Sea Room
AN ISLAND LIFE
Adam Nicolson

Copyright

Published by William Collins

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2001

Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006532019

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007380718

Version: 2014-10-24

Dedication

For my father

Maps

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Note

Praise

About the Publisher

1

FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS I have owned some islands. They are called the Shiants: one definite, softened syllable, ‘the Shant Isles’, like a sea shanty but with the ‘y’ trimmed away. The rest of the world thinks there is nothing much to them. Even on a map of the Hebrides the tip of your little finger would blot them out, and if their five hundred and fifty acres of grass and rock were buried deep in the mainland of Scotland as some unconsidered slice of moor on which a few sheep grazed, no one would ever have noticed them. But the Shiants are not like that. They are not modest. They stand out high and undoubtable, four miles or so off the coast of Lewis, surrounded by tide-rips in the Minch, with black cliffs five hundred feet tall dropping into a cold, dark, peppermint sea, with seals lounging at their feet, the lobsters picking their way between the boulders and the kelp and thousands upon thousands of sea birds wheeling above the rocks.

In summer, the grass on the cliff-tops is thick with flowers: bog asphodel and bog pimpernel; branched orchids, the stars of tormentil and milkwort. ‘Under such skies can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation,’ Dr Johnson wrote, but this miniature spangle of Hebridean flora, never protruding its yellows and deep purples more than an inch or two above the turf, is a great and scarcely regarded treasure. I think of it when in England I walk on expensive Persian rugs; the same points of dense, discreet colour, the same proportion of ground to decoration; a sudden flash of the Hebrides in a rich man’s rooms. It is a private signal to me, a bleeping underfoot, winking through the burr of conversation and offered drinks: Remember me.

At times in the last two decades, these islands have been the most important thing in my life. They are a kind of heartland for me, a core place. My father bought them over sixty years ago for £1,400, he gave them to me when I was twenty-one, and I shall give them to my son Tom when he is twenty-one in four years’ time. This is not, as cynics have sometimes said, for tax reasons. The Shiants seem scarcely to do with money and, anyway, they have been a catastrophic investment. For the same amount, at the same time, my father could have bought a Jacobean manor house in Sussex or a two hundred-acre farm of prime arable in Cambridgeshire. Each would be worth a million or more by now. As it is, if I sold the Shiants, I could perhaps buy a two-bedroom flat in Fulham.

This was never a question of financial riches. My father bought the islands and gave them to me because as a very young man he had felt enlarged and excited by the ownership of a place like this, by the experience of being there alone or with friends, by an engagement with a nature so unadorned and with a sea- and landscape so huge that it allowed an escape into what felt like another dimension. It was a way of leaving home, a step into a different world. He described this, fitfully, in a letter to his brother Ben on first going there in 1937: ‘I would wake up the next morning to find the sun in a sky as pure as a Bavarian virgin,’ the twenty-year-old Balliol undergraduate half-joked.

I would lie all morning with no clothes on, on a rock overlooking the sea, reading and annotating Hegel. In the afternoons I used to run bare-footed across the mile of heather to the edge of the northern cliff, there flinging myself down, to read, or write, or gaze out to sea thinking about life, and what Heaven this was. The view from the top is such that only Greece could parallel.

And then he torpedoed it, embarrassed: ‘One becomes very Golden Bough in these conditions, I’m afraid.’

For all the camouflage, the experience was real, and forty years later he wanted, I think, to give that same enlargement to me: that wonderful sea room, the surge of freedom which a moated island provides. The gift was this: the sensation I can now summon, anywhere and at any time, of standing in the pure air streaming in off the Atlantic, alone on these islands which the last inhabitants left a hundred years ago. I have peered at them in every cranny: I have hauled lobsters and velvet crabs from the sea; picked the edible dulse from the walls of the sea caves and of the great Gothic natural arch which perforates a narrow horn of one of the islands; scrambled among the hissing shags and looked down the dark slum tunnels where the puffins live and croak their curious, endearing note, like a heavy door opening on a rusted hinge; and I have lain down in the long grass while the ravens honked and flicked above me and the skuas cruised in a milk-blue sky. I have felt at times, and perhaps this is a kind of delirium, no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have had no existence apart from it. I have been shaped by those island times, and find it difficult now to achieve any kind of distance from them. The place has entered me. It has coloured my life like a stain. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career – all those have been cast in shadow by the scale and seriousness of my brief moments of island life.

There was a time when I thought that to give the islands away, even to Tom, would be an unbearably difficult thing. Sometimes, away from them, late at night in strange hotels, I would listen to the shipping forecast – ‘Hebrides, Minches, Storm Force Ten, backing southwesterly, sleet, visibility two hundred yards’. I would think of them then, wet, battered and impossible, the rain slinging itself in handfuls of rice against the windows of the bothy, the churning of the sea, when, as it says in a famous Gaelic poem, ‘The whorled dun whelk that was down on the floor of the ocean,/Will snag on the boat’s gunwales and give a crack on her floor,’ when the cowering birds would be tucked in behind the boulders, and the sheep would be enduring the storm with the patience of saints and the dignity of martyrs. Those were the moments, not in their presence, when I felt most deeply attached to them. The Shiants are the most powerful absence I know. On every flight across the Atlantic, I would peer out for them, looking for an opening in the clouds to see them there, still and map-like below me, with the sea sheened and glittery around them, while the stewardess handed out headsets and warm towels. That too would be a moment of dreaded loss.

That has changed now. I have changed and I do not, I think, need them as much as I once did. The gift I received is the gift I want to make. They are a young man’s place and always have been. Tom will have his time there too, with his own friends and his own discoveries. He will know the Shiants in ways different from his father’s and grandfather’s. A place evolves in the minds of the people who possess it and it is Tom’s turn now.

This book is my final immersion in them. I have tried to get to know them as I have scarcely done before. No one previously has written at any length about the Shiants and this is both an opening and, for me anyway, a closing of their account. It is an attempt to tell the whole story, as I now understand it, of a tiny place in as many dimensions as possible: geologically, spiritually, botanically, historically, culturally, aesthetically, ornithologically, etymologically, emotionally, politically, socially, archaeologically and personally. It is a description of what my father gave to me and of what, in the spring of 2005, I shall give to my son.

A year or so ago, the West Highland Free Press, the radical(ish) anti-lairdist paper produced in Broadford in Skye, heard that I was planning to write a book about the islands and produced this cartoon:

I am the English toff. I am drowning in everything the guillemots can throw at me and I am burped at by sea monsters. I might crouch on the slippery rock ledges but I don’t belong there. I might dream of the Shiants, but I should by rights be back in my natural environment, the club in St James’s, brushing up my bowler, sprucing up my moustache, talking to other members about the state of the market or the loss of empire. My presence on the Shiants is about as easy or convincing as a basking shark ordering Sole Véronique in the dining room at the Ritz.

In the Hebrides, that is a widely shared, if rarely stated, attitude. The English landowner is an alien, part joke, part irritant, a tourist who thinks he has some claim on the place. Once in the midday dark of Macleod’s Bar next to the quayside in Tarbert, I was having a drink with Uisdean MacSween. Hughie MacSween, as I know him, the shepherd from Scaladale on Loch Seaforth, is one of the great sheep men on Harris. For many years of my boyhood and young adulthood he had the flock on the Shiants. He became, technically, my tenant. He paid me fifty pounds a year for the grass. But the reality was different: he was the master and I the pupil. I always felt embraced by his presence. He whispered his stories through lips that clung doggedly to the crushed stub-end of a roll-up, his eyebrows, like sprigs of long-grown lichen, leaping at the punch lines. The movement of his mouth was so quiet, like the fluttering of a flame, that you would always be creeping closer to hear him, to put your ear to his lips. And while he spoke, his eyes would move from you to the horizon and back: you, the listener, the target of the words, the horizon somehow their source. As he plied me with another pint and another chaser, long, growling laughs would come sloping out of his chest, breaking off into bronchial chaos, and then he would suddenly grasp my arm at some urgent point, some critical fact, some hilarious aspect – a long, deep drag on the last of the cigarette – of human folly.

For years, Hughie MacSween was the Shiants for me. He told me once, long after ill health had forced him to give up the islands, that he never went to sleep at night without his mind roving across them from one end to the other: up the steep climb from the landing beach, along the sheep paths there, over the shoulder and on to the broad back of Garbh Eilean, skirting the edge of the big peat-filled hollow, down to the valley at Glaic na Crotha, on towards the far end of Stocanish, where the lambs used to jump one by one down the steps of the north cliffs to the grass growing ever greener nearer the sea, until they found themselves stranded, and he would have to rescue them, bringing them back tucked under his arm one at a time like a job lot of bagpipes. ‘I know those islands inch by inch,’ he said, and then added the words I have treasured ever since: ‘And I know it is the same with you.’

A man came up to us, a little drunk, his cap on his head, his skin white. He ignored Hughie. ‘Are you the man who says he owns the Shiants?’ he said to me, standing over me.

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling charm, the English defence, ‘I am actually.’

‘Well you’re a sackful a shite.’

I laughed.

‘You can no more say that those islands belong to you than I can say that I’m the landlord of the moon.’

Hughie rolled his head and smiled at the man, there-thereing, calming the situation, murmuring to both of us that quietening growl he uses to his dogs. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said, patting the bench beside him.

The man sat down and went on. He took Hughie by the arm. ‘This is the man who owns the Shiants. They’re yours, aren’t they, Uisdean?’

Hughie looked down, his turn for bashfulness. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t quite say that, Murdo.’

‘Well, this is the man who should say he owns the Shiants anyway. He’s got the sheep on the place. He does the work there. And he looks after it. And what have you got to say about it? What do you do to say that the Shiants are yours?’

The answer, if I had given it, would have ended in a fight. The Shiant Isles are mine; I can say that they are my five hundred acres of rock, grass, cliff and wildness, stuck out in the middle of the Minch between Skye and Lewis, besieged by the seas around them, because my father gave them to me. He had bought them after his grandmother had died and left him some money. The advertisement had been seen by his mother in the Daily Telegraph. Colonel Macdonald from Tote in Skye, who had bought the islands the year before, had imagined they might be ideal as a stud where he could breed racehorses. He had been sweet-talked into the ridiculous purchase by Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, who owned the islands at the time and was, as ever, strapped for cash. Mackenzie had acquired them in 1925 from the executors of Lord Leverhulme, and Leverhulme had bought them in 1917, along with the whole of Lewis and Harris, from the Mathesons. The Mathesons, in their turn, afloat on opium millions from trade between Hong Kong and mainland China, had in 1844 bought Lewis from the Mackenzies, the ancient family of the Earls of Seaforth, who withdrew to their territories on the mainland. The Mackenzies, in a chaotic period of unparalleled violence and treachery at the beginning of the seventeenth century known, in one document, as ‘The Ewill Trowbles of the Lewes,’ in which ‘the Macleoid of the Lewes was with his whol Trybe destroyed and put from the possession of the Lewes’, had bought the property from some gentlemen of Fife, who had been granted it by the Crown to set up a colony, even though the hereditary owners, the Macleods of Lewis, were still, at least partly, in possession. Only ‘after great trouble and much blood’ did the Mackenzies get hold of the islands. For their part, the Macleods – ‘the stoutest and prettiest men, but a wicked bloody crew whom neither law nor reason could guid or moddell, perpetuallie destroying one another’ – had stolen it in the twelfth century from the Nicolsons, who had arrived as Vikings perhaps three hundred years earlier. Presumably they – we – had done dreadful things to the previous inhabitants.

Nicolson, Macleod, Mackenzie, Matheson, Leverhulme, Mackenzie, Macdonald, Nicolson: twelve hundred years, eight sets of landlords claiming the Shiants as theirs. I was their heir and that’s why I could claim to be their owner and Hughie MacSween couldn’t. But I didn’t say any of that. Hughie bought the man a drink and – the blood of the Vikings running a little thin – I hid behind him.

In 1894, the Reverend Donald MacCallum, the highly emotional Minister of the Parish of Lochs in Lewis, of which the Shiants have been a part since the 1720s, made a long and passionate statement to a Royal Commission that was hearing evidence on the state of crofters in the island. Rolling in its Biblical allusions, wildly overstated, dependent more on a rhetoric that goes back to the subversive roots of Christianity itself than to any modern understanding of rights and responsibilities, it is one of the grandest attacks ever made on the idea of the landlord. ‘Great evils,’ MacCallum began largely,

have necessarily resulted from the fact that land, lake, river, and estuary are appropriated to the sole use, and regulated by the will of a few irresponsible individuals styled by themselves and others as lords. Every man has a right, natural, and God-given, to the earth and its fullness – its fullness of light, air and water, of vegetation and fruit, of beast, bird and fishes, of metals and minerals. The lords who first sold the land had no right to do so, and therefore the lords who bought the land are not the owners thereof. That which a man has no right to sell cannot become the property of the man who buys it.

My apostolic succession from the Nicolson Vikings a millennium ago means nothing. The idea of ownership is itself illegitimate. MacCallum went on:

Lordism impoverishes the land. The wealth that is on sea and land, instead of being used in rearing the families of those who earn it, is spent in providing luxuries for idle lords. The destitution and the plague which follow in the wake of this usurper lift up their voices against it and condemn it. Lordism devastates the land. On the face of the deserted villages, once the happy homes of the free and the brave, now lying in silent desolation, we read: ‘The scourge of lordism has passed over us.’ I never heard of any creature having a swallowing capacity equal to that of lordism. The cattle and the ears of corn which Pharaoh saw in his dream come nearest to it.

There are many ruins and signs of abandonment on the Shiants and in Pairc, the big block of Lewis nearest to the islands, and that emptiness now is a symptom of the very landlordism of which I am the current beneficiary.

Under cross-examination from the Commission, MacCallum was taken apart. He clearly knew very little indeed about the issue over which his pulpit language had taken such magnificent flight. He had no idea of the acreage of his parish, the number of its inhabitants, the amount of fertile arable ground available to them or the productivity of the lands which he claimed they were denied. He was humiliated by the lawyers. But his words, which I first read twenty years ago in the enormous volume the Commission produced, continue to resonate with me. Perhaps what MacCallum has to say is true of all property, but the outlines are especially clear in this stark and naked landscape. My claim on the Shiants, not to put it too finely, is dependent on a succession of acts of violence, quite literally of murder, rape and expulsion. Money may have passed hands recently – my father paid £1400, Macdonald £1500, Compton Mackenzie £500 – but what the Rev. MacCallum said is true: ‘The lords who first sold the land had no right to do so, and therefore the lords who bought the land are not the owners thereof.’

My islands are not a place from which to exclude others. I have derived more richness from the Shiants than from anywhere else on earth. I have felt utterly sustained for years at a time by this wild and magnificent place. Is it for me, given this, to shut anyone else out? There are several good landlords on Lewis and Harris, who allow free, universal and weekly access on a Saturday to their salmon rivers; who encourage those who might want to poach the deer to come and shoot the hinds, again for free, in the season. These are recent developments and not all Lewis landlords have subscribed to them. There are one or two who still operate estate policies of rigid and at times harsh exclusivity, who do their best to prevent people walking on their hill, at least during the stalking season, who send out their gamekeepers and water bailiffs to search through the fishing boats in the coastal townships, looking for the nets used by salmon poachers, who have even sent helicopters out to look for nets in the sea, who in the last few years have attempted to have a stretch of public road privatised. There are some estate owners, in other words, who continue to behave as if their ownership of these pleasure zones bears few or even no responsibilities to neighbouring communities.

That, I think, is wrong and this book is in part a response to it. I may be in possession of the deeds of the Shiants, I may love them more than anywhere else on earth, but I do not feel that I have anything resembling an exclusive right to them, or that any landlord could. For all MacCallum’s afflatus – you can see his face reddening as he makes his statement, his rhetoric inflating and wobbling like the proboscis of an elephant seal in front of the Commissioners, and then its collapse as their scepticism exacts its price, his deflation afterwards, his running over it in his mind back at the manse: the passages where it had sounded good; those where, as even he suspected, it hadn’t – despite all of that, he was right about this. Land – particularly land that is out on the edge of things, and particularly land that is a rich concentration of the marvels of the natural world – is to be shared. This book is an attempt to share the Shiants.

