims that it can ‘cure Parkinson’s’, and watch eBay auctions where lumps have been selling for forty dollars a gram, not much less than gold.

  When my parents moved to the farm before I was born, there were whale bones around the buildings. I remember, as a child, climbing up a dyke and standing on a massive vertebra that sat on top, part wall, part animal. The remains give us a link to these sea beasts and encourage the idea that our lump might be what we hope. It is now the size and shape of a large naan bread or a toilet seat, although Dad remembers that it has changed shape over the years – to fit a bucket it was put in, then flattening out gradually when tipped onto the byre floor. It’s a piece of farmyard junk that could easily have been thrown on a bonfire or midden.

  Our fortune – how much? Fifty thousand? A hundred? – might have been sitting on the floor of the shed all this time: the answer to our financial problems in a lump of whale puke! Ishmael again: ‘Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!’

  We have been performing experiments, melting and poking fragments of our treasure, looking for the cuttlefish beaks that are a sure sign of a whale’s digestion. Insertion of a red-hot needle produces a satisfying puff of white smoke but while there is some kind of smell it’s not quite the ‘peculiar odour that is at once sweet, earthy, marine, and animalic’ we’ve read about. We are also concerned that the dogs and rats on the farm have never tried to eat it. In the caravan, Dad and I joke that the blob we’re experimenting on is worth hundreds of pounds but we can afford to waste it. Results, so far, are inconclusive.

  I’ve been fighting to avoid falling into the depression that is apparently common in the first year of sobriety, missing some of the chaos and unpredictability of my old life. There are many things I am scared may happen by surrendering myself to sobriety but near the top of the list is losing my edge. By ‘edge’ I mean my cool, by which I mean my enlivening sense of discontent, and my youth, and sex – narrowed eyes and full lips – and enjoyment of testing the boundaries, of saying something uncomfortable and an excitement in the unexpected.

  I don’t want to become someone sanctimonious, who tuts at teenagers drinking alcopops; neither do I want to talk in therapy platitudes nor acquire the evangelical tone of voice I know from church preachers.

  But the truth is, my edge was blunted some time ago. I’d hear a great song and think, This’ll sound fantastic in a club or live, with other people, but by the time I’d got there – if, indeed, I’d got there at all after too many over-excited sharpeners at home – I’d been too trolleyed to take in, let alone enjoy or remember, the music or conversation. Where was my edge when I was physically ejected from a nightclub in front of loads of people I know, kicking and screaming against bouncers, for reasons I don’t remember and have been too embarrassed to find out? It wasn’t cool to be crying at parties to anyone who would listen about how my boyfriend had left me because of my drinking while swigging from a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. It wasn’t a good look to ruin my friend’s poetry reading with coked-up incomprehensible heckles, or to be lying on the floor of a pub toilet, my friends too weary to do anything to move me.

  Alcohol wasn’t working for me any more. I remember being so drunk I was falling down, but feeling I’d barely scratched the surface, buying shots at the bar, never able to fill the emptiness. The exhausting and boring cycle of alcoholism would have continued. I could have been a sad, lonely drunk of forty, fifty, sixty years old. In the end, I was chasing a promise that never delivered and now I’m looking to the surprises of my natural surroundings to stir my imagination.

  Uncertainty is hanging over the farm. Developers have visited, interested in the Outrun. At this lean time of year, before the lambs have been sold, the suggestion of large sums of money is attractive. As with the ambergris, we’re seduced by the idea that the land might provide an unexpected fortune.

  The next step is to send a small sample of our ‘ambergris’, for testing and verification, to one of the perfume houses in France or traders in New Zealand. Perhaps we’re stalling to keep the daydreams of multiplying bank accounts and new tractors alive, in the knowledge that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Soon, all we might have is a lump of worthless wax but for now it’s a thing of wonder and riches, magic washed up by the sea, thanks to the dyspepsia of a whale.

  At one time our farm contained a ‘smithy’, where a blacksmith would repair other farmers’ tools, ploughs dragged by horses and, later, tractors. Dad sends a sample of our waxy lump to a Parisian perfume company and they eventually reply saying that it is probably a crude form of animal-bone wax or glue, not ambergris. It’s disappointing but while the lump doesn’t connect us to the sea, it does link us, with blacksmith’s glue made from the melted bones and hoofs of horses, to the history of the farm.
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  ABANDONED ISLANDS

  IT IS NOT UNTIL LATER that spring that I see my first living cetaceans – the name for whales, dolphins and porpoises. On a small Rigid Inflatable Boat, returning from the uninhabited island of Copinsay, we are suddenly among a pod of harbour porpoise. The captain cuts the engine and they surface intermittently, six or ten of them, close enough that we can hear them breathe. The Shetland name for porpoise is ‘neesick’, onomatopoeia of the sound they make as they breach. On the small boat, we are at their level and everyone aboard is transfixed, talking in whispers. I’d always known that the porpoise were out there but to see and be among them is more moving than I’d imagined, an unexpected bonus at the end of a magical twenty-four hours on the tiny island.

