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

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      From Rousay I crossed to Eynhallow and wandered its short, circular coastline. The twelfth-century chapel here is another exceptionally atmospheric ruin. It is an intricate but crudely built holy place that looks out upon the fiercest tides. I climbed the chapel walls to view the terrifying overfalls that cut the island off from both sides. Folklore holds that Eynhallow was once enchanted and inaccessible to humans: its occupants were magical Finn-men. They called it Hildaland and were banished, by salt and the sign of the cross, only at the time the church was built. After its sanctification, Eynhallow earth was said to repel even mice and rats so that a bag of the island’s ground became a valuable commodity.

      It’s still easy to believe that the fractious white water of the sounds is an enchantment made to hold Eynhallow at arm’s length from the human world. Fulmars and seals take advantage of the safety provided by the tides, patrolling every section of the shore like guardians. I hung around on a patch of still water in the island’s sheltered eastern bay, waiting for the tide to turn, as a group of tiny harbour seals swam repeatedly around and beneath. Glistening round heads came close enough for long whiskers to brush the kayak, their gentle breath audible as they surfaced (figure 3.5). With a warming sun and clear green water rippling over shell sand, this was the perfect tonic to trials by tide: my last moment within the sphere of the enchantment.

      The contrast as I rounded the north-west mainland a little later couldn’t have been greater. The wind peaked at sunset, bringing untidy seas (figure 3.4) and forcing a crunching landing into a black, rocky shore. Swings in the weather didn’t let up until I left the islands. The next day, which took me down the western edge of the mainland, began in froth and sea spray. A scarred bull dolphin sped below, warning me away from its pod passing further offshore. Then I passed multitudes of rocky protuberances and crevices; these were bleak but colourful on an afternoon that truly was ‘a stark drama of light and darkness’ (figure 3.7). The day culminated in calm views over the final leg of the journey, including the most famous sandstone stack in Britain: the Old Man of Hoy. I turned inshore at dusk, with Hoy’s red cliffs reflected in the sea to starboard and to port the twinkling lights of Stromness. But before I could explore the bookshop, cafés and arts centre of the first substantial town on my kayak down the coasts, I had to face one of my biggest challenges: the journey between the unrelenting cliffs and tides of Hoy.

      Hoy took me two attempts. On my first effort to breach this most treacherous stretch of waters, I tried to take the sting from the crossing by spending the night on Graemsay. I slept by a disused jetty on this small island in the centre of the sound, with Graemsay’s two lighthouses in sight and views across to the orange tinge of Stromness street lamps on the low blue clouds. Despite my precautions, I hit enormous overfalls at Hoy’s north-western corner and was forced back. Even the inglorious retreat to Stromness cost me all the energy, strength and composure I had. I couldn’t help but berate myself. On a sunny day with a gentle breeze my planning had been spectacularly poor. On the two days that followed, winds raged. I waited them out in town, taking the chance to talk with experts in aspects of Orkney and to plan Hoy properly.

      On the third day, I set out in low wind but thick fog and rain. Visibility was poor and the waters starkly contrasting. In most regions of the sea, glossy and slowly rolling waves were gentle and rhythmic; but crashing cross-rhythms resulted wherever rock challenged the will of the water. Listening was my chief tool of navigation through the mist, and I was soon immersed in the patterns that lapped the edges of my boat. By the time I reached Hoy’s cliffs, I was surrounded by the boom of breaking waves, listening hard for corridors of silence through the noise.

      I took one break during the day, in the only major breach in Hoy’s western cliffs. This wide bay is ‘the Orkney riviera’ of Rackwick, a collection of eighteen crofts and a schoolhouse where generations of Stromness folk once took summer holidays. My landing was through surf, and the launch back out from the beach of boulders was challenging. Rhythm was everything: processions of breakers a few feet tall alternated with short spells of waves at least twice their height. The troughs between waves revealed rocks beneath the water: obstacles that would make it hard to meet the waves head-on. If a spell of large waves and deep troughs appeared when I launched, my situation would be perilous: I sat listening for almost an hour, trying to find patterns and make predictions.

      This day-long need to listen intently might, elsewhere, have been a chore. But here it felt like an opportunity. Hoy’s waves have perhaps the most famous patterns and rhythms in the north-east Atlantic; hearing their refraction through art had been, twenty years earlier, the start of my engagement with the islands. My dad was a violinist in the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, where the resident composer was Peter Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max. In my teens, Max had given me lessons in playing his Orkney-inspired music. Until he passed away shortly before my journey began, Max was one СКАЧАТЬ