They are not really a lonely place. That is a modern illusion. For the Shiants, the question of solitude figures only twice: once in the flowering of Columban monasticism between the seventh and tenth centuries, and once in the twentieth century. For most of their history, the Shiants were not, like some piece of Wagnerian stage scenery, lumps of rock in a hostile sea, beside which the solitary hero could exquisitely expire. They were profoundly related to the world in which they were set. Until 1901 they were almost continuously inhabited, perhaps for five thousand years. Our modern view of such places as orphans or widows, drenched in a kind of Dickensian poignancy of abandonment, is, on the whole, wrong. The Shiants are rich: in the kind of island beauty to which, it is clear, men have been drawn over many thousands of years; in soils and natural fertility; in the seas around them thick with plankton, and with the layers of predatory fish and sea birds stacked four or five tiers above that. These islands in their season are the hub for millions of bird and animal lives, as dynamic as any trading floor, a theatre of competition and enrichment. They are the centre of their own universe, the organising node in a web of connections, both human and natural, which extends first to the surrounding seas, then to the shores on all sides and beyond that, along the seaways that stretch for thousands of miles along the margins of the Atlantic and on into the heartlands of Europe.

For all the illusion of remoteness, the Shiants have never been parochial. They are part of the whole world and are a profoundly human landscape, the subject of stories, songs and poems. They have been the scene of attempted murder, witchcraft and terrible accidents. They have witnessed all kinds of happiness and cruelty. They have known great riches and devastating poverty. They can be as sweet as Eden and as malevolent as Hell. They can envelop you and reject you, seduce you into thinking nowhere on earth is as perfect and then make you long to be anywhere but this. I have never known a place where life is so thick, experience so immediate or the barriers between self and the world so tissue-thin. I love the Shiants for all their ragged, harsh and delicate glory and this book is a love letter to them.

2

EARLY APRIL AND A COLD WIND was cutting up from the south-west. Freyja was anchored in the little rocky inlet at the head of Flodabay on the east coast of Harris. A seal watched from the dark water. Acid streams were draining off the moorland into the sea. The boat swung a little and the reflected sun glinted up at the strakes of her bilges. I was shivering, not because of the cold, but because I was frightened at the idea of sailing out alone in this small boat to the Shiants. The halyard was slapping against the mast and the tiny waves clucked as they were caught against the underside of the hull. The shores of Flodabay were sallow and tussocky with the dead winter grasses and the boat was washed in late-winter sun. Freyja is sixteen feet from stem to stern and looks from the shore as slight as a balsawood toy. She and the Minch are not to the same scale.

It was the first time I was going to sail to the Shiants on my own. Always before, I had allowed myself to be carried out by fishermen from Scalpay or boatmen from Lewis, travelling as I now see it like a man in a sedan chair, gracefully picked up, carefully taken over and gently set down. That could never be enough. That was not being engaged with the place. An island can only be known and understood if the sea around it is known and understood.

Six months previously, I had read a history of the birlinn, the sailing galley descended from Viking boats that was used in these waters by the highland chiefs, at least until the seventeenth century. They raided and traded with them. Their lives were as much bound up with them as with any land-based habitation. The book described the carving of a birlinn surviving on the tomb of Alasdair Crotach, Hunchback Alasdair, the Macleod chieftain in Harris in the mid-sixteenth century. He was a violent man, the mass murderer of a cave-full of Macdonalds on Eigg, men, women and children, three hundred and ninety-five of whom he suffocated with the smoke of a fire lit at its narrow mouth.

This killer’s birlinn is an image of extraordinary beauty.

The form and curve of each strake, the fixings of the rudder, even the lay of the rope in the rigging: everything is carved with exactness, clarity and what can only be called love. Around it are the relative crudities of angels, apostles and biblical stories. Their forms never escaped the stone but the carved ship shows the panels of cloth in the bellied-out sail. It even shows the way a sail can be creased against a forestay that is faintly visible through it. Above all, though, it lovingly described the form of the hull, the depth of its keel and the fullness of the bilges. All of this was carved in millimetre detail, testament of something that mattered. The birlinn was shown at full stretch and fully rigged, but out of the water, so that the swept beauty of the hull could be seen. Only a shipwright or a sailor could have carved such a thing: it is the mental, not the actual image of a ship at sea, a depiction of what you can imagine of a boat at its most perfect moment, made by a man who knew it. The author of the birlinn history had set a Gaelic proverb at the head of his central chapter:

‘S beag ‘tha fios aig fear a bhaile,Cia’mar ‘tha fear na mara beò.

The landlubber [literally the man of the village] has no idea

How the sailor [the man of the sea] exists.

That was the gap I wanted to cross; to acquire the habits of mind which the carver of the birlinn had so easily conveyed. I rang the author, John MacAulay. He lived in Flodabay in South Harris. Did he know of anyone who might be able to build me a boat that would take on something of that Norse tradition? That I could sail single-handed? Which would be safe and strong enough to survive in the Minch, even on a bad day, and which might be hauled up a beach, at least with the help of a winch?

‘Ah yes,’ John said, a light, slight voice. Definite, polite, courteous, withdrawn, sharp, sprung.

‘In Harris, would that be?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I think it would.’

Wonderful news. And who was the shipwright?

‘Well, I think you are speaking to him now.’

John MacAulay was not only a historian of the Viking inheritance, but a boat builder of thirty-five years’ experience. He had made and repaired fishing boats in the Shetland island of Unst, and at Oban and Kyle. He had been a fisherman and was an experienced yacht sailor. He was one of the leading experts on both the history of the sea kayak and the traditional working boats of the Hebrides. He was an elder of his church in Leverburgh and author of a book on the church at Rodel in which the birlinn carving was to be found. For two months or so John and I corresponded by letter and occasionally by phone. I said I thought I could do what I needed to do with a twelve-foot boat. He said it would have to be at least sixteen foot. ‘I’m not sending you out there in something twelve foot long.’ I wanted something ‘double-ended’, coming to a point at bow and stern. John said, ‘That would be a waste of wood. You’ll want a transom on it.’ A sixteen-footer with a transom – the stern cut off square – was the equivalent of a twenty-footer that came to a point at the stern. Timber in the treeless Hebrides was always at a premium. ‘It would be a waste of wood. And time. And money,’ he said.

He posted me drawings of the boat he proposed. Unpractised at reading such things, and unable to guess performance or quality from buttock lines or the sheer of the gunwale, I took him at his word. I had yet to meet him but even at a distance he exuded an authority and conviction which it was not easy to deny. I would turn repeatedly to a passage in his book about the birlinn:

A close relationship, like a spiritual bonding, develops between the shipwright and the finished vessel, which continues throughout its entire material life. It has been known for certain boatbuilders to refuse to build for a particular client, if they did not feel an affinity towards one another. A reputable shipwright might not want to see some work of devotion fall into the wrong hands, and would rather find some obscure reason for refusing to build, than later be in the position of accusing an untrustworthy client of incompetence …

Austerity lay like an acid on the page. The Nicolsons might claim to be descended from the ancient chiefs of Lewis. Their birlinn might have been run down by the Macleods in the Minch, somewhere off the Shiants. Norse blood might have been running in me, but it was scarcely the purest of streams. John MacAulay, though, was the real thing. ‘MacAulay,’ he said to me one day, ‘is only the Gaelic for Olafson.’ The world of the sagas, a thousand years away, came reeking down the telephone.

The severity was a guarantee of his seriousness. I met him for the first time when the boat was almost finished. His workshop is a Nissen hut on the shores of Flodabay. A curling strip of tarmac makes its tortuous way across rocks and around inlets down to the settlement. Nowhere in the British Isles that has been long inhabited can be bleaker than this. The ice-scraped gneiss shelters little more than dark peat hollows and sour grass. The houses of the people who live here are scattered along the road. There is no visible sign of community. It looks like a barren world.

That is certainly how outsiders have always seen such places: as an environment and a people in need of improvement and enrichment, a place of material poverty and actual sterility. But come a little closer and the picture turns on its head. A richness flowers among the rocks. John met me in front of the boat he had made. He stood four square, legs apart and shoulders back, resting a hand on the gunwale. His long, grey hair was brushed back from his temples. He wore a small grey moustache and looked me straight in the eye: a straight, calm, evaluating look. ‘Are you up to the boat I have made?’ it said. Could the shipwright trust the client? But instead, he said, ‘Welcome, welcome.’

We went over it together for two hours, inch by inch. Although I had paid for it, and I was to use it, I was to trust my life to it, there was no doubt whose boat this was. John was describing his world. The boat to my eye was extraordinarily deep and wide for its length: sixteen feet long but six feet, two inches in the beam, and drawing at least two feet below the water line at the stern. ‘Take me through it,’ I said. Little spits of rain were coming in through the open doors of the workshop. ‘This boat is for the Minch,’ he said. ‘She is not off the shelf. She knows the conditions in which she’ll have to work. And she’s within your capabilities for handling. Twelve feet would be too small and anything bigger would be too big for you.’

John enlarged on the difference between this and ‘most boats’. ‘Most boats are a tub’ – he outlined the body of a pig in the air – ‘and a keel. A tub for buoyancy, a keel for lateral stability. Easy to make, cheap to build. This boat is different. It’s the hull planking itself which makes the keel. It is a highly complex and integrated form, and that integral keel running the whole length of the boat gives you directional stability as well as lateral stability.’ The form he was describing clearly derived from the deep-draughted birlinn. There was ‘more boat in the water’ built like this. You might see her afloat and think, just from the shore, that she was a slip of a thing. She wouldn’t show a great deal. The meat of the boat was unseen, in the water, and it was that which made her a good sea boat and a good sailing boat. She had a better grip in the water that way and you wouldn’t get anything like the rolling effect you would with ‘most boats’.

Everything was precision here. The language John was using was scientific in its exactness. The saws, drawknives, hand-drills, chisels, disc-grinders and hammers were hung cleanly and neatly, ranged by size, along the corrugated metal walls of the workshop. A mallet and a measuring tape lay on the work bench. Timber was stacked on shelving in the roof and one of John’s padded checked shirts hung from the end of the baulks. The wind coming in from the large open garage doors was the only thing unregulated here. ‘Where did you learn to be so neat, John?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t bear untidiness of any kind,’ he said.

I felt a little fat in his presence, mentally fat, from the world beyond here, the world of cheap options and short cuts, the world of ‘most boats’, where the rigour of this man and his workshop was not applied. I slowly came to understand something: this was not a very large dinghy. It was a very small ship. This was the birlinn translated for me. All the principles of sea-kindliness, of robustness of construction and yet lightness of form, of a craft designed to protect its crew and save their lives, miraculously transmitted to this man and his meticulous workshop, had been poured into the boat which he would allow me to call mine. John himself, and the boat he had made, were a transmission from the world of the Shiants’ past.

But there was more to it. ‘The entry is fine’ – it comes to a sharp and narrow point at the bow – ‘which makes her easy to row. And the underwater lines are clean: a clean fine exit.’ Underwater, the stern sweeps to as narrow and subtle a point as the bow. Seen from astern, the boat’s form is a wineglass. I – the crew – would inhabit the bowl, but the sea would come into contact only with the stem of the glass. As far as the sea knew, the boat gradually slipped away to nothing. Smooth, laminar flow along the hull would allow her to slide along, no eddies, no drag. Only ‘amidships’ – John’s word, all the implications of this tradition buried in it – does she fill out. But again the middle path must be chosen. She is not so fine that she will roll too quickly, but not so full that the drag is too great. The mast and yardarm, cut and planed from lengths of Scottish larch, the oars (larch) and rudder (oak, bound and tipped with galvanised iron) had all been made by John without compromise or trimming. Everything was as full and robust as it needed to be, but not more than that. This was no butcher of a thing. It had a slightness for all its strength. He had forged the iron for the mooring rings, the eyebolts and hooks for the halyard, the upright pins for the rowlocks and the gudgeons and pintles for the rudder. Everything was fully itself, designed not only for appearance but to last and to work in difficult and harsh conditions. Nothing was too heavy or too massive. Accommodation was all.

‘A boat for the Shiants then?’ I said. John nodded silently. ‘I think she’s beautiful,’ I said. He said nothing, but shrugged.

‘How long will she last?’ I asked him.

‘It’ll last longer than you,’ he said, and then turning away, ‘There are boats at Geocrab, the next bay up, that are more than a hundred years old and they’re still sailing.’

‘And do you think I’ll make a good sailor of her?’

‘If you had another life,’ John said.

‘Ah yes,’ I said, reeling a little, ‘I suppose one needs to know these things instinctively.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You need to be entirely conscious of what you are doing and why you are doing it.’

Sharp, educative, exact: the mind was as clear and as precisely arranged as the tools on the workshop wall. John uses words like ‘declivity’, ‘counteraction’, ‘silicon bronze’ as if they were chisels. One of his saws was stamped with its date of manufacture: 1948. It hung on its hook in as clean a condition as the day it was made.

It was not hostility. Far from it. He had done his extraordinary best for me. He had wetted the keel, as one should, with a glass of whisky when it was first laid. He had buried deep in the woodwork at the stern a threepenny bit from the year of his birth, 1941. He had given the stern his own signature, a little ‘tumblehome’, a slight curving of the hull in towards the gunwale ‘because it looked right.’ He had poured himself into this beautiful thing for me. But this is not a sentimental tradition. This was a man who had grown up with boats. He had been sailing his first small boat like this when he was a teenager. His grandfather and great-grandfather had big herring drifters, fifty, sixty, seventy feet long, built in Stornoway, with which they had followed the herring on its seasonal migration around Cape Wrath, through the Pentland Firth, down the east coast of Scotland and on as far as Yarmouth. The herring have long since gone now and that is not an option.

‘Is there much fishing in this loch now?’ a Lewis crofter was asked by one of the investigating Commissioners in 1894.

‘There used to be when herring came into it,’ he said. ‘There is very little fishing except when there are herring.’

‘Do you know the reason why the herring are not coming now?’

‘Providence,’ the crofter said, ‘the administration of the Creator.’

The herring are gone but John had been at sea all his life and he had completed a five-year apprenticeship in shipbuilding. Who was I to ask if I might be a sailor like them?

Looking back on it now, I can see that I was asking him for too much, too quickly. Again and again I asked him, ‘Show me how to do this, tell me about the tides, tell me how to cope when the wind and tide run into each other. Where are the places not to be? Take me out in the boat and show me how to do it.’ And again and again, with the mixture of sharpness and distance, he said no.

I was up for a week early in the year with a friend of mine, a writer, Charlie Boxer. Each of us was as green as the other, each as hurried and muddled in our dealing with the rig or our attempts to tack. He left us to it. Day after day, Charlie and I hacked along the Harris shore, seeing how close we could bring her to the wind, frightening ourselves in the tide rip off Stocanish, suddenly finding the boat going backwards in the tide while sailing at full speed with the wind, and once, like tourists, landing in the little loch at Scadabay to buy some tweed.

John came out with us once, a gentle afternoon in Flodabay, and the boat flew under his hands. Niftily, he threaded her through a maze of unseen rocks out to the headland on which a Norse seamark stood and then back to the jetty. He stood at the stern with the tiller between his knees, the nonchalant man against the sky behind him. He showed me, in other words, the condition I hoped to reach. It was not his business to provide any waymarks towards it.

And for all this I am grateful. I loved the boat. I felt that in the boat, and in this teaching by not teaching, I was learning more about the world of the islands than I had ever grasped. Here with John MacAulay I was seeing beyond their holiday face. The tradition in which he believed was too valuable to be tarted about.

When on that April morning, I finally left Flodabay in the boat, John helped me load her up with all my odds and ends in waterproof bags. It was, or so I felt anyway, an emotional moment. The tide that would carry me north would only start to run in the early afternoon and so most of the morning I was getting things ready. A seal dawdled in the weedy shadows. The oystercatchers peeped from one rock to the next. I had the mast up and the sail unfurled. Already there was some wear on the boat where Charlie and I had sailed her up and down the coast of Harris, the sheer presence of a friend in the boat giving me the confidence to do things I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on my own. The cleats were now worn where the sheets had tightened against them. The knots in the oak thwarts had opened in a spell of dryish weather. I said goodbye to John, a hard handshake. He was off to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Clause 28, and all the larger questions of homosexuality which clustered around it, was the issue of the day. ‘Oh, you would be surprised. Even in the Church of Scotland there’s a big gay lobby,’ he said. He wasn’t in favour himself. I didn’t tell him that most of my family was gay, but I’m sure he guessed it anyway. I thanked him for everything he had done.