  Around the north of Scotland lie many uninhabited islands, abandoned in the mid-twentieth century when the forces of depopulation reached such strength that the last residents could no longer cling on. People had lived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years on those islands but the struggle to maintain life, combined with the potential of better prospects elsewhere, brought the communities to an end. Usually there was a trickle of islanders moving away but in some cases, such as on St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, the whole community was taken off at once. HMS Harebell sailed with the last residents of St Kilda in 1930.

  Orkney’s abandoned islands include Cava, Faray, Fara, Eynhallow, Swona and Copinsay. Now on these lonely isles, left to the elements, empty houses fall into disrepair and farmland is reverting to moor.

  Eynhallow – associated with the stories of vanishing islands Hether Blether and Hildaland – is a ‘holy island’, with an important part in the history of Orkney and the Norse Orkneyinga Saga, which recounts the history of Viking kings and earls in the Northern Isles in the ninth and tenth centuries. The landowner moved all the crofters off the island in 1851 after an outbreak of typhoid. When the thatched roofs and wooden partitions of the houses were burned to control the disease, the structure of an ancient monastic settlement was revealed. The church had been used as a dwelling place for generations.

  On Swona, the descendants of the cattle left by the last inhabitants in 1974 have gone feral, the young bulls fighting for dominance of the herd. Meanwhile, parties from environmental groups go out for days castrating wild cats on uninhabited islands, trying to control the feline population, descended from domestic cats, which preys on birds and their eggs. On Cava, two women, Ida and Meg, were the only inhabitants from 1959 until the early nineties.

  I had passed another abandoned isle, Stroma, which is not actually part of Orkney but Caithness, on the ferry from Orkney to Gill’s Bay near John O’Groats, and was taken aback by the number of houses, all now unoccupied, on its east side alone. At its peak Stroma had a population of five hundred but, after a gradual decline, the last residents left in the sixties to work on the construction of the Dounreay nuclear-power station just over the water. The island still has much of the structure of a community – pier, church, school, lighthouse – relatively intact but with no one in year-round occupation.

  Copinsay is a mile long and half a mile wide to the east of the Orkney archipelago. Its population reached a peak of twenty-five in 1931 but the last residents left for the Orkney Mainland in 1958. Spending more time in Orkney than I’d planned, I take the chance to explore its edges and travel to spend the night on Copinsay with seabird researchers Juliet and Yvan, who are going there to study the fulmar, shag, kittiwake and razorbill. The island is now an RSPB reserve, home in the summer to thousands of nesting seabirds. There are no scheduled ferries to it, of course, and we make the forty-minute journey on a small vessel with local boatman Sidney, leaving from a jetty outside his house on the East Mainland.

  Sidney moors the boat at Copinsay’s crumbling jetty, overlooked by a derelict farmhouse. In an upstairs bedroom I pitch my tent, deciding to sleep in there for warmth, rather than outside in the wind. The house is startlingly similar to the one I grew up in, a late-nineteenth-century Orkney farmhouse built on the site of previous steadings. The history of people on the island stretches back to the Iron Age, and Copinsay was known to the Norsemen as Kolbeinsay – Kolbein’s island – perhaps named after a Viking chief due to its command of wide ocean views.

  The Groats were the last family on the island, and had thirteen children. Under the decaying stairs, I find coat pegs marked with their names: Bessie, Isobel, Alice, Eva, Ethel . . . There are still beds and other furniture in the house that the family left. One room was used as a school when a teacher was employed for the Groats and the children of the lighthouse keepers. The lighthouse, the only other dwelling on the island, was automated in 1990.

  Exploring the uninhabited buildings, I imagine the children in the schoolroom and playing on the small sheltered beach in front of the farmhouse and feel sad that no one lives here any more, but it’s clear what a raw existence it would have been. The island provides the minimum needed to survive: it is a wedge of rock, faced on the north-east side with high cliffs, exposed to the wind, the salt-lashed land only enough grazing for a few livestock. There was not enough to keep the children here and, with ageing parents, they all gradually left. A lot of people in Orkney are now descended from the Groats, and the tale of the Copinsay Brownie, an ugly yet helpful sea beastie, has gone down in local folklore. A farmer tried to kill the Brownie but it evaded his attack and explained that, in return for being allowed to stay on the land, it was willing to work on the farm. The Brownie no longer wanted to live in the sea, tired of gnawing the bones of drowned men.

