The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange

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СКАЧАТЬ of the island known as Dore Holm, rather than just looking up at its huge arch, and told me about a small entrance just north of the Eshaness lighthouse that had been found only a few years ago. It leads, he said, to a huge chamber inside the cliffs. This was my first reminder that apparently timeless and knowable cliffs are mysterious and shifting. There’d soon be many more.

      Next day, I continued along the sweep of St Magnus Bay, spending a night that was close to perfection on the cliff-bound island of Muckle Roe. The cove I pulled into through a small gap in the island’s towering crags was as rich in grasses, bog cotton and small flowering plants as anywhere I’d seen. Unsurprisingly, the products of the slow dissolution of contrasting rocks – a wildly varied sward of grasses and flowering plants – appear in Shetland culture almost as much as fish and boats. The star among young poets writing from Shetland today, Jen Hadfield, is particularly attentive to plants of bog and cliff such as the butterwort:

      I’ve fallen

      to my knees again not five

      minutes from home: first,

      the boss of Venusian leaves

      that look more like they docked

      than grew; a sappy nub;

      violet bell; the minaret

      of purpled bronze.¹¹

      In ‘The Ambition’ she even dreams of becoming butterwort, lugworm and trilobite, though her ultimate ambition is to be ocean, ‘trussed on the rack of the swell’:

      The tide being out, I traipsed through dehydrated eelgrass and the chopped warm salad of the shallows, and then the Atlantic breached me part by part.¹²

      I sat in this immersive scene and watched Arctic skuas (skootie alan) chase Arctic terns (tirricks) as, in displays of balletic brutality, they forced them to drop their catch or vomit recent meals. And as the air cooled, moths began to clamber up the grasses: after sleepily fumbling upwards they’d shift abruptly, as though at the flick of a switch, into a manic spiral through the evening air.

      After Muckle Roe, a long voe leads far inland, ending in the town of Aith. Following the coast now meant plunging into the heart of mainland. Here, I visited Sally Huband – ecologist, nature writer and Shetland-bird surveyor – who made me soup and pizza, as well as providing valuable local knowledge for the next stages of my journey. Sally explained several of the characteristics of Shetland’s wildlife that had struck me as I travelled. She told me, for instance, that the absence of peregrine falcons is partially explained by the dominance of fulmars in their favoured nest sites: when threatened, fulmars spit a thick oil that’s enough to debilitate a peregrine chick or compromise an adult’s flight. Sally had just flown back from the outlying island of Foula where she’d been collecting great-skua pellets as a favour for a friend who needed them before going to Greenland. Her descriptions of Foula’s geological and biological distinctiveness convinced me that once I’d finished my month’s journey south I would have to make my way there: without reaching Foula I couldn’t claim to have travelled Atlantic Shetland.

      Back on the water I headed for the mouth of St Magnus Bay, but before I could round the lower lip a large island blocked my route. For any sea kayaker, Papa Stour is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Shetland: a mile-wide rock with a twenty-two-mile coastline, pocked with some of the deepest and most complex caves and arches in Europe. It is stranded in the ocean amid speeding tides, and I decided to break the journey through them with a night high on the island’s cliffs. I watched a trawler pass the remote Ve Skerries (another ancient knuckle of bedrock) as a group of Arctic skuas clucked and quarrelled like the drunk family at a seaside caravan park.

      Papa Stour also appealed to Shetland’s first geologists. In 1819, Samuel Hibbert described his arrival across transparent water, which made the boat appear ‘suspended in mid-air over meadows of yellow, green, or red tangle, glistening with the white shells that clung to their fibres’. He observed ‘red barren stacks of porphyry’ that shot up from the water, ‘scooped by the attrition of the sea into a hundred shapes’. Hibbert described many customs, including the Papa residents’ tradition of trapping seals in the famous caves to club them until ‘the walls of these gloomy recesses are stained with their blood’; but he gives a more picturesque vision of his own journey underground:

      The boat … entered a vault involved in gloom, when, turning an angle, the water began to glitter as if it contained in it different gems, and suddenly a burst of day-light broke in upon us, through an irregular opening at the top of the cave. This perforation, not more than twenty yards in its greatest dimensions, served to light up the entrance to a dark and vaulted den, through which the ripples of the swelling tide were, in their passage, converted by Echo, into low and distant murmurs.¹³

      Hibbert was a polymath prone to taking long excursions in corduroy breeches and leather gaiters, accompanied by his dog (delightfully named Silly). It was one of these excursions that took him to Shetland in 1817, but his relationship with the islands was transformed when he happened across commercial quantities of chromite on Unst. In 1818 he began a geological survey covering all the archipelago. In the evening or during storms, he would appear at the doors of crofters, seeking bed or food. Then, according to his daughter-in-law, he would ‘retire to rest lying down in his clothes, dry or wet, on a bed of heather or straw, but not always sleeping, for swarms of fleas might lay an interdict on sleep’. On Papa Stour his hosts treated him to tusk fish and ‘cropping moggies’ (spiced cod liver mixed with flour and boiled in the fish’s stomach). Such dainties, he writes, should make Shetland a place of pilgrimages for discerning gourmands. He adds one caveat: for variety the poor islanders sometimes resort to coarse foodstuffs like lobster.

      In the morning, I explored the caves, though I couldn’t pass far into their depths, lacking the conditions that Hibbert recommends ‘when the ocean shows no sterner wrinkles than are to be found on the surface of some sheltered lake’. I then swung round the headland beneath St Magnus Bay. Passing under yet more rugged cliffs, I called in on the memory of Vagaland at Westerwick, before embarking on the final stages of my Shetland voyage.

      Once I was beyond the geological spectacles of the north, I made my way towards a world of small, fertile islands that were long smattered with settlements but are now home only to sheep. The day I set out through these islands was my first experience of the infamous Shetland haa and so the first time I really had to navigate. After ten minutes on the water, I tore my new compass from its plastic packaging and checked I could read it as I rocked. The conditions were haunting. Sometimes the haa sat flat against the gentle, three-feet swell. At others, it hung just inches from the water and tendrils of grey-white cloud seemed to stroke the surface of the waves. I had intended to spend the night on the island of Havera. But this, I’d since heard, was a place without streams: its community had been sustained by two wells that, a century later, I couldn’t afford to rely on. So I aimed first to find my way between the Peerie Isles (peerie being Shetland dialect for small) to the outside tap at the local Outdoor Centre.

      Mist is an excellent ally in wildlife watching. Today, not much after 4 a.m., an otter stood and watched as I drifted quietly by, while several red-throated divers, known here as rain geese, left it late to sidle off. Conditions, landscape, wildlife and atmosphere had all changed dramatically since St Magnus Bay. After landing and stocking up on water I set off for Havera, a place I’d long been intrigued to see. Slowly, the mist rose, wisps clinging to the moors east of the island, so that Havera gradually brightened from the west. Soon, it was stranded in a wedge of weak light beneath dark and silent skies. Clouds still licked the feet of the rough pewter cliffs long after their brows were clear. As I entered the mile of open water СКАЧАТЬ