The inflatable dinghy in and deflated, the oars stowed, the charts in the stern sheets, the laminated folder of the pilot tucked in under the stern thwart, the compass, the VHF and GPS, the mobile phone and binoculars, the bread rolls I had bought outside Tarbert, the lump of cheese; my drysuit, life-jacket, harness, lifeline, the little knowledge I had acquired with Charlie of how the Minch might be, how it threatens you even on the gentlest of days: with all of this, and the trust in the boat, I was equipped. I raised the anchor, washed off the black mud that clung to it, stowed it away and hoisted the sail.

The wind, coming down off the hills in South Harris, snatching at the foot of the sail, pulled the bow around. The still bay water rippled against the strakes of the hull. The sunshine flicked up at me from each small wave. As the boat moved out towards the open sea, past Bogha Creag na Leum, the underwater rock which guards Flodabay against the unwary incomer, and as the surface of the water started to lift with the swelling of the Minch outside, there on the headland by the Norse seamark, a tall, lichened stone pillar, stood a man. He was waving to me. I couldn’t see for a moment who it was. I waved back, and then I realised: it was John MacAulay. He must have run half a mile to get there in time. He had made no mention of it, but this was his farewell, the shipwright saying goodbye to his boat. As the sea began to take up its longer, bigger rhythm, and the stem bit and rose in the swells, with the bow wave running and rippling the length of the hull beside me, and the wake starting to gurgle behind, I waved back to him.

‘Good luck!’ he shouted.

‘Thank you!’ I shouted back, ‘Thank you, thank you!’

The air has closed in and the north is now a featureless absence. Between me and the mist-wall, a gannet cruises above the Minch. It must be in from St Kilda, sixty miles away to the west, low over the water, quartering it, looking for the flash of silver there, cutting sickle curves across the grain of the swell. It is a frightening sea. I see a big tanker coming south down the Minch. The spray bursts around its bow as it slaps into each of the swells. No contact with its crew or master, but I feel them looking at me from the bridge and wondering what that tiny boat must be about. Not that the swells are particularly big; they lift Freyja five or six feet in a long, rolling motion. It is just that the boat seems small, the sea wide and the land in all directions a long way off. Like a climber on his ledge, I have to suppress the awareness of all that room beneath me. Concentrate on the boat. Look to the sail. Check you are on course. Do not consider the hugeness of the sea.

The muscles across my chest have tightened and my whole body is tensed, waiting for some relief. I am not at home here. I don’t have the sailor’s ease. I look at each coming sea as a possible enemy. The sea surface is streaked white as if the fat in meat has been dragged downwind. Why did I think this would be a thing to do, to push myself out here on a slightly difficult day, with the wind rising and the passage untried? It was not wise, but I am committed now. It would be just as bad turning back as going on. The sea extends like a hostile crowd around me. I want to arrive. I want to be out of uncertainty. At least on the island, however much the sea might batter it, there is no fear of the ground beneath your feet breaking or of it somehow abandoning you. An island is loyal in the way that a boat can never be. A boat can go wrong, the gear can fail. The sheer solid stillness of the islands is not like that. An island is a presence, not a motion, and there is faithfulness in rocks.

I look for the Shiants but they have yet to appear. I am shut in the world of the boat and the compass. At sea, something sixteen feet long does not feel large.

I wanted to call her Maighdean nan Eileanan Mora, the Gaelic for ‘Shiant Girl’ until John MacAulay pointed out that saying that to the Coastguard over the VHF was not going to sound quite right. Besides, the name wouldn’t fit on the boat. So I have called her Freyja, after the Norse goddess of love and fertility, who could turn herself into a falcon and fly for a day and a night over the sea; who could shepherd the fish into the nets of fishermen; who could happily sleep with an entire family of elves, each one of which would present her with a link in an amber necklace after the night she had given them. One shape Freyja would never adopt was the chaste and abstinent virgin. She was always fully engaged with life, ripe in body and desire.

I love Freyja’s beautiful fatness around her middle. (I had said this to John. ‘Not fat,’ he said. ‘Full.’) She is uncompromisingly robust and strongly nailed for all the travails she will have to go through; nothing fey but nothing brutish. The Norse used to have both their houses and their graves made in the shape of boats, smoothly narrowing to the ends. It is the most accommodating form man has ever devised. I focus on that, on the coherence of what John has made compared with all the incipient anarchy of the sea.

A gannet suddenly slaps into the sea beside me. No warning. I start at it and remember this, the story of one of the stewards of St Kilda. At some time in the seventeenth century, (no date, because dates are rarely certain here), the steward, sailing out from Harris to his island responsibilities forty miles away across the Atlantic, found his boat passing through a shoal of herring so thick that the bodies of the fish lay like a pavement on the surface of the water. There was a silver skin to the sea and any man could have walked across it. A south wind was blowing and the boat was skimming through the bodies of the herring as if skating across them. All around them the gannets were diving, again and again, no hesitation necessary, no accuracy needed. It was the atmosphere of a tobogganing party. If the gannets had been children they would have been shrieking at the pleasure. The steward and his companions were gliding to St Kilda as if to Heaven.

A gannet, mistaking his moment, plunging for fish but ignoring the people, dived for his prey but missed his mark, his narrowed, darting body slicing down past mast, sail and shrouds, past the crew at the sheets, into the body of the open boat where its beak and head were impaled in the bottom strakes of the hull. The bird was dead on impact. Its enormous wings stretched across the frames and thwarts of the boat almost from one gunwale to another. Its perfect white body, six feet across from black wing-tip to black wing-tip, and a yard long, took up as much room as a man. The bubble of perfection had been pierced. The plank was splintered through. Twenty miles of the Atlantic separated the steward and his party from Harris and twenty from St Kilda. Could they mend the punctured hull? Would they drown here? Was water coming in faster than they could keep it out? Searching for the damage down in the bilges, the steward and his crew, scrabbling the ropes and creels out of the way, looked for signs of water bubbling in. There was none. Miraculously, the bilges were dry. The gannet’s head had plugged the hole its dive had made and its body was left there for the rest of the voyage, four hours to the bay on Hirta, with the enormous corpse beside them performing its role as feathered bung.

I was first told that story when I was a ten-year-old boy. I stood up with shock as the crisis hit and, of course, I have never forgotten it. I have learned since how prone to accident the gannet is. Every year in each of the great rocky gannetries around the Scottish coast, on Ailsa Craig and Bass Rock, in the stupendous avian city of St Kilda, hundred of gannets crash on arrival, breaking a wing or a neck, either dying then or over many weeks as their thick reservoirs of subcutaneous fat slowly wither in the breast, a pitiable death. Evolution does not create the perfect creature, only the creature that is perfect enough.

It is the one bird I wish would come to live on the Shiants. For a few years in the 1980s, the islands were the smallest gannetry in the world. Like a corporal among dukes, the Shiants made their glorious appearance in the ranks of the great: starting with St Kilda 100,100 gannets and Grassholm 60,000, the list ends with:

Shiants: 1.

He was to be seen for a few years perched solemnly on one of the north-facing rock buttresses of the islands, looking out woefully to the Lewis shore, hoping, I always imagined, that a lovely gannet girl might think this a suitable place to make her life. Around him, the guillemots stared and squabbled. Above them, the fulmars spat and cackled. No other gannet came to join him and by 1987, the Shiants, still listed in the wildly prestigious catalogue of British gannetries, now had an even more woeful entry:

Shiants: o

The mind is distracted for a moment and then returns to the foolishness of what you have done. It was not exactly the vision of the drowning man but I found myself thinking of the people I love and have loved. Do men drown regretting what they have done with their lives, all the stupidities and meannesses, the self-delusions and deceits? I was driving blind and it was not comfortable. I had been in the boat nearly three hours and even through all the layers of clothes I was getting cold. I had a hand-held GPS with me and it put my position at just about six degrees, twenty-seven minutes west, fifty-seven degrees, fifty-four minutes north. I should have been almost on the islands now but I could not see into the mist-bank to the north and east of me. I needed to come round to the north side of the Shiants to bring the boat into the bay between them, protected there from the southwesterlies. I had to overrun them and then turn for shelter. I hadn’t been here for a year and by now I was in a state of high anxiety.

This approach is larded with danger. Lying off the islands to the west is a chain of rocks and small steeply banked islets called the Galtachan or Galtas. No one knows what their name means but it may perhaps come from the Old Norse word, Gaflt, meaning the gable-end of a house. That, at least, is John MacAulay’s suggestion. It is a derivation which even now makes me smile. So much for these savage seas! So much for the tides that rip through the narrow channels between the Galtas! When the Ordnance Survey first came here on 27 October 1851, the surveyor wrote a hurried and unpunctuated description in his notebook:

Received Name: Galltachan

Object: Islands

Description: This is a range of Several [?] High and Low water Rocks extending from east to west three of which has a little of their top covered with rough pasture and surrounded by small but steep rocky Cliffs. there is a channel between each and every one of the High Water Rocks. at a distance they appear low but are no way inviting as at all times especially at Spring tides there is a rapid current about them the tide flows exceedingly strong flowing the same as a large River.

That is the modern voice; the survey officer, Thomas O’Farrell, measuring, estimating, a little fearful, unable to disassociate his description of the place from his apprehension over it. It could easily have been my voice, frightened now of being swept by the tide into the channels between the Galtas through which the deep-drawing Freyja might not have passed. Perhaps John MacAulay would have felt relaxed here, but neither I nor O’Farrell were Vikings. Would either of us so calmly have named these rocks ‘the gable-ends’? Would we have wanted to or been able to domesticate them so casually? The Gables? It is a joke, a place with a double garage and stuck-on timbers outside Beaconsfield. To know them as the Gables is evidence of an attitude of heroic calm; a sudden jump into the Viking world. To call them that is as cool as the gannet, as easy in the sea as by the hearth, almost literally at home there. Or maybe something else: the roofs of buried houses, mansions drowning in the Minch.

Freyja does at least belong to that world. I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway. Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive. Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch direct to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris. Although Freyja’s own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as ‘Stockholm tar’: a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages. Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported from Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast. In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had the tenancy of the islands. They

launched forth in this gentleman’s boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea. I nearly called Freyja ‘Fulmar’ because of that phrase of Teignmouth’s. No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds. It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after. But Freyja’s fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking. The words used here for boats and the sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people’s lips for a millennium. If I say, in Gaelic, ‘windward of the sunken rock’, ‘the seaweed in the narrow creek’, ‘fasten the buoy’, ‘steer with the helm towards the shingle beach’, ‘prop the boat on an even keel’, ‘put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket’, ‘use the oar as a roller to launch the boat’, ‘put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern’, ‘set the sea chest on the frames amidships’, ‘the tide is running around the skerry’, ‘the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf’, ‘haul in the sheet’, ‘tighten the back stay’, ‘use the oar as a steerboard’, or say of a man, ‘that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat’, every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic. It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged. Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in Norse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag now is made with sugar and cream. With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used. A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse. The smock worn by fishermen is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse. Sgaireag is the Gaelic for ‘seaman’, skari the Norse word. And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation. The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for a hammock. Norse for ‘strong’ becomes Gaelic for ‘fat’. The Norse word for rough ground becomes ‘peat moss’ in Gaelic. A hook or a barb turns into an antler. To creep – that mobile, subtle movement – translates into Gaelic as ‘to crouch’: more still, more rooted to the place. A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide. ‘To drip’ becomes ‘to melt’. A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago. There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion. Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning ‘a trap’), nor for ‘strife’, nor ‘a faint resemblance’ – the word it took was svip, the Norse for ‘glimpse’. The Gaelic for ‘lullaby’ is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning ‘allurement’, ‘seduction’.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment. Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale. Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer – all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships. Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

I was steering west of the Galtas but I had to make sure it was a long way west. The water had turned, as it does sometimes with the tide, into strange, long slicks, each slab of water as smooth as a hank of brushed hair. It is a horrible sensation in the mist, a strangeness at sea, when all you want is normality and predictability. Was this the effect of a rock ahead of me which I couldn’t see? About five hundred yards off the westernmost Galta was the most dangerous rock in the Shiants: Damhag, perhaps meaning ‘ox-rock’ in Gaelic (no one knows why) or more likely ‘a rock awash’. It is pronounced ‘Davag’. O’Farrell had heard of its terrors:

Received name: Damhag

Object: Rock

Description: This is a Small low water Rock seen only at Spring tides which makes it very dangerous to mariners, lying about 15 Chains west a Group of high and low water ones, the tide flows so Strong and rapid here that unless Mariners were aware of its Situation it would often become fatal. there has been not long ago a large vessel wrecked on it the vessel and crew were all lost. at neap tides if the wind is high there is always Breakers seen on it.

That ship was in fact the Norwegian schooner, Zarna, of Christiansund, which was wrecked here on 13 February 1847, en route to Norway from Liverpool with a cargo of salt.

None of this is pleasant in a small boat in a rising sea. If the GPS could be relied on, I was well clear but I didn’t want to overrun too far. The long slicks of water were giving way to a broken, pitted surface like the skin of an orange.

North-west of the islands is the Sound of Shiant, separating them from the bulk of Lewis five or so miles to the west. The Sound is a place of deep discomfort. I have never been in there in a small boat and the fishermen in Scalpay have warned me away from it. Donald MacSween (another Viking name, Sveinson), whom I have known since I was a boy, and who, for a few years after his cousin Hugh MacSween gave up, was the tenant of the Shiants, told me only that I had to respect the Minch. ‘Pick your day and pick where you go and you will be all right.’ After supper in Rosebank, his house in Scalpay, in the sitting room, with the coal fire burbling beside us and Rachel, his wife, looking through the packets of seeds she was to plant that spring, from time to time telling me that I was a disgrace, ‘walking around the way you do with holes in your socks the like of which I have never seen in my life’, Donald and I sat over a chart together.

He is a strict churchman, a man of immense propriety and overwhelming charm. ‘What do you talk about all the time on the radio to each other when you are out at sea?’ I asked him once. Channel 6 on the VHF is solid with Gaelic chat, day and night, between the fishermen. ‘Local talent,’ he said, with a face like a gravestone. Rachel told me that in three decades of marriage she has never once seen him angry. ‘He must be a saint then,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s a saint to me.’

Donald knows all there is to know about the Minch. Without a second thought I would trust my life to him. He has fished it since he was a boy and he knows every one of its ‘dirty corners’. ‘Oh yes,’ Mary Ann Matheson, the mother of John Murdo, the present shepherd on the Shiants, said to me once, ‘you need to listen to Donald. He knows all the crooks and crannies of the wind.’

With his glasses on and his enormous, scarred hands feeling their way across the figures and the submarine contours, he went through the chart with me. Off the mouths of Lochs Seaforth, Bhrollúm and Cleidh there are big riffles on the ebb as the lochs drain out. There is a bar across the mouths of each of them so that the draining water has to rise from something like sixty to twenty fathoms as it emerges. That does not make for an easy sea and in my boat I should avoid them.

But the real danger was in a triangle of sea between the Shiants, Rubha Bhrollúm, which is the nearest point of Pairc on Lewis, and the mouth of Loch Sealg, five miles or so to the north. I was not to enter it. The sea there was not, Donald said, ‘very pleasant’. Heavy, fast tides ebbing down from Cape Wrath or flooding up from the southern Hebrides are squeezed by the islands here into a narrower channel. At the same time, the water is forced to run over a knotted and fractured sea-bed.

A huge ridge of rock, three miles long and more than three hundred and fifty feet high, coming within seventy or eighty feet of the surface, stretches most of the way across the Sound, a sharp-edged submarine peninsula reaching out from the Shiants towards Rubh’ Uisenis on Lewis. It makes that short passage on which the Admiralty chart-markers print an innocuous-looking set of wrinkly lines, meaning ‘tidal overfalls’, the equivalent of a set of rapids in a river. But the river coming up to them is five miles wide and four hundred and fifty feet deep, that enormous mass of water running at the height of spring tides at almost three knots, the speed of a fast walk. Any idea of a river is of the wrong scale. This is the equivalent in tonnage and in volume of an entire range of hills on the move. At certain states of high wind against spring tide, the sea here can turn into a white and broken mass of water, a frothing muddle of energies stretching across the whole width of the Sound, a chaos in which there are not only steep-faced seas coming at you from all directions, but, terrifyingly, holes, pits in the surface of the sea, into which the boat can plunge nose-first and find it difficult to return.

The Sound of Shiant is also known as Sruth na Fear Gorm, the Stream of the Blue Men, or more exactly the Blue-Green Men. The adjective in Gaelic describes that dark half-colour which is the colour of deep sea water at the foot of a black cliff. These Blue-Green Men are strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who come aboard and sit alongside you in the sternsheets, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same metre and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew.

