Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  That first night seasickness and sea air had done for me; come twilight, I dozed in my bunk a couple of hours, but when Jill came and said they were going to the village, I got up again and, like the others, made ready to go out. It was nearly midnight, and we went out, because, well, how often do you get the chance to ramble round an uninhabited island, in the northern ocean, in summer? But also, there was something in particular we wanted to witness, which happened only in the darkest hours. Saturday night, and we had a date in town—but instead of glad rags we pulled on winter waterproofs and hats, because even in July the sea winds were persistent and cold.

  * * *

  The island is only a mile and half long. It has one fertile hill, and two flat near-barren peninsulas, one pointing north, one southwest, like two mismatching wings. There are no beaches, all is cliff, swooping now high, now low, and cut with many geos. The sea prowled into every geo; by night its sound seemed muted, though now and then the breeze brought whoops of seal-song. Clouds were gathering, but that was good, Stuart said: the darker, the better.

  We walked westward up a slight rise, which at its crest gave views down a long slope to the ragged peninsula called Sceapull, which soon surrendered to the waves. A dusty, antique sort of light lay over the island; the sea was the colour of tarnished silver. The path led across a hillside, then through a gap in an earthen dyke. At once, within the dyke, the land began to rise and fall in ridges, like those of a vast scallop shell, waist-high ridges between shadow-filled troughs, all with a pelt of long grass that shivered in the wind. The ridges curved downhill toward the sea. Hundreds of years ago oats or barley would have been raised on them, but now, long overgrown, they had become sculptural, land art.

  We passed through that strange estate, then arrived at the shell of St Ronan’s chapel. Just four stone walls, all speckled with lichen, a low doorway, no roof at all. It faced the southern sea, and between the chapel and the cliffs a quarter-mile away were ovals and pockets of darkness, half dug into the earth, and bound by overgrown turf walls—all that remained of the village. Beyond that, beat of the waves.

  This was what we’d come for, something faraway and special, so we settled ourselves against the chapel wall to wait.

  I think I fell asleep. Half asleep, but started awake because someone had laughed right in my ear. It came again—a stuttery laugh in the air, a burst of high chatter, sudden as a match-strike. At once it was answered from within the wall itself. A shape tilted fast overhead and Jill beside me said, ‘Look, that’s one—they’re coming.’ Even as she spoke, another spat of glee came, conjured out of the night air; now several dark shapes were darting about the chapel walls, quick like bats but not bats. They chattered as they flew, and from deep within the walls came rapid replies. Jill cast me a laughing look, as more birds appeared from nowhere to chase and chatter around us, so close we could feel the thrum of their wings on our hair.

  You have to go a long way to find a breeding colony of Leach’s fork-tailed petrels; to a handful of the farthermost islands, St Kilda, the Flannans, and here, Rona, where on summer nights they make the quick dash ashore. Mate calls to mate, dit-dit diddle-dit!, rival pursues rival, one partner creeps back into his burrow-nest, allowing the other to be off on her small black wings, far out to sea.

  The call, to our human ears, sounded like laughter. At the darkest hour, the walls, like a hive, were busy with birds. They’re small as swifts, but their challenge isn’t the ocean storms, it’s the short race ashore. Great skuas—bonxies—prey on them, god knows how, hence their dash by moonlight—except, they prefer no moon. They prefer the darkest of summer nights.

  Surf, and seal-song, and petrel glee. By about two o’clock, dawn was breathing onto the northeast sky again, and there was an urgent wartime feel in the air, of subterfuge and thrill, and exchanges of the birds’ high, rapid Morse.

  Stuart had been prowling about the village; now he came back, a white-haired figure rounding the chapel end.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ I whispered.

  We stood in the chapel doorway, as dark bird-shapes chased above its ancient walls.

  ‘How far out do they go?’

  ‘Right to the edge of the continental shelf.’

  ‘How far’s that?’

  ‘We’re about halfway there. Another fifty miles.’

  The birds jinked about our heads as we spoke; if they saw or heard us at all, they paid no heed.

  ‘Just magic!’

  ‘There’s no’ many . . .’

  ‘There’s loads, look . . .’

  But he shook his head. ‘No, there’s no’.’

  * * *

  Leach’s petrels are rare, so under European law we’re supposed to keep a weather eye on them. This was Stuart’s task—he’d come to Rona to count their secret nests. He had done the same ten years ago; over the next days he’d do it again.

  In the morning—though the sun had been high for hours—we again made our way through the fields-systems to the village. The ruins were all innocence by light of day; not a sound came from them, nor from the stones of the chapel. Human presence and retreat was all they admitted to; they denied all knowledge of the night’s merriment.

  We were blessed with the weather. I had the sensation I always have on Atlantic islands, in summertime, when the clouds pass quickly and light glints on the sea—a sense that the world is bringing itself into being moment by moment. Arising and passing away in the same breath. Stuart, however, meant business. From a rucksack he produced some bamboo canes and plastic tags. Then he handed me a Sony Walkman.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Give three blasts, about thirty seconds, then move on.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere that looks likely.’

