by Amy Liptrot
Fair Isle was of vital strategic importance in the times of the sagas. A beacon was built on the isle that could be lit to warn Earl Paul in Orkney if Earl Rognvald from Shetland was approaching by ship. However, Rognvald was one step ahead and sent out a dummy ship: ‘When the beacon on Fair Isle was seen to be alight, Thorstein Rognuson had the beacon lit on North Ronaldsay, and so one after another was lit throughout the islands. All the farmers gathered around the Earl, making up a sizeable army.’
After this false alarm, Rognvald sent a spy to Fair Isle. ‘Uni chose three young Shetlanders to come with him in a six-oared boat with provisions and fishing tackle and rowed over to Fair Isle.’ Pretending that he was a Norwegian wronged by Earl Rognvald, Uni volunteered for the job of looking after the Fair Isle beacon. When Rognvald’s real ships approached, Uni was found to have disappeared and the beacon was soaked with water so it wouldn’t light. The warning would not reach Orkney that night and no army was raised.
As the captain ding-dongs over the intercom at six a.m. to tell the passengers we are approaching Lerwick, I imagine fires being lit one by one on the hilltops, like our modern lighthouses, points of light in the dark seas.
As well as being Fair Isle’s weatherman, Dave Wheeler is the airport manager, a crofter and the registrar, keeping the official records of the island’s births, deaths and marriages. He is also a professional photographer and teaches an IT class at the school (roll: six, the same as Papay). When Dave, a Yorkshireman, arrived in the early seventies, he was able to convince the Met Office that they needed a Fair Isle recording station, plugging a gap in the weather recording network. ‘You have to find a niche,’ he explains of island life, and describes how he and his wife Jane brought over cows, a rarity on the island, and sell their milk. I think of my own parents, coming to Orkney in the seventies, the photos of them in woolly jumpers with different hairstyles.
Although some of his weather-recording equipment has now been automated, each day Dave sends regular reports to the Met Office, starting at six a.m. and carrying on into the night. He shows me the meteorological enclosure on his croft, ‘Field’, in the shadow of Sheep Rock. Thermometers measure air, grass and underground temperature; an anemometer on a post at ten metres height, the Met standard, measures winds; a beautiful device that looks like a crystal ball records sunshine. The glass sphere is a burning lens, Dave explains, focusing the sun’s rays onto a strip of card marked off in hours, so length of burn – sunshine – can be measured. The card is changed daily after sunset.
I look through a collection of shots taken by Dave’s fixed webcam over just a few months with the same field of vision and shutter speed. It takes a picture every hour and the huge changes in weather and light, in seasons and over days, are shown in the changes in the pictures. I see the colours transform from green grass and blue skies to washed-out fields at the end of winter. In the mornings, sunlit from behind, Sheep Rock appears in shadow but in the evening the details of the cliff are sharply revealed. A sunset casts everything – sky, cliffs, hillside – in pink. There are grey skies and whiteouts. Sometimes Sheep Rock is obscured by fog and at others the lens of the camera is splashed with rain. On very bright days, the sun appears as a black dot, the camera unable to process its light.
* * *
The wind means I will not get off the island the next day as I planned. As others predicted, the planes are cancelled. I start to think about the difference between choosing to come to an island and being stuck there, stranded. As a teenager I’d shouted, ‘I didn’t ask to be born here,’ and hated having to get lifts from my parents to go anywhere, weather howling every time I stepped outside the door.
I spend an extra night in the old lighthouse keeper’s accommodation at the South Lighthouse, built in 1890 and automated in 1998. The foghorn at the front, which could be heard forty kilometres away, was turned off in 2005. The lawns around the lighthouse look as if they are maintained by a groundskeeper but in fact they are kept short by the whipping wind and sea salt.
I walk the coastline listening to BBC foreign correspondents, feeling like a dot in the ocean. I decide I want to walk to the top of Malcolm’s Head, which some say was the site of the saga’s beacons – a foolhardy plan in this gale. I ascend the hill in a crouched position, probably watched by amused islanders in the houses below. I lie forward into the wind, like a mattress of air: it takes my breath and exhausts me – a full-body experience. It’s loud enough to hide in. Chunks of sea foam are being blown over the cliff into my face. I think it’s calmed, then a powerful gust blows up again.