The Reverend John Gregorson Campbell, Minister of Tiree from 1861 to 1891, and a renowned collector of folklore in the Hebrides, claimed to have met a fisherman who had seen one. It was, Campbell reported, ‘a blue-coloured man, with a long, grey face and floating from the waist out of the water, following the boat in which he was for a long time, and was occasionally so near that the observer might have put his hand upon him.’

Something about the Blue Men has attracted one folklorist after another. Donald A Mackenzie, author of Scottish Folk Lore and Folk Life, published in 1936, even claimed to have preserved a fragment of verse dialogue between skipper and Blue Man tossing beside him in the billows. Both had, it seems, been studying the verses of Edward Lear and the rhythms of Coromandel and the Hills of the Chankly Bore were still ringing in their ears:

Blue Chief: Man of the black cap, what do you say

As your proud ship cleaves the brine?

Skipper: My speedy ship takes the shortest way

And I’ll follow line by line.

Blue Chief: My men are eager, my men are ready

To drag you below the waves.

Skipper: My ship is speedy, my ship is steady.

If it sank it would wreck your caves.

‘Never before,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘had the chief of the blue men been answered so aptly, so unanswerably. And so he and his kelpie brethren retired to their caverns beneath the waves of the Minch.’

Mackenzie went on to describe how ‘Once upon a time,’ – a giveaway phrase, if ever there was one, for non-first hand information – ‘a ship passing through the Stream of the Blue Men came upon a blue coloured man asleep on its waters. The sleeper for all his nimbleness was captured and taken aboard.’ The crew bound him hand and foot but were appalled to see two of his friends following. Mackenzie then reports the conversation between the pair of Blue Men: ‘One said to the other: “Duncan will be one man.” The other replied: “Farquhar will be two.”’

This was clearly a threat to the crew but luckily, before disaster could strike, the Blue Man they had captured ‘broke his ropes and over he went.’

Is there anything more serious one can say about this? TC Lethbridge, sailor, archaeologist, savant, Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge for much of the twentieth century, who believed that Druidism and Brahmanism were the same, had an intriguing theory about the Blue Men. In The Power of the Pendulum, his final, eccentric and free-spirited book, published in 1976, he touched briefly on the survival of beliefs such as these. Making connections which more strait-laced archaeologists are wary of, he identified the Blue Men with Manannan, the Celtic sea-god remembered in the place-name of Clackmannan, meaning ‘Manannan’s stone’, and Manannan with Poseidon. The seaways around the shores of Europe bring stories, and ways of looking at the world, as well as goods. He plunged on into dangerous territory. A ditty had been recorded in the early twentieth century that was still being said or muttered among the fishermen of Mallaig:

Ickle Ockle, Blue Bockle |  | Little youthful Blue God
Fishes in the Sea. | or | Of the fishes of the sea
If you’re looking for a lover |  | If you’re looking for devotion
Please choose me. |  | Please choose me.

It is a charm-cum-game-cum-riddle for Poseidon, of whom the Blue Men in the Minch were the last, rubbed-down remnants. ‘How would you describe a god of this kind?’ Lethbridge asked. ‘As a cloud of past memories, to some extent animated by the minds of those who retained it.’

John MacAulay as a fifteen-year-old boy forty-five years ago, spending a season ‘at the fishing’ on the Monachs, to the west of Uist, heard stories from fishermen who had been out in the Sound of Shiant. On a wild day, they had hauled something or other very strange from the sea. They had no idea what it was. Other creatures of the same sort seemed to be visible in the surf around them and they didn’t like it. Nothing is easier than being spooked at sea in a small boat, and the Sound of Shiant seemed to be turning into that horrible continuity of white and broken water. All sense of one’s own fragility; the thumping of the hull against each new wave, the distance from shore, one’s own pitiable progress to windward, the sheer size of the cold, hateful sea, the knowledge of all the others that have been drowned here before you: your throat constricts, you feel it in your chest and the stories start to turn real.

The fishermen, rather than carry their mysterious catch back home in triumph or as a curiosity, threw it back into the thrashing water among its companions, and it was lost to sight. Surely not a Blue-Green Man? John MacAulay guesses that it might have been a walrus, of which one or two occasionally wander south from their Arctic breeding grounds, appearing here as enormous mustachioed aliens to Hebridean eyes. Donald MacSween is scepticism itself: ‘How have you got on with your investigations into the mermaids?’ he asks from time to time.

I wasn’t interested now. I was straining for the sight either of a Galta, a blessed gable-end, or of Damhag in front of me. Some of the swells were just breaking under their own weight. Behind me, the little grinning teeth of the breaking seas were scattered across the whole visible width of the Minch. Downwind I couldn’t see them. If I looked ahead of me, it was like a crowd from behind, a sea of wind-coiffed heads. The slick black-grey backs of the waves moved on in front of me. Scarcely any whiteness was apparent. It was like two different seas.

The wind was coming and going around me. I called the Coastguard on the VHF, Channel 16. ‘Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard, this is Freyja, Freyja, Freyja.’ My eyes were on the sea ahead for the white on Damhag, the appearance of a Galta, the radio in its waterproof case in one hand, the tiller in the other communicating the quiver of the sea to my hand. Out of the radio a voice:

‘Freyja, Freyja, Freyja, this is Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard.’ A young woman in a calm, warm office twenty miles away, grey carpet on the floor, magnetic charts of the Sea Area Hebrides covering half of one wall, men and women in their blue uniforms at the desks, coffee there on plastic coasters, a normal call on a normal day.

She gave me the forecast but we exchanged no names. She was the Coastguard, I was Freyja. She was providing a service. I was on my own. The weather would stay as steady as it was for the next twenty-four hours, south, southwesterly, four to five, with the wind dropping away after that. There would be something like calm for a day or two.

I was cold. I reached down into the bag at my feet for my own coffee in the thermos. My hands fumbled with it. Sandwiches in the plastic bag. I checked my position on the GPS again. It all feels a little absurd, to think that I might ever reach the condition in which it would be natural to call those rocks ‘The Gables’. I am in my own world of bags from the Stornoway Co-op, the VHF in its ‘Aquapac’, the GPS locating me through the American military satellites orbiting above. They tell me that I have passed Damhag and the Galtas. It is time to turn east.

It’s a relief. I must be nearly there. Simply taking the stern of the boat through the wind and gybing, moving the sail over to the other side, it feels better. That is a sign of arrival, or at least of near-arrival. I have got that amount of sea under my belt. All that strange width of sea has now, oddly, changed in my mind. Uncrossed, it felt terrifying. Having crossed it, I feel as if I could cross it any number of times. I sense John MacAulay at my shoulder. Is this all right John? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you’re not doing too badly.’

Now, though, I was moving into the shadow of the known, the sea around the Shiants. Because the Shiants are themselves such a disturbance to the flow of the tide, for others this would seem like the most hazardous and hostile section of the passage. But I’m familiar with the sea here. It is like knowing an old ill-tempered dog. I know how to get round him. Moving across the swell, a different pattern, Freyja was making a rolling barrel along the crests and then slewing into the troughs behind them. Looking up, back in the stern, with the boat underway, I saw that things would be all right. The sky was lifting. From a satellite, I would have seen the shifting of an eddy, the slight revolution of some huge cloud crozier turning on the scale of Europe, the planetary mixing of Arctic and tropical air. This was the southeastern limb of a giant depression rolling in out of the Atlantic and on to Scandinavia. It had blown me here. I felt a little sick but I could see where I was and it was where I had hoped to be. The seas breaking on Damhag were a mile to the south-east, that silent flinging of spray into the air above the rock, like a hand repeatedly flicking out its fingers, signalling ‘Keep away, keep away!’ I was well clear of it. The broken line of the Galtas extended for a mile beyond the rock, black and bitter, the knobbled spine of a half-submerged creature: one like an old woman with a bonnet, called Bodach, or Old Man; others blocky, fretted.

Beyond them, arrival, emergence, home. Coming out of the mist, draped with cloud ribbons like feather boas across their shoulders, were the islands, my islands, my destination. The Shiants are the familiar country, the place around whose shores I feel safe. Even in all its masculine severity, I know where the tide rips and bubbles, exactly where the rocks are, and the known, however harsh, is the safe and the good. Even though the sea now was more uncomfortable than anywhere on the journey, I started to feel easy. A small wave slopped aboard and I pumped it out. A shearwater cut past me and the birds were hanging around the Galtas like bees. But the relief, as ever, was ambivalent. It’s always like this. I never quite feel the comfort of arrival that I expect. It is enigmatic. This is the longed-for place, but it is so indifferent to my presence, so careless of my existence, that I might as well not have been here.

A remembered room is never as big as you think, but the Shiants always emerge much larger than I have remembered them. They are called na h-Eileanan Mora in Gaelic, which perhaps means ‘the Big Islands’, and here, now, they slowly billowed above me, a new world. They expand into reality, growing out of the mist, and their big, green, wrinkled forms drifted at me like half-inflated balloons. I let out the breath I had been holding in for hours. A home-coming to a place that provides no welcome. They come at you one by one. First Garbh Eilean, the Rough Island (garbh is the adjective you would use to describe someone who was strong, stocky, ‘a big lad’), the most masculine and the westernmost. Freyja pushed steadily eastwards, along its northern cliffs, a mile-long wall of black columned rock, slightly higher in the centre, dropping at each side, each of the columns eight or ten feet wide, bending slightly as they rise from the sea, like a stand of bamboos swayed in a breeze. The sea sucks and draws in the caves and hollows and the birds are spattered across them like paint flicked from a brush. Freyja keeps to her line without my hand on the tiller. In the lee of the cliffs, their ribbed surfaces are like the ripples of an enormous curtain, gathered in its folds; or a vast black shell.

A scallop boat skipper waves to me as my sail snaps from one side to another in the gusts off the islands. The Shiants are stretching their arms around me. Around the corner comes Eilean Mhuire, Mary Island, the sweetest, the softest, the lowest, the most feminine and the most fertile. It is early in the year and the grass has yet to grow. The islands’ skin is pale, a musty green. The sea is a little quieter here, protected by the islands from the swell. I am still a little dazed from the journey, as if I have emerged into the quiet from a room filled with noise. I slide along and remember the past.

At last, I turn into the bay which the three islands encircle. Eilean an Tighe, House Island appears, enclosing it to the south, the third of the three. Together they have always seemed to me like a family: Garbh the father, Mhuire the mother and this most domestic of the islands as their child, taking some of its character from each. The wind is less here but fluky. I let go of the tiller and the boat sails wherever it will as I tidy things away. I have crossed a sea which I have spent my life looking at: sixteen miles in three and a half hours, about four and a half miles an hour. I look back at it. There is no way I would set out on it now. Long, grey-faced waves come on at me from the south-west. For a moment I have a companion. A kittiwake, one of the smallest of the gulls, hangs buoyed above me. The way is still on the boat, making its easy last strides into the ring of islands. There is calm water in their shelter, and as if suspended above us the kittiwake comes to a point just beyond the stern, bobbing above me, curious, its arched wings like the curve of the sail, peering down from mast height into the boat, looking at me and all my possessions in their waterproof bags. Kittiwakes often hang after fishing boats, waiting for the offal as the fish are gutted. That is all it was, a hungry bird in pursuit of food, and it was only for a moment or two, but I took it as a sign of arrival.

The boat ran on into the bay. If the word ‘here’ has any meaning beyond simply the label of a place where you happen to be; if ‘here’ can be the name for the place to which you belong for more than just a moment, then this was my here. I let the anchor go and the chain ran out through the fairlead and down into the patch of sand, just off the Garbh Eilean screes where men have always anchored in a southwesterly. I unstepped the mast and folded the sail into its bag. I had arrived. I could hear the wind on the far side of the island beating without thought on the shore.

3

‘THE SEA WANTS TO BE VISITED’, a Gaelic proverb says and, as scarcely needs to be added, the host will murder its guests. Nothing can be understood about these islands, about the life that has been lived on them, and about the tensions under which people have existed here, without grasping that dual fact. The sea invites and the sea destroys. It is often said that the Hebrideans are not as natural seamen as the islanders in Orkney or Shetland, and that the northerners were fishermen who occasionally farmed and the Hebrideans farmers who occasionally fished. That isn’t entirely true, particularly in Lochs. In 1796, there were three hundred and sixty-six families. The ability of the ground itself to sustain the people was minimal. They were lucky if for every oat or grain of barley sown, they could harvest three or four.

Before the nineteenth-century Clearances, when the inhabitants of twenty-seven townships in Pairc were evicted, about three hundred of those Lochs families, distributed like limpets around the shore in their tiny hamlets, were dependent on fishing, mostly of cod and ling which were at their best between February and May. There were seventy fishing boats in Lochs, each with a crew of three or four. The Shiants would probably have had a single boat, or at most two, shared between the five families that lived here. The boats were, essentially, the same as my Freyja, although a little longer, twenty rather than sixteen feet, undecked, with six or eight oars, a heavy dipping lug rig and a hull made of pine (or larch for the better quality) on oak frames. The timber would have been imported, as it was for Freyja, from the mainland.

They can be horribly dangerous in a rising sea, when large volumes of water can land inboard without warning, and I know what would happen if a sea ever came into Freyja. Beside me in the stern I have a large bucket and I would start baling with that. I have watched myself in these situations: a kind of cold panic grips me, a terse rejection of terror. Of course it wouldn’t be enough. With the boat half full, Freyja would be riding lower than before. Almost certainly the next wave or the one after that would come in too. There would be no chance of keeping it out. The stern which John MacAulay had made for me, with that little sprung lift to its line, would not have the buoyancy. Within a minute or two the boat would be awash and there’s no baling then. That’s why the fishermen on Scalpay always ask me if I am going alone, why I am not taking anyone with me. Donald MacSween asks me every time: he smiles with the question, but not with his eyes. They say, ‘You don’t know what it will be like out there if something goes wrong. You would be safer with two.’ I know he thinks that, but he has never once said it.

I have seen one of these boats sunk before, in the warm, still conditions of a quiet bay in the Hebrides. It had been out of the water for a while, the wood had shrunk and when it was launched, the sea poured in like miniature Niagaras between the strakes on either side, rippling down step by step into a widening pool in the bilges. In half an hour she was down to her gunwales. I watched entranced as she went under. It was a blessing, not a catastrophe. I could feel the wood absorbing the water and it was like giving a thirsty animal a drink, a gulping at the longed-for element. The boat looked buried in the sea that morning. She no longer had an existence independent of the water, but sat there still and submerged as if in jelly, an embalming of her life, neither sinking nor floating but absorbed by the water from which she was usually so distinct.

That is a picture you see all around the Hebrides in the early spring, as men who have kept their boats ashore in the winter sink them for a week or so before the summer fishing. Each is tethered to its mooring in the loch like a cow in her paddock. She is happy there ingesting the goodness around her. The season of fatness is to hand and her belly is filling. It is an image of contentment but it is also a prefiguring of something worse: what happens to these small open boats when caught out in the wrong weather. They do not sink but they fill. The sea invades them. All weight in the boat must be thrown out if it is not to pull the hull down. I kept a knife beside me in the stern, ready to cut the rope which was holding down my belongings amidships so that once the hull filled I too could throw everything away. The sea, Donald MacSween told me, would soon turn the boat over and your only chance of survival was to hold onto that upturned hull. It is not easy. The little ledges formed by one strake overlapping the next do provide the thinnest of rock climbers’ footholds but the underwater profile is coated in the deliberately slimy Stockholm tar. As the weather worsens and the cold loosens your grip, the next big wave will wash you off into the sea. Then you are lost.

Records of boat losses are thin before 1800 but the nineteenth century in Lewis and Harris records again and again the loss of these boats and the drowning of their men. In February 1836, two boats from Point were caught out in a sudden gale. They were forced south before the wind, running for the Lochs coast at Cromore, just north of the Shiants. The crew of one boat survived. In the other, the four young men, inexperienced and perhaps underdressed, died of cold. Township after township lost their men. Year after year, boats went down from Barvas, Skigersta, in the district of Ness. In 1875 an oar was all that was found of a boat from Borve, coming ashore at Bragar. Two years later, a Bernera boat was lost with all its crew off the Flannans. Between 1862 and 1889, seventy fishermen from the district of Ness were drowned, in 1895, nineteen men from Back. Almost three hundred Lewis men were drowned in the second half of the nineteenth century, all of them within a few miles of their home shores, some of them watched by their families and friends as the small boats struggled to get home through the surf.