  Looks likely. We were standing by a curved waist­-high wall that contained an oval space now brightly carpeted with silverweed. Two stones jutted up from the wall-head like praying hands.

  ‘Does that look likely?’

  He shrugged. ‘Try it.’

  I held the Walkman to a tiny gap between stone and turf, and pressed the button. The tape whirred, then issued the dit-dit diddly-dit of a Leach’s petrel, and at once, from under the stones, a muffled but outraged householder dit diddle-ditted right back again. It made me laugh, but Stuart wrote a figure on a plastic marker and rammed it into the turf.

  ‘You do the rest of these walls. This’ll be your patch. We’ll do the village every day. Jill’s taking the graveyard. I’ll do the chapel dyke.’

  ‘Does it work if you play them Abba?’ I asked, but he just gave me a long look.

  It was a joy. In sunshine and a businesslike breeze, I made my way around the old walls, pausing every few yards to press the button and quickly learning the ‘likely places’. Some burrows were neat round holes in the turf; the birds dig them out with their feet. If I saw such a burrow, I played the tape, then pressed my ear to the turf. Silence was disappointing, but every time a bird responded from within, it made me laugh again. If a burrow was live, if a bird was tucked inside, there were tiny signs: broken grass stalks, a discreet dropping. You could sometimes smell their peculiar rich, musty odour. Some burrows had no visible door; the response came from deep within green tussocks, as if from a fairy boudoir. Now and again the tape elicited some sexy Eartha Kitt purring—that was the female. Only males made the chatterbox call; sometimes if one piped up, he set off his neighbours, too, so a turf wall, centuries old, warming in the sun, started up like a barrel organ.

  I found myself saying, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sorry’, and began to feel like a door-to-door salesman, except, if I looked behind me, there was the ocean, brightly shifting everywhere, meeting the sky in every shade of grey. A little farther uphill, around the chapel, Jill and Stuart worked at their own sections, leaning in to their own walls, as if listening to the heartbeats of stones.

  But when we met to compare notes Stuart was again muttering darkly. It was not good, he said. Not like last time. Worrying.

&nbs
p; * * *

  Over the next ten days, he covered the entire island, from the lighthouse at the eastern clifftop down to the ends of both storm-scoured peninsulas. Sometimes Jill and I helped. We laid blue nylon ropes over the ground to mark off strips of land, so we could tell where we’d been when every stone began to look like every other. Within the roped sections, we crawled a few yards apart, playing our tapes under rocks and cairns. Sometimes birds answered, and soon I couldn’t see an unexplored rock without my heart giving a little leap—a likely place! We found bits of birds, a cradle of seals’ ribs, the exquisite skeleton of a starfish, no bigger than a thumbnail. It was a curious task, very intimate, to sail to a faraway island, then crawl over it on hands and knees, like pilgrims or penitents.

  Every morning we worked the village, which held by far the greatest concentration of birds, and soon developed a feel for the colony’s dynamic. If a bird who’d replied every day for three days was suddenly absent, he got a cross against his number in my notebook, and I knew that he’d slipped out to sea in the small hours. Gone from the chapel, from the village. A wing and a prayer. Now his mate would be sitting meekly on her single egg, a dark eye in the darkness within the dyke.

  * * *

  While Stuart spoke to the birds, Jill communed with stones. First she concentrated on St Ronan’s chapel. It’s just a shell now, the stones of its western gable much collapsed. It stands at the southern wall of an enclosure, and within the enclosure is a little graveyard, very old. The turf has risen over the centuries, so the humble gravestones, hewn of the sparkly island feldspar, tilt this way and that like little sinking ships.

  Nothing is known of St Ronan but his name, which, oddly, means ‘little seal’—as if he’d been a Rona selkie who’d swapped his sealskin for the habit of a monk. Doubtless he was one of the early Scots-Irish monks, who sailed from his monastery to seek ‘a desert place in the sea’, where he could live a life of austerity and prayer. Hundreds of years later, the people built the chapel in his name, and buried their dead beside it. Now those people are gone, too, and their graveyard is a poignant place.

  But suddenly it was en fête. This was Jill’s doing. One day she went around the graveyard and festooned it with little orange flags on wires, one beside every stone, and the flags snapped in the breeze, so the cemetery seemed to be celebrating a day of the dead. She was plotting the grave-markers on a chart; the orange flags helped her see them as she measured their distance from a baseline: a measuring tape strung across the enclosure wall to wall. She was doing this because the stones were going missing. By studying black-and-white photographs from the 1930s or 1950s, she could tell that the stone crosses were being quietly stolen away—and, by dint of wind and weather, the medieval chapel was ever more collapsed. It troubled her. The chapel, village and all the surrounding fields are a Scheduled Ancient Monument, in the care of the state, but the state is far away and has more pressing concerns. So Jill said, ‘We can at least plot them, so there’s a record of what there was.’ Really, she’d like to get people out here, experts from official agencies, an architect, or a drystone dyker, who could do some discreet shoring up and save the chapel from complete ruination.