As well as birders, visitors to the lighthouse include ‘island-baggers’, who want to visit as many Scottish islands as possible. The 1861 census defined an island as ‘any piece of solid land surrounded by water which affords sufficient vegetation to support one or two sheep, or is inhabited by man’. Haswell-Smith’s guide snootily denies island status to Skye, joined by a bridge, and Orkney’s Burray and South Ronaldsay, joined to the Mainland in the Second World War by the Churchill Barriers, built to stop German U-boats. There are also ‘lighthouse-baggers’, and ‘Marilyn-baggers’, who have perhaps finished the challenge of climbing all the Munros, hills in Scotland of more than 3,000 feet (915 metres) and are moving on to the Marilyns, more than 490 feet (150 metres), of which Fair Isle’s Ward Hill is one.
Another reason that people come to Fair Isle is to trace family history. There are thousands of descendants of Fair Isle people, with surnames like Stout and Irvine, all over Canada and the USA. When I mention my trip, several Orcadian friends tell me their great-grandparents originally came from the isle. My friend Rognvald Leslie shows me a photograph of his great-grandfather, George Leslie, striking both for his dapper handsomeness and his slightly exotic features, which almost look Mongolian, Inuit or Sami. This may be coincidental but Fair Islers may like to feel kinship with edge-landers, tough people from the far north. Rognvald says that George lived at a croft called Pund, which Dave tells me is one of the only two derelict houses on the island – when most places are abandoned the stones are quickly claimed for another building – and points me in its direction. In the mist, I pick around the broken-down remains of the house, now used for storing animal feed, and outbuildings. I discover that Pund is where the Duchess of Bedford stayed when she came on bird-watching trips in the early twentieth century and am excited to tell Rognvald of his aristocratic links.
I am a rare January visitor so people on the island know I am there before I meet them. The woman in the shop knows where I’m staying. But what am I doing here on Fair Isle in January, a single woman with no easy explanation? I’m not a birder or someone tracing my family history. I’m not sure. It’s just that I’ve been scrolling over Google Maps and reading Wikis for ages and now I’m here. My leisure time is no longer filled with drinking and nights out, and I don’t have children or many responsibilities, so this is what I’m doing instead, visiting increasingly remote northern places, following the map to the edge. This is the story of what happens after you stop drinking. This is the freedom of sobriety.
I didn’t know what would happen when I got sober, when I launched myself into the unknown future. I didn’t know I would return to Orkney. I didn’t know my strongest desire would be to hear the rasping call of the corncrake. I didn’t know I’d start swimming in the sea and taking my writing more seriously. I didn’t know I’d find myself alone climbing a steep hill on the country’s most remote island during a gale in early January, buffeted by spindrift. But I had to give myself the chance to find out.
There are disputes over the origin of the name ‘Fair Isle’. It could be from the same root as ‘fairway’ or ‘thoroughfare’, a place to navigate by, halfway between Orkney and Shetland. I find it weirdly prescient that Fair Isle is located such that the nearest places – North Ronaldsay in Orkney and Sumburgh Head in Shetland – are both just on the horizon, around twenty-six miles away. It is almost completely isolated, but not quite. North Ronaldsay lighthouse
is the tallest land lighthouse in Britain so its light can be seen from Fair Isle. Another idea is that it is simply called ‘Fair’ because it’s bonny.
A notorious site of numerous shipwrecks, Fair Isle has had different methods for warning of its rocky dangers. As well as the two lighthouses and foghorns, there is a rocket station, built in 1885 and used only for a year, as an alternative to the foghorn, to warn passing ships about the presence of the isle. During thick fog or snow it fired rockets at ten-minute intervals, exploding 800 feet above sea level. Next to the site of the Viking beacons, at the top of Malcolm’s Head, is a nineteenth-century watchtower, erected during the Napoleonic Wars to look out for enemy ships. On Ward Hill are the remains of a Second World War radar station and coastguards’ huts used to scan the ocean by eye for seafarers in distress.