If the bodies came ashore, which they often didn’t, they, like the boats, were smashed into pieces or rotted beyond recognition. It was the pattern all down the western seaboard of the British Isles. Poor soils drive men to boats in which they drown.

At the Shiants themselves, in the spring of 1881 four young fishermen from the village of Lemreway in Lochs came out to the islands to catch a few puffins. None of them was more than twenty years old: Murdo Macmillan, Norman’s son; John Macinnes, Donald’s son; Angus Ferguson, Murdo’s son, and Donald Macdonald, Kenneth’s son. That’s how Dan Macleod, a retired merchant seaman, weaver, story-teller and the carrier of memories and traditions in Lemreway, described them to me. He tells the story in the way Hughie MacSween does, twisting his roll-up between his fingers, looking away to draw on the memory, looking at you to communicate it. Dan also gave me their addresses: the Macmillans lived at 1 Lemreway, the Fergusons at 3 Lemreway, the Macinneses at 5, the Macdonalds at 7. None of the boys was married. ‘They were young boys,’ Dan says. ‘And they wouldn’t be salting the puffins. They’d be giving them away.’

For several decades, probably since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Lemreway men had come out to the Shiants in May and June to catch the puffins. In the 1850s, Osgood Mackenzie, then still a boy, but in time the creator of the subtropical gardens on his inherited estate at Inverewe, near Gairloch, on the mainland, came out to the Shiants and witnessed the Lemreway men catching the puffins: ‘They brought back boatloads of them because they valued the feathers,’ he wrote in his autobiography.

They also enjoyed big pots of boiled puffins for their dinners as a welcome change from the usual fish diet. They told us how they slaughter the puffins. They choose a day when there is a strong breeze blowing against the steep braes where the puffin breed, and the lads then lie on their backs on these nearly perpendicular slopes holding the butt-ends of their fishing rods. These stiff rods would be about nine or ten feet long [and almost certainly at this time made of bamboo]. Holding them with both hands, they whack at the puffins as they fly past them quite low in their tens of thousands, and whether the puffin is killed outright or only stunned he rolls down the hill and tumbles on the shore or into the sea, where the rest of the crew are kept busily employed, gathering them into the boat.

It is possible to reconstruct something of the conditions in May 1881. The steep braes to which Mackenzie refers are on the north face of Garbh Eilean, a big, green, grassy bank, the grass itself thickly enriched by the generations of puffin droppings that have fallen on it. You cannot spend five minutes there without being spattered yourself. The puffin bank faces the small rocky inlet called simply Bagh, the Bay, and beyond it the Stream of the Blue Men and the square outline of Kebock Head in Lewis. A strong breeze blowing on to them, creating the conditions the fowlers preferred, would have been a northerly. That would also be the wind that would carry the boys easily down southwards from Lemreway to the Shiants. With an ebb tide under them, it would scarcely take more than an hour to run down the six miles or so.

You can imagine the dream of the day. The colours which drain out of the Hebrides in the winter, leaving the black rock and grey turf as a monochrome ghost of the summer life, have now begun to return. The lichen glows yellow on the rocks. The off-lying skerries are pink with the thrift in flower. Fat red and white campions make cushions in the nicks of the cliffs. The sea is silk, patterned in the Stream of the Blue Men with the twisted curls and table-top bubbles of the upwelling sea.

It would have been the same in the 1850s and the 1880s as it is today: that glowing light, the notched outline of the mainland to the east hazed by the rising sun, the hills of Skye still wrapped in the morning clouds, the long broken back of the Hebrides running down to south Harris, the Uists and to Barra, and the Shiants hanging in the middle distance, a secret world, asking to be visited.

The Lemreway boys in 1881 planned to stay overnight on the islands. There was a shepherd and his family living there at the time. Donald Campbell, better known as Domhnall nan Eilean, or Donald of the Islands, had come over from Molinginish, a small township on the coast of Harris near the mouth of Loch Seaforth, twenty years before. He had his wife and children with him and together they lived in a good house of two rooms on the island, which had previously been called Eilean na Cille, the Island of the Church, but which they called Eilean an Tighe, House Island, the name it has today.

Summer was the time for visiting. Winters for the Campbells would have been lonely, but come April and May, with the stilling of the sea, the network of connections that have always bound the summer Shiants to the neighbouring islands, would re-emerge. Campbell’s employer, the farmer and Stornoway merchant, Roderick Martin of Orinsay, would bring out to him the meal and other supplies he needed. The socks which the Campbell girls had knitted over the winter would be sold or even given to anyone visiting. Gentlemen in yachts might arrive to investigate the geology or the birds. There were plenty of diversions.

The fowlers, as a courtesy as much as anything else, would have taken their boat to the anchorage just in front of the shepherd’s house on the west side of Eilean an Tighe. Courtesy and hospitality remain the norm here. Even nowadays, when a stranger arrives and the shepherds happen to be there, the greetings are warm, welcoming and generous, far more than among English people in the same situation. ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo,’ I heard Donald ‘Nona’ Smith, one of the modern shepherds, say to a man landing on the beach here one day, a rising chorus of delighted welcome.

‘Do you know him well?’ I asked Nona later.

‘No, I’ve never met him before,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to be diplomatic.’ There is no sense of anyone’s isolation being invaded. Sociability has always included the Shiants. But it can only be presumed on to a certain extent. The Lemreway boys brought their own provisions with them, some oatmeal and perhaps some of the cod or ling they might have caught on the way down.

There is a patch of sandy grey mud on the sea-bed a hundred yards or so offshore in front of the house, and in a northerly it is protected from the worst of the sea. A cairn high on the hill may well be a mark of this anchorage. Its stones are hairy with a long-bearded lichen, and because lichen takes a long time to grow, that alone is a mark of its age. Although people are always ready to attribute seamarks in the Hebrides to the Norse, there is no real way of dating them. The boys would have dropped anchor, unstepped the mast, furled the sail and would have come ashore in their dinghy to the beach next to the Campbells’ house.

The time of birds is the time of abundance, the season of summer-time adventure but the expedition to the Shiants of the Lemreway boys ended in disaster. Their boat, ‘an Orkney-type boat, a double ender, a stout boat’, Dan Macleod calls it, eighteen feet in the keel, a little longer than Freyja, had been safe enough overnight, protected from the northerlies by the bulk of Garbh Eilean. It can be quite still in there even on a wild day. While you hear the groaning of the breakers on the other side a mile away, plunging their long tongues into the caves at the cliff foot and exploding inside them – a heavy, quarryman’s boom reverberating through the island, at your feet, in the lee of the vast, whale body of Garbh Eilean, the water laps on the rocks and the eiders paddle from one inlet to another as if asking for bread in St James’s Park.

The boys spent the night with the Campbells and were due to return home the following day – it was a Wednesday – but they never arrived. That evening, as Dan Macleod has written,

their families, neighbours and friends gathered around scattered vantage points anxiously scanning the surface of the water to see if they could detect any sign of their loved ones’ boat coming home. Alas, there was none and the young men’s fathers resolved to sail out to the Shiants at first light the following day.

The party of fathers arrived at the shepherd’s cottage, and Domhnall nan Eilean told them that the boys had stayed with him on the Tuesday night but when the wind changed direction on Wednesday morning, they had decided to move the boat to a more sheltered spot.

The wind had gone round to the south-west and stiffened. In that wind the anchorage off the house was the most exposed place on the Shiants and there was no way they could leave it there. In a southwesterly, the only usable place is in the shadow of the giant boulder screes that run along the eastern side of Garbh Eilean. Looking down from the cliff-top there on a sunny day, at low tide, with the light driving down through the twenty feet or so of water, in which the puffins and the other auks dive and dart for food, you can see the pale turquoise patch of sand into which boats can drop their anchor. All around are boulders, in which an anchor would get caught and could never be retrieved; or cobbles, through which the anchor would slither in a wind. That sandy patch is well tucked in, sheltered from the west by the block of land above it, and sheltered from the north by a narrow arm of the island which stretches out eastwards towards Eilean Mhuire.

It would have been tricky work, getting the dinghy away from the beach, with the sea coming straight on to them, then sailing the boat away from the now aggressive and surf-lined shore. These long-keeled, broad-beamed boats do not point high into the wind. You are lucky if you can bring the boat to within sixty degrees. The wind that day had become a gale. The seas as they arrived at the Shiant shore were kicking up into long, whitened combers, driving into the notches and crannies of the coastline where they burst into plumes reaching fifty or sixty feet on to the grass. But the boys knew what they were doing. Keeping just out from the shore, with the boat on a broad reach, they could make their way to the far corner of Garbh Eilean. Donald Campbell told their fathers that he had watched them get away, pulling with the oars to begin with and then hoisting the sail, covering the mile or so westwards at a fair pace, reaching the far point of Garbh Eilean, the headland called Stocanish, before disappearing around the corner.

No one can know what happened next. Out there, beyond Stocanish, in a southwesterly gale, with the tide ebbing southwards, can be as good a version of hell as the Hebrides can offer. I have taken Freyja in there on a bad day; not a gale but blowing perhaps Force 5 or 6 with the ebb coming down from Cape Wrath. The sea picks up. When you are in among it, there seems to be no pattern. It stands in little peaks all around you, like the points into which the whipped whites of egg can be made to stand. Or more like that miniature thorny landscape which is left behind if you pick one recently glued plank away from another. As the two separate, the glue is pulled up into little pinnacles with sharp, cup-shaped valleys between them. There is no structure to this form, no readable order, just a little world of mobile chaos, a dancing three-dimensional spiky surface through which you can only hope to make your way. It is disconcerting even in a slight wind, the randomness of it, the unpredictability of those mobile pin-ranges, the lurching and jumping of the boat from one side to another, the steep little walls of sea that the wind makes against the tide, the picture of anarchy and its primordial threat. If you increase the energy in that system, if you turn a gale on to it, if you make these water pinnacles eight rather than four feet high, this stretch of sea would be unsailable.

After an hour or so the Campbells started to get worried. The Lemreway boys had not come back to the house. Donald sent his son John, a blond giant who was deaf and dumb, down to the beach connecting Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe to see if he could make out what was happening in the bay. John returned, highly agitated, somehow communicating to his father the fact that the boat was not to be seen. It had vanished. The Lemreway boys had left their provisions in the Campbells’ house. Clearly they had been intending to stay. Where were they now? The Campbells guessed, or so they told the Lemreway men the next day, that once the boys had got round the corner at Stocanish, they had thought they had better run for home. As soon as the fathers heard this from Donald Campbell, they knew the boat was lost, and without pause set off for the Lewis shore. They searched loch after loch there, hoping to find the boys sheltering from the storm, or driven in there perhaps with their gear broken. They nosed into all the corners of Loch Claìdh, into Bagh Ciarach, Loch Valamus, Loch Bhrollúm, at Camas Thomascro, at Mol Truisg and in the further reaches of Loch Sealg. Their sons were in none of them.

It wasn’t a stupid exercise. The Lewis coast has always provided shelter from the Stream of the Blue Men but in 1881 the boys from Lemreway were never seen again. The rudder of the boat was found a little later washed up on the Mol Bhan, the blond beach, near Orinsay, a few miles west of Lemreway. Timber was scarce in the Hebrides and the rudder was used for more than forty years as a foot-bridge across the stream that runs down over its pale pebbles on to the beach there. It was the way people took back to the village from the peat-bank and nothing was more welcome, when loaded down with peats, than to find the stream properly bridged, an easy step or two across a difficult passage.

A few weeks later, a rudderless Orkney-built boat was found drifting around Cape Wrath, seventy-five miles away to the north. It was recognised by the Lewis fishermen who came across it as the boat that had been lost at the Shiants. There were sickles stowed away in the gunwale. Shortly before the boys had taken the boat to the islands, it had been used for gathering the seaweed that was to be spread on the fields just before the spring sowing of the oats and the barley. The sickles had been left aboard, jammed between the gunwale and the stringer. The sea had clearly turned the boat over twice: once to drown Murdo Macmillan, John Macinnes, Angus Ferguson and Donald Macdonald, and once to set it on its way again to Cape Wrath, with its cargo of sickles intact.

In 1910, another generation of boys, this time from the village of Gravir, just north of Lemreway, set off on the same summer expedition for the Shiants. The party included fourteen-year-old Donald MacPhail. It was the ‘last sad summer of my boyhood’, as he wrote as an old man, before he was sent away as a scholar to the Nicolson Institute, the secondary school in Stornoway, to fulfil his father’s ambitions for him to have ‘a gentleman’s job, chained to a desk, a school room, pulpit or doctor’s surgery.’ He was going to make the best of his last weeks of freedom.

One fine day, with three other boys, I decided to make a hail and farewell trip to the Shiant Islands. My father was away fishing, and my mother did not like the idea very much; however my heart was set on the trip and after getting up early and packing some food and drink in a small cask, we set sail, swathed in the calm early morning sunshine.

When they arrived, they ‘roamed all over the island, collected a lot of eggs and watched the thousands of birds that assembled on the cliffs. We had taken shotguns and ammunition and passed the time away shooting at the puffins.’

Only on the way home from their puffin-shooting trip did the schoolboy crew find themselves in trouble. As they left the Shiants, the wind that day seemed suddenly to get up from the north-west – almost precisely the direction they needed to go – and the boat had far too little weight in it to push itself into the wind.

The bright calmness of the morning gave way to a darkening moody sky and we began to have difficulty beating against the wind in our light, unballasted boat. As the sea got choppy we shortened the sail and had to take it in turns to bale out furiously as the spray washed over the boat making it harder for us to steer and retain control.

Eventually, after many hours, late in the evening, they managed to get into the shelter of Kebock Head, tucked in under its big brutish cliffs, which could protect them from the northwesterlies. A little pool of still water lay under the lee of the headland itself. There they had to wait on their oars, unable, with this wind, to sail up Loch Odhairn into Gravir. At midnight, the boys heard the thudding note of a propeller. They set light to a tarred rag and attracted the attention of a trawler which towed them home. Their parents were out searching on the headlands and nobody noticed the trawler coming into the loch bringing their sons in from the sea. The last hope, so they guessed, was that the boys might be sheltering under Kebock Head, and the Gravir families made their way there across the moor. ‘When they arrived at the Cabag [the Gaelic spelling of Kebock Head] and discovered that there was no sign of our whereabouts they feared the worst.’ Donald MacPhail put the experience behind him. ‘The menacing mass of the Shiant Islands,’ he wrote many years later, ‘never again held any mystery for me. Only a painful memory. My father saw to that.’

A famous and beautiful Gaelic song, still sung at ceilidhs and in the great annual competition, the Mod, can stand for all the laments over those who have drowned in the Shiant seas. In the spring of 1786, the young and handsome Allan Morrison, a shipmaster from Stornoway, who usually traded between Lewis and the Isle of Man, took his boat down the coast of Lewis to Scalpay, where he was to be engaged to Annie Campbell, Campbell of Scalpay’s daughter. In the Stream of the Blue Men, off the Shiants, the wind turned, as it does, his boat was swamped and he and all his crew drowned. Annie Campbell, broken with grief, wasted away and soon died herself. There is no burying ground on Scalpay. The soil is too thin and still today the Scalpay dead are carried over to the sandy soils on the Atlantic side at Luskentyre to be buried. Annie Campbell’s father took her body in a coffin by boat to the most distinguished of all the burying grounds in Harris, at Rodel, in the south-eastern corner of the island. On the way there, another storm came up at them and to lighten the boat, the coffin had to be thrown overboard.

Soon afterwards, the body of Allan Morrison was found washed up on the shore of the Shiants and a few days later Annie’s body was found at the same place.

The song – this is the Shiants’ only brush with Hollywood: it was sung in the film Rob Roy – is in the voice of Annie Campbell, grieving on Scalpay for her lost lover. It survives in many versions, some of them still sung in Cape Breton, in Canada, where the descendants of emigrating Hebrideans took it in the nineteenth century.

Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee; hó rì rì rì u ho, e o hùg hoireann ó, Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee.

I am tormented,

I have no thought for merriment tonight

but only for the sound of the elements

and the strength of the gales …

And brown-haired Allan, my darling sweetheart,

I heard you had gone across the sea

on the slender black boat of oak …

Brown-haired Allan, my heart’s darling,

I was young when I fell in love with you.

Tonight my tale is wretched.

It is not the tale of the death of cattle in the bog

but of the wetness of your shirt

and of how you are being torn by the whales.

I would drink a drink, in spite of everyone,

of your heart’s blood,

after you had been drowned.