  One bright afternoon I held measuring poles and called out the numbers she needed, while Jill, a black baseball cap pulled over her thick hair, bent over a board and mapped the people’s graves.

  Of course it made us think of them. The long-dead people whose graves we knelt on. We called them ‘them’ and spoke about them every day. How did they live, what were their lives like, these people who’d managed for generations, out here alone in the sea?

  The Rona people weren’t unique; they were Gaels, part of the wider culture of the Western Isles, and, as Jill kept reminding us, the sea then was a conduit not a barrier. Nonetheless they lived a long way from any neighbours, had to fend for themselves, with their fields and few cattle and seabirds’ eggs. But by the time Martin Martin wrote his travel journal of the Western Isles, in 1695, the people were already gone. ‘That ancient race,’ he called them, ‘perfectly ignorant of most of those vices that abound in the world’—and when you wander round their village and look out at the uninterrupted sea, you know why.

  Ronan’s name is known, but the names of those buried under the turf are lost, save for one tantalising detail, which Martin provides: the Rona people, he says ‘took their surname from the colour of the sky, rainbow and clouds’.

  ‘Such work,’ Jill would say, as we strolled through the overgrown fields. When I asked her who had first come to Rona, if it were Neolithic or Bronze Age people or what, she just smiled and said, ‘Ooh, we don’t know, do we?’ The sea may have been the highway then, but it was still a long way to venture in a skin-covered boat.

  The work, indeed. All those acres of undulating fields, built up by hand of the scant earth and seaweed. Outwith the enclosing dyke lay the rest of the island, which the people must have known down to every blade of grass, every stone. They must have felt acutely the turning of the seasons, the need to lay down stores and supplies, because summer was brief. We arrived in early July, when bog cotton was in bloom, soft white tufts facing into the wind. Two weeks later, its seeds clung to rocks and grasses, or were out to sea and lost.

  Daily, our sense of time slowed, days expanded like a wing. The days were long in the best, high-summer sense; at night we put up storm shutters on the bothy window to make it dark enough to sleep. Time was clouds passing, a sudden squall, a shift in the wind. Often we wondered what it would do to your mind if you were born here, and lived your whole life within this small compass. To be named for the sky or the rainbow, and live in constant sight and sound of the sea. After a mere fortnight I felt lighter inside, as though my bones were turning to flutes.

  * * *

  St. Ronan rode to Rona on the back of a seamonster, so the legend says. Monster or boat, he’d have jumped ashore giving prayers of thanks, sometime in the eighth century.

  Whether he was really alone, as romanticists would have it, or whether others came with him—monks, lay penitents, men without women—well, as Jill would say, we don’t know, do we? Surely it would have taken more than one to do the spadework; even saints must eat. And if there were people on Rona already, people who knew exactly how many souls the island would support, watching as the Christians’ boat drew nearer—we don’t know that, either.

  But we know what the saint sought, because on faraway Rona there survives something unique. A tiny building. To enter, you must first enter the chapel. Then, low on the eastern gable is another doorway, just a square of darkness with a lintel of white quartz, as though it were Neolithic. You have to crawl, but once inside you can stand freely. At first it seems wholly dark, and it smells of damp earth, but as your eyes adjust, stars of daylight begin to spangle here and there overhead, where, over the many centuries, the stones have slipped a little—so after a while it’s like being in a wild planetarium.

  Darkness, earth—and a sudden quiet; no wind or surf—you find yourself in a place from which all the distracting world is banned. Then you see the stonework. The little oratory is beautifully made, and has stood for 1200 years. A low stone altar stands against the east wall. So there is one thing we know of the saint—he had a feel for stone; strong hands. Or someone did. Having sailed here and claimed this island of sea-light and sky and seals and crying birds, he built himself a world-denying cell.

  Two or three times, when Stuart was inquiring of the birds, and Jill of stones, I crept into the oratory, and waited till my eyes adjusted to the low light. I went warily, because a fulmar had made her nest in a corner; too close and she’d spit. A fulmar guarded the saint’s cell, and it was strange to think there were Leach’s petrels secreted in the walls. Seabirds, named for St Peter, who walked on water, had colonised a cell built by a saint named for a seal.

  I crept in just to wonder what he did in there, Ronan; to imagine him right there, in front of the altar, wrapped in darkness, rapt in prayer, closed of
f from the sensory world, the better to connect with . . . what?

  * * *

  I say we had the island to ourselves, but of course that’s nonsense. There were the seals, and thousands of puffins, and colonies of terns on the low rocks, forever rising against some fresh outrage, and down among the rockpools, shags’ slatternly nests.

  One evening six swifts appeared, circled above the bothy and then vanished again. A party of Risso’s dolphins arrived out of the blue, spent half an hour feeding just off the south side, then they, too, went on their way. The time of thrift had passed; every day, we met a flock of crossbills, of all things, which twittered round the island, feeding on thrift seeds. Crossbills are birds of the northern pine forest, but nary a pine tree here, and long sea miles to travel before they saw one again. There were about a hundred—the males were bright red, and the females brown, so when they all flew by they were like embers blown from a bonfire.