  As much as it is bleak, Copinsay is also dizzyingly beautiful. To the north is the even smaller, inaccessible Horse of Copinsay – the Norse liked to zoomorphise small islands – with cliffs rising straight out of the sea. A flock of more than fifty puffins is swimming near the coast, with more perched on the clifftop among the sea pinks. The view from the the clifftop, back down the steeply sloping island to the farmhouse, across a curving tidal causeway joining three low holms to the Mainland beyond, under immense skies, is one of the best in Orkney.

  Until around 1914, brave and hungry islanders took part in ‘fowling’ on Copinsay, catching seabirds from the cliffs for their flesh, eggs and feathers – known as ‘swappin’ for auks’, in Orcadian dialect. These days, the birds are caught only for conservation research. I go out with Juliet and Yvan around Copinsay’s cliffs and geos, looking for birds. They catch shags by extending an eight-foot fishing pole down the cliff to their nests: Yvan loops the bird in a kind of noose, lifts it and passes it up to Juliet, who grapples it, flapping and honking, and puts a bag over its head. A GPS tag is carefully taped to the feathers on its back and, over the next few days, every hundred seconds the tag will communicate with satellites and plot the shag’s location. The operation is efficient and the shag is quickly released but they will have to catch the same bird again in the next week to collect the data – about how far and where it has been to feed – which will contribute to biological records and inform government marine policy.

  Having a small island to myself brings a strange mixture of freedom and confinement. I have a pee on the edge of a cliff looking out towards Norway and feel like a Viking conqueror. A year ago I was in rehab in London. Now I’m lying star-shaped in the centre of the helicopter pad built to service the lighthouse, with its shadow over me, and bonxies – the Orcadian name for great skuas – above, on an uninhabited island in the North Sea. I walk back down the hill, fall asleep for an hour in a sheltered spot by the bay and dream of being a seabird on a high ledge.

  I plan to walk around the whole island but my circumnavigation is thwarted by the birds. Near the cliff edge, bonxies launch a dive-bomb attack, protecting their nearby nests. I hear one repeatedly swishing just above me and cover my head with my hands, duck and move swiftly out of the area.

  I cross the tidal causeway to Corn Holm and suddenly the cold farmhouse feels relatively civilised. I am the first human here in weeks and my arrival flushes gul
ls and greylag geese into the sky. Big, threatening black-backed gulls circle above; fulmars shift and squawk in their nests, some expelling foul vomit in my direction. Turning onto Ward Holm, I hear a noise like a sound effect for a B-movie haunted house – echoing moans and ghoulish howls – and it takes me a moment or two to realise I have come across a colony of grey seals basking on the rocks. At the sight of me, the huge mottled grey mammals slide into the water but don’t swim away. They turn around and every pair of eyes is on me.

  I start to worry that the tidal window for crossing the causeway will close and I’ll be stranded. I cut my route short and don’t venture to the ominously named Black Holm. Although I haven’t met the Brownie, I feel spooked. When the people left, Copinsay became the birds’ island. I am on their territory and won’t stay too long.

  I want to find out more about life on uninhabited islands so I go to Westray to visit Marcus Hewison. Although he has always lived on Westray, Marcus farmed the abandoned island of Faray for thirty-nine years, renting the grazing of the three-hundred-acre island and its hundred-acre holm from the Stewart Foundation, part of the Church of Scotland. At his house, I am fed with home bakes as he tells me how he kept up to six hundred ewes on Faray, getting over to them in his own yoles. He is one of the few farmers, these days, with sea as well as land skills, which used to be the norm when Orcadians were known as ‘crofters with nets’. With the yole moored at a geo, access to the island, for both people and animals, was a scramble up the rocks. Marcus used to spend two or three weeks a year at lambing time on Faray, staying in the old schoolhouse with a couple of helpers.

  Although there are eleven houses on Faray, no one has lived there full time since 1947. A few of the island’s past residents, now very elderly, are still alive on the Orkney Mainland. When Marcus first visited the island, the schoolhouse windows were broken and birds and sheep had been getting in. The five-hundred-strong black-backed gull colony had to be controlled as ‘they were taking the lambs’ tongues before they were out of the ewes’.