4

I TAKE THE BOAT SLOWLY in to the beach. Her iron-shod stem slides, grates and then halts on the stones. I jump ashore and push the small grapnel anchor between the shingle. It is a way of pinning the boat to the island. However seasick I feel, this of course is the moment. I am walking at last on the familiar shore, awash with the familiarities of the place: the slip of one stone against another, the smell of the seaweed rotting in the nostrils, knowing without even watching them the flickering presence of the birds as they take this route between the islands, the great inviting wings of land spreading out on all sides, the surge and draw of the sea on the shingle. And above all that, the core sensation of island life: knowing the world is held at arm’s length by that sea, afloat on the privacy, buoyed up by the knowledge that here I am alone. It can, oddly enough, be a shared feeling. I remember arriving here one morning with John Murdo Matheson, the young shepherd from Gravir, a man, if this is possible, more in love with the Shiants than I am. We were waving goodbye on the beach to the fishing boat that had brought us, watching its wake curve around the rocks of Garbh Eilean, and he said to me, not looking at me, but our shoulders rubbing, ‘It’s as if the world’s been cut off with a knife, isn’t it, Adam?’

But now I am alone and I inspect the place, the first time I have been here since the previous autumn. It is like looking through old letters, a slowly growing recognition of a well-known thing, its atmosphere stealing up on you, enveloping you like the smell of bread from an oven. Your body remembers the movements of island life: the hauling of the boat up the beach, the tying it on to the mooring ring, the touch of sun for a moment, the endless wind, as if you were listening all day to the whispered roaring in a shell held up to your ear.

But the beach looks odd. In summer, it extends between Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe in a smooth and well graded expanse of pebbles, cleanly sifted and sorted in a shallow grey arc between the rocks of the islands on either side. Now, in April, it looks as if a team of bulldozers have been at work over the winter. The enormous volume of stone which in summer makes up the centre of the beach, one hundred and fifty yards of it, thirty feet high and a hundred across, has been shouldered aside, roughly barged into mounds which are humped up against the rock buttresses of the islands. This is the work of the winter storms, an unthinkable battering. A third of the fence posts along the cliff edge are broken off at their base, pieces of perfectly good square-section timber, four inches by four, snapped and held now by the wire they were meant to support. Posts don’t last long. After they have been here a year or two, the winter wind has so picked away at the wood that they have returned to younger versions of themselves. The little side stems of slightly harder timber which had been buried by later growth as knots, have withstood the eroding wind and now stand out from the shrunken post as truncated branches. Each post looks like a fossil tree.

I unload Freyja, piling my belongings on the beach above the rising tide. It takes half an hour. Then I row Freyja out to a depth where she will not ground at low tide, anchor her there, inflate the dinghy, row ashore, pull the dinghy up the beach and tie it fast to the wrought iron rings which are hammered into cracks in the rocks.

The landing beach is two hundred yards or so from the house and everything must be carried up over a small rocky rise and then along a level grassy platform to the door of the house. It is, through sheer repetition, the most familiar two hundred yards of the islands, as known to me as the knots in the desk on which I write or the feeling of my teeth to my tongue: the slightly awkward shuffles across that rock step; the point where the path crosses a smooth piece of turf, next to the boulder on which a pincushion of thrift produces two or three blooms in the summer; the little spring, just beyond the small ridge that separates it from the beach, where the path curves round above the shore. The spring is stone-lined, with rushes fringing its edges and a flat stone placed at its lip, on which a bucket can stand while you fill it. Past two ruins of abandoned houses, through a patch of nettles and there, on its little coastal shelf, with the silverweed thick around it, and all the pens and fences in which the sheep are gathered for the marking of the lambs in May, the shearing in July and the autumn cull, you come to the house.

Although I love the building, it is in truth, little more than a shelter in a storm. This is, at heart, the house occupied by the Campbells at the end of the nineteenth century, built for them by their landlord, Patrick Sellar, the Mathesons’ tenant, in the 1870s. The Campbells left the Shiants in 1901, and in the next twenty years or so the house partially collapsed, losing a gable. In 1926, the novelist Compton Mackenzie, who owned the islands at the time, rebuilt it. Mackenzie only ever stayed here for a day or two at a time and the house remains almost exactly as he left it: primitive. Its stone walls are pebble-dashed – ‘harled’ is the Scottish term – and have been painted over and over again with Snowcem, a white cement-based paint. It has a tin roof on which the rain patters and across which the wind for some reason roars. Perhaps the attic space makes a kind of sounding box. There are two small rooms, one to the north, one to the south, each with a fireplace in the gable-end wall and both panelled with tongue-and-grooved lining board. It is, from time to time, rat-infested. The rats skitter across the roof, climb down the chimneys and make their nests between the panelling and the stone behind it. There is no electricity, lavatory or running water but it is possible with a good fire going, and a glass or two of whisky, to make the house feel snug and happy, a glow of inner warmth and outer on the faces of everyone around the table. And it can be beautiful on a summer morning, with the day bright outside, to sit in the kitchen, writing at the table there, the thick walls keeping the house cool in the heat, the light coming through the open door, the quiet self-sufficiency of the house a measure of contentment and containment. If it is always a little severe on arrival – cold, ratty; not much of a human habitation – an hour or two of a lit fire, of cleaning the surfaces, lighting the paraffin lamps, somehow driving out the sense that you are not entirely welcome here, in other words rehumanising the shell of it, and the house begins to acquire a certain friendliness. People have often been happy here and the walls have absorbed some of that delight.

I don’t mind this crudity. It is quite unfeminine. There are no curtains. I am afraid to say that the smears and scrabblings which the rats have left on the walls since they were last painted four or five years ago are still there. The hook from which my father suspended his bags of food in the 1930s still hangs from the ceiling. The guttering candles and smoking lanterns have coated the ceilings with a film of grey soot. Women don’t like it much. Compton MacKenzie could never persuade his wife to stay there with him. My own mother only went once and never again. Sarah, my wife, has braved it twice but not with much enthusiasm and will not, I think, return. Although in the 1930s, and again after the war, picnics of fishing families from Scalpay went out there for the day, the women sitting on the grass in their floral prints and their cardigans, this is not now a female place. Of course, for centuries it must have been as much woman’s as man’s country, but the islands’ modern isolation has masculinised them, as though they have become part of the sea, which is the male domain. ‘You see that hill there?’ Joan MacSween, the widow of a fisherman on Scalpay said to me, ‘That’s as near as I would ever like to get to the sea.’ She was pointing at a rock outside her front door. The shepherds now never take their wives or girlfriends.

After dumping my belongings in the house, and gathering some driftwood and lighting a fire, the first task is to collect some water. I keep a bucket and a shallow dish in the house. There are five or six wells along the foot of the cliff that lines the landward edge of the island’s coastal strip. One or two have beach cobbles arranged around them, to make them easier to use. Others are scarcely more than scoops in the turf, in which the water seeping from the hill naturally gathers. None is datable. A friend of my father’s relined one with the stones he found nearby twenty years ago. Now, although the water-level in it is for some reason a little lower than before, there is no telling it from the others. It might as well have been done a thousand years ago.

The best well at the moment is about a hundred yards from the house. A large piece of driftwood acts as its cover. Silverweed fringes it and a flake of the lichen on the rocks sometimes falls off into the water where it floats as a shallow scooped raft. Water boatmen skid in from either side. It is no good if you plunge the bucket deep into the pool. All you are left with is a brownish and unappetising bucket of stirred-up, peaty soup. But if you take the shallow dish and allow no more than a sixteenth of an inch to slip in over the brim, filling the dish with no disturbance to the body of the water in the pool, you will slowly acquire a bucket of clean, fresh spring water filtered from the hill above.

This gathering of the Shiants’ sweet water, which has never, even in the driest summers, run out, always feels to me like an engagement with one of the oldest layers in the place. Where the materials like this are constant, and the uses to which they are put will always be the same whatever your beliefs, or language, or habit of mind, history collapses. It is as if time has not passed. This delicate sipping at an island spring is the same now as it must always have been. That is the key to something central about the Shiants. History does not move here in a single current, sweeping everything up into one comprehensive pattern of change, but in a laminar flow, different sheets of time moving at different rates, one above the other, like the currents in the sea. At the lowest level, the coldest and oldest, there is virtually no movement. Life down there is still. Gather the water at the well and you are performing a Bronze Age act. Dig over the peaty soil in the vegetable garden and you are doing what has been done here in the Middle Ages. Call Sarah on the mobile phone and you are doing something that wasn’t possible until the late 1990s. This is not, as people so often say of a landscape, a manuscript on which the past has been written and erased over and over again. It is a place in which many different times coexist, flowing at different speeds, enshrining different worlds.

In early spring, the place is paddled flat by the flock of barnacle geese that live here in the winter. The grass lies down where they have trampled it and looks like the hair of a teenager; unwashed, brownish, greased. All over the surface of the islands – particularly on Eilean Mhuire and the southern end of Eilean an Tighe, called Mianish – lie the goose droppings from the flock. Most of them, according to Calum MacSween, Compton Mackenzie’s grazing tenant here, only arrived after the Campbells had left in 1901. Their droppings, MacSween said, ‘spoiled the water in the Mary Island pools, which until then had been sweet all year.’ They certainly aren’t now: foetid, sour to look at, too pea-green even to be tasted. But the geese themselves are worth it. Walk down to Mianish along the western shore of Eilean an Tighe, past the lazybeds that rim the first bay, across the little burn that runs to the shore in one of the dips between the ridges, clamber carefully across the black-lichened rocks – a lichen that grows only in the splash zone where the storms can reach it and the grass will not grow for the saltiness – keep your head down, out of sight of the flock, not disturbing the sheep either, which would alert the geese, and try to come on the birds at their grazing. A dog, of course, with all its carelessness, would be a disaster and cannot be allowed. Previously, without much of a shift in mentality, I would have had a gun with me. Certainly the early twentieth-century shepherds, Calum MacSween, and his nephew, Donald Macleod (DB as he was known, Donald Butcher), shot their goose dinners when they came to the Shiants early in the year, when the geese were still in the Hebrides, and again on the final visits in November, before the winter closed in, putting the tups on the islands. Then the geese had returned from their breeding grounds in the far north. The barnacles made a better roast, I am told, than the greylag, but were downier. The man plucking them, or so Hugh MacSween maintains, would emerge ‘looking like Father Christmas’, the mass of fine white feathers clogged in his stubble.

I am here to look. I feel more protective of the barnacle geese than of any other animal on the Shiants. They are the winter-spirits of the place. Hardly anyone else comes here in March or early April. The place is more private then. None of the modern train of yachts which anchor in the bay on summer nights dares cross the equinoctial Minch. The private winter islands are the realm of the geese. Come on them slowly. They are scattered across the grass, black and white – white chest and head, a black bib and neck, a black back next to which the wings are barred with grey and white stripes which from a distance gives the effect of moiré or ruffled silk, as elegant and concordant a crowd as the racegoers in My Fair Lady, perhaps four hundred of them, relentlessly pecking away at the ground beneath their feet, looking up now and then, a wary eye, but then face-down again to the grass, tugging at the stems, eating, eating. They are busy. This is no holiday. There is none of that standing around, displaying to each other, socialising, or looking bored, which the puffins and other fish-eating birds do later in the year. The goose’s life is dictated by its intestines. Even these barnacle geese, a smaller and more delicate version of the Canada goose, need to eat all the hours the day gives them. They are flying herbivores and that is their difficulty. Fish-eating birds can acquire the protein hit they need in a few sharp, efficient dives. A cow can invest in an enormous set of stomachs, through which the tough grass stems can be serially fed, slowly digesting the cell walls of the plant within which the most nutritious proteins and sugars are locked. But as the American naturalist David Quammen has written, ‘A Hereford is not obliged to cope with the delicate physics of flight.’ A goose can’t afford all those voluminous stomachs. It can’t even afford to have a stomach that is full. Overladen, it would never fly. As a result, most of what a goose eats passes straight through it in a couple of hours. That’s why a goose is as loose as a goose, and that’s why the Shiants in the early spring-time are carpeted in their droppings.

They are as innocent and flighty as deer. The flock moves in its grazing like a shoal, a turn of a few degrees communicated somehow at the same instant throughout the pack. There is an ever-present suggestion of a tremor even in the way they stand and walk. But for all the beauty of that sight, that million-fingered responsiveness, this land-life on the grass seems to be no more than an interruption to their favoured state. They belong in the air. Lift yourself for a moment, so that more than your eyes and hat appear above the geese’s horizon and it is as if you have blown a breath of wind across the flock. The four hundred of them rise and shimmer like a single piece of cloth lifted by the breeze. The edge of the crowd nearest you moves first, and that beautiful supple sheet of the rest of them follows on with the same ripples in their white heads and black necks, the same slow crooner’s elasticity in the muscles, and same ineffable languor, all synchronised as if tied by invisible threads. A human crowd, suddenly made aware of a threat or danger, would shatter, each shard dispersing as if shot. The flock of geese does the opposite, more whole in the air than it had been on the ground, turning on the wind, a single wing, before beating out over the Minch, down over the small, grassless rock at the southern tip of Eilean an Tighe, Sgeir Mianish (‘the rock of the middle headland’ in Gaelic-cum-Norse) before flogging over into the wind to the equally inviting grass on Eilean Mhuire, a mile and a half away to the east, a coughing, guttural chatter as they pass.

I may be drawn to them but they don’t care for me. They are only here because people like me so rarely are. I have pursued them once but once only. Having disturbed them down on Mianish, I walked the mile back to the beach where the dinghy was tied up, launched it, rowed the mile across the bay to the landing place on Eilean Mhuire, hauled the dinghy up the beach there, climbed the two hundred feet up to the top of that island, walked the half mile down to its eastern tip, the promontory called Seann Chaisteal, the Old Castle, only to see the flock which had been grazing happily there for an hour since I had last disturbed them, lift with that wonder grace, a slow-motion departure, back across the tide-rippled sea to the headland where I had first encountered them.

Sometimes looking up from digging the garden, or sorting out the boat, or collecting firewood from the beach, I will see the flock of Shiant geese strung out against the sky, or wheeling in the gusts that ripple and billow off the back of Garbh Eilean. It is only a question of time before they leave, at some time in April. This is the gateway to summer and I have never witnessed it. All that I have ever noticed is a sudden absence. The paddled turf, the ubiquitous droppings, even the weather, all seem the same, but the geese have gone. It is like a death, or the descent of Proserpina into Hell, a removal of that life-presence which animates a place. The Shiants, then, are like an island from which the inhabitants have been cleared. Nothing has changed except the thing that changes everything.

Not until the nineteenth century did anyone understand this disappearance of the goose and its sudden re-emergence at the end of the year. There was a general belief that the birds hibernated somewhere or other, an idea that went back to Pliny and Aristotle before him. The barnacle goose was thought, but only by the credulous, to retreat into and later emerge from the goose barnacle, a crustacean which attaches itself like a mollusc to the rocks and has a shell which resembles the beak of goose. There is no need to be too condescending about this: still no one has any idea, for example, of what happens to the basking shark in winter. They disappear every autumn only to reappear the following spring. Whether they go out into the mid-Atlantic, or swim south to warm waters or hibernate on the sea floor, it remains invisible to us, and unknown.

There is a strange connection between the Shiants and the question of disappearing birds. According to the late-nineteenth-century Roman Catholic priest and folklorist, Father Allan McDonald of Eriskay, ‘the corncraik and stonechat are called eoin shianta on account of their disappearance in winter. The opinion is that they are dormant all winter, and that they should be so and not die makes people consider them eerie or uncanny or sianta.’

Certainly, that word runs true to the experience of a bird that departs without warning. The emptiness it leaves is haunted by the retinal image of its presence. You feel for a few days that the geese must still be there and that you are simply failing to see them. It is then that the Shiants come to feel like eerie islands.

The Gaelic word probably lies behind the Shiants. ‘Si’ in Gaelic is pronounced ‘sh’ and ‘sianta’ transliterates as ‘shanta’. The ‘i’ in the modern spelling of the word, which is a phonetic transcription of the Gaelic, is a mistake. Either ‘Siant’ or ‘Shant’, not ‘Shiant’, is the way it should be spelled and pronounced. Only those reading from maps ever say ‘Sheeant’. The Old Irish word sén, meaning ‘a blessing’ or ‘a charm’, derives eventually from the Latin signum, meaning a sign of any sort, especially the sign of the cross. From that comes the verb sénaim: ‘to bless’, ‘to make holy’. Its passive participle in Old Irish is sénta, a word which evolved in modern Irish Gaelic into séanta, meaning ‘consecrated’, ‘hallowed’ or ‘charmed’, with a haze of meanings hovering around its outer edges meaning ‘haunted’, ‘spooky’, ‘otherworldly’. This is the word which is often spelled in Scottish Gaelic sianta.

