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

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СКАЧАТЬ coast of north mainland – the region called Northmavine – is perhaps the most outlandish landscape in Britain: I’d entered a science-fiction vision of an ocean planet. The first headlands, gnarled, grey and viciously gouged by sea, contain some of the oldest rocks in Britain. These soon give way to young red granite pillars and pinnacles, topped with puffins or Arctic terns, which rise directly from the ocean (figure 2.5). Some are smooth and torpedo-like, others prodigiously spiked, and still others have broad bases cut through by arches resembling the galleries of a flooded cathedral. I thought of ‘the living floriations and the leaping arches’ of David Jones’s long poem The Anathemata; in presenting cathedral architecture as an extension of the natural world, Jones insists that nature and culture shouldn’t be seen as separate. Passing through in windless conditions gave me rare access to each dark transept in these enclosed, steep-sided spaces.

      These islands are drowned mountains. Six hundred million years ago a vast ‘Caledonian’ range stretched from what is now Norway to the present-day United States. The islands of Shetland were then peaks of Himalayan majesty, before aeons of erosion ground them to their cores. This mountain heritage shapes Shetland’s modern character: the ocean floor falls away from these ‘erosional remnants’ faster than from most of Britain, so that a depth is reached in half a mile that takes a hundred miles to reach from many English shores.⁸ The behaviour of the ocean and the distributions of fish or oil are all defined by those underwater inclines. The first, grey headlands in Northmavine are a rare point at which no remnant of the Caledonian mountains survives, worn down to bedrock laid 3 billion years ago from quartz and feldspar, before laval heat deformed it into the coarse gneiss basement of today. Later, thick sediments settled over this foundation before the clash of continental plates which, through buckling, thrusting and folding, made the Caledonian mountains. When I gazed up at many mainland cliffs, I was staring through cross sections of those ancient hills, with an access to the distant past that is rarely possible from land. The vast variety of rocks – including granite, marble, limestone, gabbro and sandstone – generates the diversity of foliage above. Limestone feeds patches of green munificence, while gneiss and granite starve the ground into blanket bog.

      Geological distinctiveness has drawn scientists and artists to Shetland for generations. The driving force behind the great twentieth-century renaissance of Scottish literature, Hugh MacDiarmid, moved here in search of ‘elemental things’, by which he meant old language as well as rocks and the forces that moulded them. In ways that are often neglected, his career was defined by Shetland: it is indicative of the scale of Shetland’s impact on his work that most of pages 385–1,035 in his collected poems were written here. MacDiarmid’s son described the strange scene in their Shetland fisherman’s cottage:

      The blazing peat fire, surviving in its grey ashes through the hollow of the night to be fanned fresh with the rising sun, patterned his legs to a tartan-red, and great blisters swelled. But nothing matched the white heat of passionate concentration, the marathon of sleepless nights and days that suddenly ended the sitting around for months indulging in that most deceptive of exercises – thinking.⁹

      When MacDiarmid explored these islands – in his own words, ‘rowing about on lonely waters; lying brooding on uninhabited islands’ – he was actually in the company of a geologist (Thomas Robertson) and a fisherman (John Irvine of Saltness). It seems hard to imagine a group better suited to exploring Shetland than these experts in boats, rocks and words. One result of this alliance, MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘On a Raised Beach’, is perhaps the finest evocation of the entanglement of Shetland’s geology, sea and culture ever written. It becomes a kind of metamorphic metaphysical, with a famous opening – ‘All is lithogenesis’ – that rang true as I weaved my way through dramatic features formed from vertical layers of differentially eroded stone. This is a poem that demands to be read aloud, and deliberately snares the reader in thickets of dialect and science: words piled together like stones on the beach.

      I dug my MacDiarmid from my dry bag and savoured his insistence that seeing is not enough when we confront Shetland rock:

      from optic to haptic and like a blind man run

      My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,

      Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveloes

      Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear

      An angle-titch to all you corrugations and coigns.¹⁰

      When I reached Ronas Voe, one of the most dramatic sections of this coast, I took a kind of risk I never had before, sleeping at the bottom of tall red cliffs, where a tiny beach of silver-white stones seemed to stretch two yards behind the tide line: just enough space to keep me and my kayak out of ocean. From here, I looked up to Ronas Hill, the highest point in Shetland: a frozen former magma chamber from a huge Caledonian volcano.

      Although the days were still fine, this was my first really wet night. Each day so far, I’d stopped kayaking a couple of hours before sleep in the hope of drying out. While at sea, I wear wetsuit boots, neoprene trousers and a thin rash vest that starts out black but after two or three days is mottled silver with salt. Each evening I’d change into warm and comfy land-wear. Sitting back in the sun, with a book by a Shetland author, I’d eat bread and cheese while watching the tides and seabirds pass. But tonight a thin drizzle set in, making the stones of my little beach shiny and slippery.

      Rain makes decisions that would otherwise be of little consequence, such as when to change clothes or how to pack the sleeping bag, into significant moments when mistakes can lead to days of discomfort. I had just one set of land clothes (and nothing has ever dried in the hold of a kayak). So tonight, I rushed straight from my kayak gear into the sleeping bag and went to sleep early. Dampness increased as the rain thickened. True to form, my waterproof sleeping bag let nothing in for hours until I was woken by a thin trickle of water rolling down my neck and pooling above my collarbone. I was glad to be sheltered from the wind that had picked up, but decided that the best chance of comfort was to make a very early start.

      This was the day I’d reach St Magnus Bay: a bowl in the side of Shetland, fifteen miles across, 140 metres deep and forty miles along the involuted edge I’d paddle. Many of the most dramatic remnants of Shetland’s tumultuous geological past line its circumference. I decided to take my time over the first stage of this journey, passing down the stupendous Eshaness cliffs before landing in a cove at a tiny settlement called Stenness and walking to spend the night on the precipice I’d kayaked beneath. But conditions were slowly changing. Where the sea until today had been a blue-vaulted expanse with perpetual views, the swell had risen overnight to become a series of narrow corridors whose silver walls could obscure even the tallest cliffs. I’d wondered whether I might see basking sharks round Eshaness, but today they could have passed within feet without me knowing. For most of the day, this swell was immensely peaceful, its phases gentle and unthreatening as I moved through four dimensions with every stroke. But at the bottom of the Eshaness cliffs, the swell seemed to come from all directions at once: unpredictable and disorienting. The way to deal with this in a kayak is less about the arms than the hips and thighs. At leisure, I sit straight-ish, but the means of responding to complex seas is to lean forward, lower the centre of gravity and grip the kayak tightly with the knees, creating a sense of connection with the boat. After a damp night and in cold wind, I was deeply reluctant to roll this morning and relieved once I reached the simpler water near Stenness Island. Here I stopped on the swell to take pictures back along the cliffs, as best I could, and to observe the place I found myself: the bowl of another volcano. It felt strangely appropriate that in a spot where I was separated from writhing magma only by time, I should be plunging and leaping with violent swell, head rhythmically plunging beneath where my feet had been.

      I landed at Stenness in time for lunch, left my kayak beside an old haaf-fishing station, and began the walk towards the lighthouse to learn these cliffs by watching the setting sunlight shift across them. Before I’d got beyond the bay, the local crofter СКАЧАТЬ