Fair Isle is no longer important for military defence but its location, as an outlier miles from anywhere, is important strategically for meteorological and ornithological records.
On my last night on Fair Isle, about an hour after I fall asleep, an asteroid passes relatively close to earth. Asteroid 99942 Apophis once caused fears when it was calculated to have a 2.9 per cent chance of hitting the earth in 2029 but, with each year, astronomers refine their model of its trajectory and tonight it passes more than eight million miles away. There are ten asteroids out there with a higher risk rating than Apophis, monitored from an office in California using information from powerful telescopes.
From my bedroom window in the lighthouse, in the haar, four beams pass every thirty seconds as the light rotates, its characteristic pattern. (Out to sea these beams are seen as flashes and I recognise them a couple of nights later, out on deck around nine o’clock on the ferry returning to Orkney.) Back inside the lighthouse, I fall asleep under the beams and dream of warning systems: beacons, rockets, lighthouses, satellites and telescopes. I dream of the dangers and curiosities we try to predict, measure and bag, coming towards us on this small isle, over the sea, through the sky and across outer space.
25
BONFIRE
ON THE WALL OF THE treatment centre, among the peers’ work from the art-therapy classes – rainbows, inspirational slogans – there was a felt-tip drawing of a dog with its tail on fire. I used to look at it during the interminable group-therapy sessions. It spoke to me somehow.
In my last week on the programme, a new lad joined. It was, as is often the case, his second time through and I found out, to my joy, that he was the artist. Pleased that someone liked his work, he was happy to give me the drawing as a leaving gift and I have it with me now, a dog with its tail on fire, hanging on the wall of Rose Cottage, as a reminder of those twelve weeks and that this was my last chance: I don’t want to go through the system again and be trapped in the cycle. It’s also a reminder that if I smell something burning it’s probably myself.
* * *
There is some excitement on Papay at the arrival of a skip. Large rubbish is stored up for these occasions, to be taken off the island, rather than the old method of tipping it over a cliff. Historically, dead sheep were disposed of by being thrown over the cliff – on our farm, into Nebo Geo. Now this is illegal and Dad has a metal tank out at the far side of a field where the bodies are left to decompose. I catch a whiff of rotting flesh when I walk by.
Bonfires are another method of rubbish-disposal, popular here, and most houses have a blackened patch in the yard. Plumes of flame and smoke rise from the low island on still days and often on Sundays. Despite our small population, there are three different church groups here – Church of Scotland, a Gospel Hall and a Quaker meeting – but these fires are a link to something pre-Christian.
Papay has its own fire brigade, made up of five or so locals who are paid a retainer although the time commitment and training mean it’s hard to make up a full crew. Living in the city, I’d got used to local-authority-run fireworks displays, with safety barriers and officials in hi-vis vests. But I remember the bonfires once a week on the farm and the smell of burning black plastic from silage bales. We’re in control of our own fires here.
As well as for practical purposes, there are bonfires on Papay for celebrations and special occasions. For the last three years, in mid-February, a contemporary art festival has taken place on the island: Papay Gyro Nights, set up by Papay residents and artists Ivanov and Tsz Chan, a couple who moved to the island about five years ago and have a Papay-born daughter. That an art festival is held here at all is surprising, even more so that it’s in the off-season when gales thrash and nights are dark and long.
The ancient Papay tradition of the Night of the Gyros was celebrated until the early twentieth century on the first full moon of February. Young boys went out into the winter night, chased by older boys to ‘weep them with a tangle under the full moon’s light’. The last known celebration was in 1914 but now, a hundred years later, the art festival is reviving the tradition with a modern interpretation.
The bias of the festival is towards experimental video art. Some artists have made the journey to Papay, alongside a small but enthusiastic group of international visitors and curious Orcadians. The hostel is pretty much full for the week – unheard of at this time of year – and island women make meals for everyone.