Examples of the name are scattered across Gaelic Scotland. There are sacred mountains in Jura, near Callander and in Ardnamurchan, all called Beinn Sheunta. There is a Loch Seunta, ‘Holy Loch’, in Cowal, and a cave, an Uaimh Shianta, ‘the hallowed’ or ‘the sacred’, in Applecross. There is a Shian Wood north of Oban and a stone circle at Shian Bank in Perthshire. In Skye, Martin Martin described a Loch Siant in the seventeenth century, of which the water was thought to cure diseases. There is a brackish Loch Shient in North Rona, although the derivation of that may be different, describing the sea spray with which the pool is filled. Most curiously of all, there is a record, in one of the Irish Chronicles for the second half of the fifth century, of the Isle of Man having its name changed ‘from Inis Falga to “Ellan Shiant”, that is “The Holy Isle”’.

The Shiant Islands, full of magnificence and strangeness, protected by the Stream of the Blue Men, standing out in the Minch tall, mysterious and beautiful, a challenge and an invitation to any man with a boat and a modicum of courage along hundreds of miles of coastline from Sutherland to Skye and from Ness to Barra, said, as so many of these islands are, to have been the hermitage of a Celtic saint in the Dark Ages: these are the Holy Islands of the Minch.

Most of the names of places on the Shiants are Gaelic and not particularly rich in association or significance. They describe parts of the islands in the way a Crusoe would, by looking at them, by saying what they are, rather than by associating them with anything that might have happened there in the distant past. So there is a Big Beach, a Beach with Boulders, a Washing Place, a Cormorant Head, some Rocks of the Bay, a Seal Point, the Kittiwake Rocks, the Hole of the Seals – the natural arch at the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean – and the Point of the Fank (the gathering place for sheep on Eilean Mhuire). Most of these still have the attributes by which they are named. Sheep are still gathered on Eilean Mhuire at the Bid na Faing. The seals do indeed lounge and wail on the point that is named after them. There is a kittiwake colony not far from their rocks, and there are shags (the Gaelic word sgarbh does not distinguish between a cormorant and a shag) forever standing with their arms outstretched, drying their feathers on the point named after them.

Almost certainly, most of these names are quite recent and do not embody a long tradition. They may well have been given by the shepherds who came here seasonally in the early nineteenth century, after the old Shiant population had left. The Ordnance Survey officers, when recording these names in the 1850s, used as their authority a Neil Nicolson or Nicholson (he couldn’t spell) from the village of Stemreway in Lewis. He may not have known the place very well. The surveyors could speak no Gaelic, and so in this way, here as elsewhere in the Gaelic world, much of the information that might have been gathered was lost. The Shiants must once have had a rich suite of names in which the lives of its inhabitants were folded into the landscape and recorded there, but they will never be recovered. A Harris woman, Christina Shaw, when interviewed a few years ago by the ethnographer Morag MacLeod, told her: ‘There wasn’t the length of between here and the gate that we didn’t have a name for, which is not the case nowadays. Every ben and every mound and every hill … I could name them all.’ All of that has been lost from the Shiants.

Here and there, something older can be traced. The islands are set in a Viking sea. Every prominent headland and inlet around them, every stretch of water, and village after village, township after township on Lewis, were named by the Norse. There are three identifiably Norse place names on the Shiants themselves: Stocanish on Garbh Eilean (‘the Headland near the Sea Stacks’), the mile-long line of the Galtas offshore (perhaps ‘the Sea Gables’) and Mianish on Eilean an Tighe, meaning either ‘the Narrow Headland’ (which it is) or, more intriguingly, ‘the Middle Headland’, which it also is when approaching the islands by sea from the south. A Dublin Viking, making his way back north, would see Mianish stretching out towards him in the haze, the Middle Head, around which the flood tide rips. All three of these Norse places on the Shiants are precisely those which any sailor would need to mark and remember. Other than that, apart from one glowing exception which I shall come to in later chapters, the place-names of the Shiants record not memories but forgetfulness, the washing away of human lives, the fragility and tissue-thin vulnerability of human culture to the erosion of time.

When I realised that the geese had finally gone, I went to stand on the heights of Garbh Eilean, nearly six hundred feet above the Minch at its most languorous and seductive. The sky was draped with the weightless trails of evening clouds. They were the colours of the prayer flags which Buddhists leave on mountain passes and their brightness had been bleached by wind and sun. Below them, in the stillness of the evening, every inch of the horizon was rimmed with distant sunlit mountains. My eye travelled them like a fell runner. Even to name the hills is a roll-call of ancestors, the Shiants’ own king list. In Sutherland, eighty miles away to the north-east, Foinaven and Ben Stack. Going south, Quinag above Assynt, Suilven and Stac Polly. Above Loch Broom, Coigach matches the ragged notches of An Teallach on its southern side. Behind Gairloch is Beinn Eighe in Torridon, south of that, Beinn Bhan behind Applecross. Each mountain in what Martin Martin called ‘the opposite Continent’, is the bass note to the human settlement at its feet. The eye swings around to Rona, Raasay and northern Skye, each wrinkle in the rock picked out by the last of the light. In the distance, with only their upper reaches appearing over the foreground, are the Cuillins and the strange flat summits of Macleod’s Tables above Dunvegan. On the clearest days, Heaval, the mountain on Barra, is visible past the headlands of Waternish and Dunvegan. Hecla and Beinn Mhor follow in South Uist; a gap and then the shark fin of Eaval, the unmistakable signpost for anyone sailing south in the Minch, the islands in the Sound of Harris; then Roineabhal, the hill above Rodel, which for years was under threat of removal by the workings of a superquarry. If the catastrophe should happen and permission were ever granted, five hundred and fifty million tons of it would be dug out over a period of sixty years and this wrinkled horizon would have changed for the first time since the Ice Age. North of it come the mountains of North Harris, the round bull-seal head of The Clisham, the hills of Pairc and Eishken, before the eye swings up to the north-west, to the low mound of Muirneag, north of Stornoway, and the long flat headlands of Lewis beside it. Only then is there a gap in the list, an opening in the ring, and there you look out to the North Atlantic. Nothing till Spitsbergen.

Compton Mackenzie said when he stood here that he felt ‘swung between heaven and earth’. No place I know feels more like the centre of the universe

.

5

SOMETIMES, EARLY IN THE SPRING, around the middle of April, before any true signs of summer arrive, when the grass on the islands is still dull and tawny from the rigours of winter, when the sheep are poor and thin and an air of exhaustion hangs over the place, a break can come in the weather which seems like a gift from Heaven. Stillness is wrapped around the Shiants for a day or two and the sun bathes their cold, bruised limbs. Once, ten or twelve years ago, I was there on my own when one of these openings came. I watched it in the sky, arriving from the south. The clouds folded back towards me, like the ravelling up of a screen, leaving behind them a sky as pale as an eighteenth-century ceiling, in which the colour went from blue to pale blue, and at the horizon scarcely blue at all.

I could feel the islands sighing in the light, their pores expanding, the vegetable life reaching out from its winter retreat. It seemed to me then – it is the only time I have ever witnessed it – that as the days went on, opening each morning to another new brightness, I could see the Shiants beginning to move towards their summer condition, like the pelt of an animal as it regains its health, the big flanks of Garbh Eilean greening between the ribs of rock, the tight winter-bitten surface of Eilean Mhuire softening under the millions of grass tips and sorrel shoots prodding up into the light, the body of Eilean an Tighe turning towards the vivid luxuriance of its summer life.

I only had a small dinghy with me then and the calm meant I could take it around to the north side of Garbh Eilean. For weeks at a time when the weather is bad you can’t visit that northern face, because in any kind of sea it is terrifying, thrashed at by the Minch and merciless in the way it would deal with any boat. When the calm descends, that is the place, more than any other, to which I am drawn. It is where you can sense the Shiants’ power, a place of turbulence only ever encountered in tranquillity.

I rowed the boat around, slipped easily through the natural arch at the corner of Garbh Eilean, where, every time you pass, a black guillemot drops out of the cracks in the ceiling on to the sea and then panics and flusters away to the north. The boat slides out across the liquid glass of the Minch. The seals asleep on the skerries wake, stare, shuffle seawards and plunge horrified into the water. The boat rounds the corner of those rocks and then the Shiants reveal their heroic heart. A curtain of columns half a mile long, five hundred feet high and each column up to eight or nine feet wide, drops into the Minch. The black lichen of the splash zone coats them to a height of a hundred feet or more. They bend slowly as they rise from the sea, a wonderful subtle elasticity in the mass. On calm days you can take a dinghy right up to the cliff foot, the boat just nosing and brushing at the giant forms. Afloat on the ink of the green sea, it is like being in the elephant house at the zoo, intimate with hugeness, pushed up next to a herd of still, alien, unembraceable bodies.

This was how William Daniell, the early nineteenth-century topographer of the British shore, portrayed the Shiants in his pair of 1819 aquatints: a vastness of form, a solidity and scale of presence, a tranquil sea passive at their feet.

I had this picture on the wall of my room at school and it remains a consoling image for me. Daniell does not attempt any heroics, any wild dynamism in the picture. He portrays the islands as a place of quiet, with a glow in the light and the huge, brooding stability of the cliffs behind them.

It never lasts. The Atlantic drives its next weather system on towards the islands and that sullen, lit beauty is taken up and twisted into a new and familiar frenzy. The Shiants’ temper is like a child’s: unbidden, unexplained rage; sudden quiet; a new paroxysm as total as the one before. Awake at night in the house, I lie listening to the weather. I see the Shiants as if from above, laid out beneath the storm. The cloud shadows beat across them. The swells cram themselves, one after another, through the natural arch, filling it, forty feet high and thirty wide, a tube of white water a hundred yards long, squeezed in there, until they burst out on the far side, released into huge, disintegrating flowerheads of surf. The cliffs and the islands are unmoved. Besieged by the Minch, they remain there, black, impassive and irreducible.

It is tempting to see the Shiants in that way. Perhaps any island owner would like to think of his property as a hedge against erosion but it couldn’t be more wrong. I once spent a few days on the Shiants with a pair of geologists and under their steady rational analysis all idea of the island fortress was soon whittled away. It was a highly enjoyable experience. Fergus Gibb, the Reader in Igneous Petrology at Sheffield University, and his friend Mike Henderson, now Research Professor of Petrology at Manchester University, both know more about the Shiant rocks than anyone on earth. They have been studying the islands since the 1960s and in a small dinghy they guided me around the cliffs and shore, pointing out to me where the story of the Shiants was to be found.

It was a charming, affectionate and mutually impatient double act. Fergus – Mike calls him Fergie – is the more bullish and macho of the two. He plays tennis for the Yorkshire Veterans, talks with fervour about ‘stonking great sledge-hammers’, likes to give things ‘welly’, wears dark glasses and short-sleeved tartan shirts, and looks after Mike, whose balance on the rocks is uncertain. Fergus’s big seamen’s stockings are always pulled up over his trousers to his knees. He takes charge and one falls into line. Mike – knitted wool tie, glasses, green V-neck, baseball cap well down on the brow – plays the complementary role. He and his wife Joan are keen on organic food, a certain kind of witty late nineteenth-century novel and the finer of the performing arts. Mike must be the only geologist in the world who has had a ballet dedicated to him and the first thing he asked me, as I sat him down to a supper of roast lamb in the house on the Shiants, was what I thought of Giselle.

Neither talks of immovability or irreducibility. They are engaged with something richer and deeper: the huge, slow dynamism of this extraordinary place. Everything in the geologist’s mind is a symptom of something happening. We layman landscapists may see the thing itself, the immovable rock, the huge columns, the stand of swaying bamboo, the Elizabethan ruff, the clustered organ pipes; they see the process, the mineralisation, the conductive cooling, the developing faults. ‘Don’t think of what it is,’ Fergus said to me. ‘Think of how it came to be.’

The Shiants, or at least most of them, are about fifty-eight and a half million years old. They are formed from a series of hot, intrusive magmas, giant plugs of molten rock rising from deep within the Earth’s mantle, which squeezed between much older fossil-bearing rocks above them. The process is about as dramatic, and as unlocal as it could be. The ‘emplacement’ of the magma was part of an event of planetary scale. About sixty million years ago, a whole zone of the Earth’s crust began to come under immense strain. Whether the weakness in the crust caused the upwelling of hot rock from deep below; or whether the upwelling of the magma, a huge bubble of heat and energy in the mantle, caused the weakness in the crust, is not certain. What is sure is that this was a stretched, tensed time. Heavy convection currents in the mantle, rising in a plume beneath this spot, put the whole of the Hebrides under pressure. A boil covering half a continent wanted to burst. The whole depth of the Earth’s crust was being stretched here, one part being pulled south-west, the other north-east. The result was one of the most cataclysmic episodes in the history of Britain. The precise geography of this is still not quite clear but it is certain that the enormous volcanic outpourings would have been visible from another planet. Signs of the rift system run from Disco and Nunavik on the west coast of Greenland, to Kangertittivaq on the east coast, out to Jan Mayen Island, deep within the Arctic Circle, besieged by drift ice, across tens of thousands of square miles of what is now the North Atlantic, through Iceland, the Faeroes, Rockall and St Kilda, down through the Shiants, all the way through Skye and the Inner Hebrides, to Staffa and the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim, on to Slieve Gullion and the Mountains of Mourne, before ending in the granite of Lundy in the Bristol Channel.

The rift may perhaps have been the first attempt at the opening of an Atlantic Ocean. If so, the Hebrides would have been pulled apart. Floating in Freyja between the islands, I am directly above one of the world’s great might-have-beens. From within the centre of the Shiants, America and Europe would have moved slowly away, eased apart on giant conveyor belts of hot rock in the mantle. The Galtas and Garbh Eilean would now be off the coast of a New England shore made principally of the old and twisted rocks of Lewisian gneiss which form the Outer Hebrides. Eilean Mhuire would be the westernmost island of Europe, looking out not to the screes and green puffin slopes of Garbh Eilean, a mile away, as it now does, but across three thousand miles of grey Atlantic.

It didn’t happen. The rift never opened beyond a slit. The Atlantic opened to the west of Rockall and the Hebrides remained whole. All that is left of this cataclysmic episode now are the roots and the remnants. Nearly sixty million years of erosion has done its work and almost nothing of the surface landscape which this vulcanism produced now survives. The great mountain punctuation points of the volcanic province, Slieve Gullion and Mourne themselves, the hills of Mull and Ardnamurchan, the Cuillins of Rum and Skye, represent only the hardened footings of the enormous volcanoes through which this spasm of the Earth’s intestinal juices were vented on to the surface.

The Scotland into which the lavas poured was tropical and paradisical. America, Britain, and the Europe of which it was a part, would have been unrecognisable then. Lotus lilies, magnolias and several species of proteus, the tender plant which now flourishes in South Africa, were all thriving in the Hebrides. After each eruption there was a pause. Earth and life accumulated on the ragged, fissured surface of the lava before the next eruption destroyed and enclosed it. In Morvern, one can see the upper parts of each flow stained red where the weather had broken down the rock and turned the iron in it rusty. Each of these red layers is buried under the basement of the flow that came after it. On Mull, at Rudha na h-Uamha, John Macculloch, the fiercely opinionated geologist who was one of the first to give an account of the Shiants’ rocks in 1819, discovered the fossil of a tree still standing embedded in a river of lava, twenty feet deep, which had overwhelmed it. You can still see it there today.

The Shiants themselves, though, can never have known any of this. They never had their Hawaiian period and parakeets never flitted along these shores. These islands – or what are now these islands – came into existence two miles or so underground, perhaps under another volcano which has entirely disappeared.

That much was known in the nineteenth century. Since World War II, the understanding of the Shiant rocks has developed enormously, largely in the hands of Fergus Gibb and Mike Henderson, who, in five visits and with extensive laboratory analysis, have, quite extraordinarily to my mind, been able to establish a sequence of events that occurred here over a few decades about sixty million years ago.