It is amusing to see islanders and visitors, from kids to old folks, farmers and performance artists, standing in the cold kelp store dutifully watching an hour-long experimental film, where masked figures perform strange rituals. It’s a much more diverse and attentive audience than there would be in a London gallery, although I notice some people slip out with the excuse of sleepy children. There is a general open-mindedness on Papay, a feeling that, although the art might not be for everyone, it is making something happen and bringing people to the island.
A Norwegian artist spends the week producing a ‘kinetic sculpture’ in and around an abandoned croft near Rose Cottage. I watch him through my telescope, battling to hang a canvas in the wind. An anthropologist from Minnesota gives a lecture, the projector set up on a giant sperm whale vertebra. A Frog King from Hong Kong makes his nest in the school.
I remember how, on the first Thursday of each month, art galleries around east London were open late, with people walking between them as much for the free drink as the art. Girls in exaggerated head bows and boys in old men’s jackets drank cans of lager in the street. Hopeful artists inhabited these nights, displaying photographs of urban romance, keeping quiet about how they spent their days and paid their rent.
One night I accidentally destroyed the art. Elaborate foil ‘pieces’ were suspended from steel wires and dangled into the lobby of the gallery, like chandeliers, and, being a curious and sloshed viewer, I leaned over the balcony and hoisted one up. A security guard came and tapped me on the shoulder so I immediately dropped the wire, snapping it and sending the art smashing to the ground. It made a terrific noise.
Gyro Nights launches an architectural competition to design a bonfire – a ‘combustible centrepiece’ – to be constructed and burned at the festival, and they receive entries from around the world. Architecture students look at Papay on Google Maps to find the best location for their fire: a structure whose purpose is its own destruction. A bonfire is a type of controlled chaos. On the first night of the festival, we take part in a torch-lit procession, from the shop down the hill to the old pier where we put our flaming wooden torches together to light a fire.
Coming to this island without light pollution, I remember just how dark it can get. At midwinter I close my curtains at half past three. In days gone by, four times every year, hilltops across Orkney blazed with orange firelight. Giant bonfires were constructed and lit to commemorate the ancient festivals of Yule, Beltane, Johnsmas and Hallowmas. In the seventeenth century, cattle, horses, the sick or infirm were led ‘sunwise’ around bonfires because the flames were believed to have a purifying or revitalising power. In the past they would burn heather and peat; today it’s more likely to be packaging pallets or old fenc
e posts. The fires light up the winter nights, giving excitement and hope.
The full moon and new moons of winter – including the full moon of Gyro Nights – are also the times when it’s possible to forage for spoots, the local name for razor fish or razor shells, long, thin shellfish that can be caught without the need for a boat, at the lowest tides.
At new moon, Tim shows me the best spot on the beach where the ‘spoot sand’ is exposed at the ebb tide. We walk backwards and the spoots, which lie vertically just under the surface, are disturbed by our booming footsteps and burrow downwards, leaving a telltale bubble in the sand. By walking backwards, I am able to spot these bubbles – the ‘spoot’ of water – and dig furiously with a trowel, then with my rubber-gloved hands. I feel the razor fish pulling downwards away from me and it’s a battle of woman versus spoot but I manage to get it and put it into my bucket. That night I fry them up with some garlic and eat them with spaghetti – a small meal but one of the most satisfying I’ve had in a long time, caught for free and with fun.
I have been sober for exactly twenty-three months. I remember 21 February as being Said’s ‘clean date’ because we had to repeat these to each other once a week in the treatment centre. He was one of the very few others that got through the three months of treatment without ‘picking up’ but I haven’t spoken to him for more than a year. My last text, a few months ago, went unanswered. I try another. It doesn’t feel good.
I text another person I became friendly with in the centre, a funny, fragile girl with jewelled fingernails and more problems than just the drink, including a history of anorexia and relationships with abusive men. She was thrown out of the programme halfway through after admitting taking some of her boyfriend’s prescription painkillers one night when she was feeling desperate. The rule was zero tolerance. I saw her later in AA meetings and she was back drinking, getting a few weeks sober then relapse after relapse. She replies telling me she is in a psychiatric unit after getting arrested for breach of the peace.