It is a vast poem written in heat and liquidity. Remove the sea from your mind. That has nothing to do with it. You are in the dark of the Earth’s crust, several miles down. About a hundred and twenty million years before, in the Lower Jurassic, enormously thick accumulations of mud, silt and sand had built up in layer after layer on the floor of an earlier sea. These mud stones and shales have become rock. Beneath them, a huge bubble of hot molten rock starts to rise. The pressure it exerts opens fissures and ruptures in the overlying layers and it is between those laminations that the magma wants to squeeze.

This is the moment of the Shiants’ creation. The liquid rock, deep underground, probably took the form of what geologists call ‘a cedar tree laccolith’, a set of leaf-like chambers arranged around a central stem like the boughs of a cedar tree. The magma, pulsing from below, still hot from the energy generated when the planet first formed, runs into each chamber and beyond it into new leaves, new extensions of the form. The idea of a single tree is wrong: more likely a forest of them, the forms connected through the bough tips or a branching of the stem. The growth of this red-hot forest, each tree fifteen miles high and its canopy spreading as much as ten or fifteen miles wide, was moving north from the southern Hebrides. The whole floor of the Little Minch is covered in the leaves of that infernal cedar grove. In the far more recent past, glaciers have gouged hollows between them in the softer Jurassic sediments, leaving a family of submarine Shiants between here and Tiree. Occasionally they break surface, in the islands of Staffin Bay, the Ascrib Islands, Fladda-chuain, Eilean Trodday, all off the northern tip of Skye and in Sgeir Inoe, the lonely and vicious rock off Scalpay. Most are unseen, apparent only in the kicking of the tide.

Deep inside those ancient layers, the Shiants came into being in an orgasm of incandescent liquid. It was enormously hot: the greatest heat reached in the most violent fire in a burning building is about 850°C. That can melt bricks, turning them into pools of liquid glass. The Jurassic mudstones melt at about 900° but the heat of the magma itself was about 1150°C.

The Shiant intrusion would have been pulsed, the impulse coming and going, like a breath, an exhalation, pushing at the rocks above it and distending them. That dynamism is now fixed in the form of the rocks. You can find precisely the point – it is revealed on the shore in the bay next to the house – where the inrush of radiant magma came up against the cold mudstones in the roof of the cavity. Pull away the kelp and the serrated wrack. The little green crabs scuttle for the dark, the tiny transparent shrimps wriggle like rugby players in a tackle, and you can see the instant of creation frozen and preserved in front of you. The raging heat of the magma meets the old, cold mudstone and that meeting has had a double effect.

Elsewhere on the islands, you can see in the mudstones the layering of the sediments as they had settled onto the Jurassic sea-bed and you can find many fossils of ammonites and belemnites embedded in them like meat in a cold pie. Here, though, that has all been lost in the cataclysm. The mud stones have been baked hard into the solid grey stone called hornfels, without layers in it and without fossils. If you break the stone open, though, as Mike Henderson showed me, you can find the ghosts of the life once preserved here. Heat and pressure has transformed everything that was once in them and a faint, coppery, gilded sheen coats the inner surfaces of the rock. These are what Mike Henderson called ‘the pyritised remains’, the only evidence of the fossils which the rock once held, reduced in the furnace to this undiagnosable inkling, a breath of a suggestion, like the ash of an abandoned hearth. But the mud stones also exacted their price from the magma. Where the hot, molten intrusion came into contact with the country rock it was suddenly chilled. The semi-crystalline mush of the liquid, a kind of hot granita, was shocked into solidity by the old, cold stones. In suddenly becoming solid, the minerals in the magma are small, almost instantly formed and so the rock is as smooth and as fine-grained as cheese. That analogy is curiously exact: where you have broken the rock open, the fracture marks are exactly like those you find on the open face of a piece of broken Parmesan. ‘Chill’ or ‘chilled margin’, as this frozen magma is called, sits all alongside the hornfels on the beach, the twin products of intense heat meeting ancient cold, fifty-eight and a half million years ago.

Many things are still not clear about the making of these islands, nor is the precise order of events certain. Broadly though, it seems that several blades or ‘sills’ of magma were intruded here over a period of perhaps a century or two. One fairly narrow one, having cooled quite quickly, can be seen in the Galtas. Another makes the rib of rock through which the natural arch passes at the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean. A third forms Eilean Mhuire and the fourth, by far the largest, 537 ft. thick, created the vast bulk, about four hundred acres, of Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe. No one has yet found how these sills are related to each other, nor how they are connected to the huge feeder pipe along which the magma arrived from the south, but it is obvious that some of the old Jurassic rocks, the mudstones and shales, were caught up in the process. Most of the top of Eilean Mhuire consists of a huge raft of those older rocks buoyed up like a baulk of wood on the flood of magma which poured in, mostly below but some also above it. Another slab of old rock crosses the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean and has been eroded in the bay that stretches out below the puffin slopes there. Those soft and crumbly rocks, full of the nutritious minerals which accumulated on the Jurassic sea-bed, make far better soils than the hard, solidified magma of the sills. These Jurassic rocks, richer than almost anything in Pairc or Harris, and comparable in Lewis only to equivalent rocks around Stornoway, have been the basis for most of the farming on the Shiants. Without the wealth of Eilean Mhuire and the beautiful meadows at the Bagh on Garbh Eilean, it is difficult to think that life on the Shiants would ever have been possible.

For the professional geologists, this story is only the introduction to the book. They seek to penetrate much further into the arcana of chemical detail, above all into the diagnostic mineralogy of the different sorts of rocks to be found on the islands.

Previously it had been thought that the different minerals that can be seen in different places were the result of large crystals settling towards the bottom of the sill as the magma cooled. That was the old orthodoxy developed in the 1930s but Fergus Gibb and Mike Henderson have over the last four decades pushed most of that aside and discovered a quite different process.

As they have revealed, the enormous main sill of Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe is itself made up of at least four different pulses of magma. These were not violent events but of great scale and immense power, slowly applied; a slow squeezing apart of an abscess the size of fifty city blocks. The Shiants laid on Manhattan would stretch from Wall Street to Times Square. These successive pulses are not, as you might think, laid one on top of another, in the way you would assemble a sandwich: mustard on top of the ham on top of the cheese on top of the butter on top of the bread. Not at all: each new one inserted itself, in a hot, licking tongue of new magma, within the body of those that had come before. They could only have done that if the preceding magma was still quite soft. In other words, here in this main sill, they must have followed, one from the other, quite quickly. The picture is of a gradually fattening sandwich, made in something like a piece of pitta bread. You begin with the bread alone, and one by one, butter, jam and peanut butter are squeezed inside it. The sequence you end up with, then, is: bread, butter, jam, peanut butter, jam, butter, bread.

In the Shiants, although the sandwich is 537 ft. thick, it is almost precisely like that, made up of four interleaved layers. The first, of a rock called teschenite, was 6 ft. thick (the top and bottom of this layer are now 531 ft. apart), the second (picrite), 78 ft. thick, the third (crinanite-picrodolerite), 440 ft. and the fourth (granular olivine picrodolerite), just 13 ft.

Beyond that, I fear, it becomes difficult for a layman to follow. I could tell you about the mineralogy of these islands, with the intriguing differences between picrite (which cooled slowly, so has big crystals and looks wormy, with an eroded surface like the mottled, liver-spotted skin of a toad or like penne in a pesto sauce) and picrodolerite (quicker cooling, a fine, granular porridge), or about the beauty in freshly broken rock of the tiny grape crystals of the olivine and the big black glitter of the pyroxenes, about the evolution of the magma over the years of its emplacement, so that the last spurts of it produce a strange, white, open-structured, vast-crystalled rock called syenite on Eilean Mhuire – but I won’t. This is not the place.

After the magma from the vast chambers below had finally exhausted itself, the Shiants, still deep underground, began to cool. From both above and below, the chill started to reach inwards into the heart of the semi-liquid mush, like the hemlock in the limbs of Socrates. It might have taken a century or so for the rock to become solid. As it cooled, it shrank, and that is the origin of the columns of which the Shiants are made. Any large body of shrinking material, contracting over its entire width, pulls apart from itself internally. Shrinkage cracks develop in the body of the rock identical to the network of polygons that develop on the floor of a drying lake. The columns are nothing more than a network of cracks extended into a third dimension.

If this cooling had been conducted in laboratory conditions, where the magma sheets were of equal thickness throughout and both upper and lower surfaces of the intrusions were level, then a structure of complete regularity would have emerged. All the columns would have been straight, the same size, and parallel. But this is not a laboratory. Some of the intrusions were clearly thin (in particular the one that formed the Galtas) and cooled more quickly. This has meant that the columns are themselves much thinner there. More intriguingly and beautifully, it is clear that the opening into which the magma squeezed was uneven. The columns would have formed by growing perpendicular to the cooling surfaces and here the unevenness of those surfaces has created columns that curve, twist and bend, are waved like the hair of art deco statuettes, fixed in the elegance of a geological perm, Jean Harlow turned to stone, Madonna having glimpsed the Gorgon.

Others, such as the upper sections of the north cliffs on Garbh Eilean, cooled so quickly that whole slaggy masses of rock became solid before columns could develop. Below them, deeply buried in the huge Garbh Eilean sill, the magma cooled very slowly indeed and here the Shiant rock-forms attain the great magnificence of the giant columns. These were the forms over which John Macculloch, the early geologist, enthused in 1819:

The lover of picturesque beauty will here, as in many other parts of the Western islands, be gratified with a display of maritime scenery combining the regularity of Staffa with the grander features of the coast of Sky. Towards the north it exhibits one continuous perpendicular face of naked rock. This face is columnar throughout, and forms a magnificent scene for the pencil; spreading in a gentle curve for a space of 1000 yards or more, and impending in one broad mass of shadow over the dark sea that washes its base. In simplicity and grandeur it exceeds Staffa almost as much as it does in magnitude; offering to the tourist an object as worthy of his pursuit as that celebrated island, and of no very difficult access from the northern extremity of Sky.

The Shiants languished in obscurity, while their more famous, and more accessible cousin-rocks off Mull became ever more visited. Perhaps the open waters of the Minch protect the Shiants from fame. Perhaps the nearness of Staffa to Iona creates its public success. And having witnessed, from the deck of a boat, Staffa sagging one summer’s day under the weight of its geological trippers, I can only say; ‘Thank God’.

A Gothic fate awaits the Shiants. There has been a steady geological drizzle over the millennia which has created the huge scree slopes at the feet of the cliffs. Giant pencil stubs the size of small houses lie tumbled like the aftermath of an earthquake. Sometimes, groups of them still hang together as if thrown in a clump on the rubbish heap. The birds live in many-storeyed tenements among them. If you walk across them, the lorry-sized rocks wobble and creak beneath you. Shiant dynamism is not over. The cliffs themselves are a symptom of the slices being taken out of them and the hard edges of the islands are signs of destruction in progress. ‘The upper millstone heaven,’ Ted Hughes once wrote, ‘Grinds the heather’s face hard and small.’ It isn’t only the heather. Fergus Gibb reckons that ‘a million years or two should see the Shiants off.’

Every spring, I look for the new scars, the beds from which the lumps of rock have broken away. They are unnerving places. Where the splits have occurred, the remaining edges are as sharp as knives. You can cut your hands on them. For some reason, the bare unlichened stone smells of iron or even blood, because blood smells of iron too. The smell is one of deep antiquity, a release into the nostrils of elements in the rock which have not been volatile since the rock was made. It feels as intimate as poking your fingers into a wound.

I have never witnessed something which I have spent hours in a boat waiting to occur: the collapse of an entire column from a cliff. Fergus has only seen it once, and then not here but in the similar rock formations in Trotternish, the northern wing of Skye, twelve miles or so to the south. He too was in a boat on the quiet sea. Alerted by a shuffling, a distant rumbling in the silence which on still summer days hangs around these places, Gibb looked up from his notes. Across the bay, an entire thin pencil, perhaps three hundred feet high, six or eight feet across, was slipping in slow motion into the sea. The base of the column, like many of them, must have been eaten away by the sea. Incredibly, the columns of which the islands are made are scarcely more bound to each other than pencils in a box and once the base has gone, knocked out by a winter storm, there is nothing to withstand the force of gravity. That morning, the column slid down, buckled and then fell, not like a felled trunk but with the shaft snapping in two places in mid-air before the three giant sections crashed like stone hail into the stillness of the Minch. The birds clattered away from the impact, the wash ran up to Gibb’s boat and on past it and the silence pooled back in. Fergus said it was like a glacier calving.

These rocks are killers too. In 1796 the Reverend Alexander Simson, the Minister of Lochs, described the Shiants in his statistical account of the parish:

There is one family residing on the largest of the islands. The head of this family has been so unfortunate as to lose, at different times, his wife, a son, and a daughter, by falling down great precipices; the mother and son met with this catastrophe in following sheep, and the daughter, by going in quest of wild-fowl eggs.

There is no further explanation of why they should have fallen. It is easy enough to slip on the dew-wet cliff-top grass, or to be blown away in a sudden gust, or for a rope to fail, but it seems likely enough to me that the collapse of part of a cliff might be to blame.

More recently, the sheer instability of Shiant rocks killed a boy. On 28 June 1986, a party of teenagers and their teachers from Cranbrook School in Kent had just arrived for a summer expedition to the islands. It was a beautiful evening, and as they were putting up their tents, one of the boys, Simon Woollard, an experienced alpinist and gifted climber, decided to climb the small cliff just behind the house. It is no more than twenty feet high and I have often climbed it myself, pushing up past the bunches of wild thyme, the purple knapweed and the hart’s tongue ferns, without ropes, for fun. We had given names to some of the routes – ‘Grassy Chimney’, ‘The Squeeze’, ‘Crab Lunch’ – ‘a naughty little climb with pretentious reaches’, as I wrote in the visitors’ book when I was seventeen.

That evening in 1986, Simon Woollard did it by the book. He was belayed from below, wearing a harness and a helmet. His friends were watching him from among their tents on the grassy level behind the house. The Shiants on a summer evening like this, as the sun begins to drop towards the hills of Harris, and the two Galtas stand out as a pair of black moles against the colours of the evening, and as the birds come in from their fishing for the evening wheel between the islands, is the happiest and calmest of places. It could not hurt you. It was then, at about twenty to nine in the evening, that, towards the top of the cliff, a block of dolerite over which Simon was pulling himself came away in his hands. It was about the size of an armchair. He fell with it for a moment but was then held by the rope and the rock sliced through his helmet and into his head. He died there, at the foot of the cliff where he had fallen, and later that night, after many hours’ delay and unspeakable distress for those who were there, a helicopter from RAF Lossiemouth came to take his body and some of his friends back to Stornoway. The others left thirty-six hours later, when Donald MacSween collected them from Scalpay. There is a small plaque at the place where Simon died and none of us has ever climbed there again.

That is not quite true. I came to the islands a couple of weeks after Simon Woollard had died. The evidence was still there: shards of broken rock on the turf at the cliff foot, still sharp, a huge and horrifying stain on the boulders which the rain had not yet washed away. On the evening of the accident, Adam Tozer, the master in charge, had written in the visitors’ book that there had been a fatality. With big, slashing, diagonal lines he had crossed out the pages in which we had described the various routes. ‘DO NOT CLIMB’, he had written across the sketch of the rocks on which the boy had died.

For the first day or two I did what he asked and kept away, but reluctantly. Not to climb what we had always climbed would mean the cliff would be haunted by a kind of denial. These islands were a place in which, if you took care, nothing had ever been denied. You could risk a storm if you knew what you were about, you could happily expose yourself to weather which at home you might have hidden from. I decided to climb the cliff again. I went up to the foot of a familiar route, the Grassy Chimney, an adder’s tongue fern in the cleft above me, a cushion of thyme on either side. I reached up for the first hold, pulled my body up six inches, perhaps a foot, and as I did so, as I applied my weight, I felt the block, a cubic yard of dolerite, ease out a little from its bed. I let go of it as if it were a burning coal and dropped those few inches back to the turf. Never again.

6

I HAVE SAT FOR HOURS on the bench in front of the house – it’s a plank of driftwood on a pair of stones – watching Donald MacSween trawling for scallops (or clams as they are called in the Hebrides) in the waters a mile or two away just south of the Galtas. He has a new boat now, the Jura, but in the 1980s, it was the Favour, a steel thing, not, it has to be said, the greatest beauty that Scalpay has ever known, painted red and white, with its name in huge letters on the wheelhouse.

Sometimes, he and Kenny Cunningham, his crewman also from Scalpay, went on deep into the night and on a quiet evening all you could hear for hour after hour was the groaning monotone of the diesel, a slow surging in its note, as the Favour

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