Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  Paradoxically though, the development of peat was eventually to provide the means by which people could survive this climatic shift. For while the destruction of the native woodlands must have contributed to the growth of the bogs, the forest had never been very substantial anyway. The fuel that was available to people, both from indigenous trees and from driftwood, was most likely becoming scarce by the time that peat had grown to useful depths. And it is peat – cut, dried and burned – that has sustained people in these islands ever since. Those communities without access to it struggled, and sometimes failed to survive. It was, until very recently, an essential element of life in Shetland.

  Today, electricity, gas, coal and oil have largely replaced peat in island homes. But it is still dug by some, out of habit or nostalgia, or because the smell of burning turf has a warmth and a redolence that cannot be replicated by any other fuel. Its thick, blue-grey smoke is inviting and evocative, wrapping a house in warmth and in memories of warmth. But its necessity has now passed, and there on the hilltop it seems the life of the peat itself may be passing too. On the slopes around me, much of it had eroded to the bedrock, drying out and degrading. And below, as I began descending again, towards Channerwick, I could see great swathes of black and grey all around, scars of soil and of stone. In the autumn of 2003, after two dry summers and one dry winter, a single night of heavy rain resulted in thousands of tonnes of peat slipping off the hill where I stood, covering the road, destroying a bridge and walls, killing sheep. Other landslides have occurred elsewhere in the islands since, and as the climate continues to change – with temperatures rising and both droughts and storms increasing – the illusion of stability and permanence that exists on the hill is likely to be shattered more and more often.

  I paused just above the main road, where a small, yellow sign confirmed the latitude. Ahead of me were Hoswick and Sandwick, hidden behind the crest of the next hill; and beyond them lay the sea, and the island of Mousa. There is no cover here, no shelter or protection. Everything is exposed like the bare rock scars. A kind of melancholy had settled on me as I crossed the moor, but I was reluctant to move on and leave the hill behind. I sat on the heather gazing at the sky above, where a few, sluggish clouds drifted east towards the sea. Then I lay back and closed my eyes for a moment, and dreamed I was exactly where I was.

  I first visited Shetland when I was about five years old, on a holiday with my parents. My mother’s elder brother had moved to the islands from Belfast in the late 1960s for work, then married a Shetlander and had a family. My other uncle had followed and stayed, and we came to visit them several times. My mother and father had considered moving north before I was born. Both of them felt drawn here, away from the south of England where I spent my first few years, but it was not until after they separated that my mother eventually made the move. My memories of those early trips are vague, and have mingled with photographs from the family album, which fix them more solidly but less certainly in place. They are images more than they are true memories, snapshot moments that carry little weight. A boy on a beach, playing and swimming in the sunshine; games and tears in the Lerwick street where my uncle lived.

  When we moved north permanently, my mother, brother and I, I was ten years old. My parents had separated some time before that, but family life in Sussex had otherwise continued much as I had always known it. I was too young to really understand the significance of their split, and was anyway surrounded, always, by love.

  The idea of a relocation felt like an adventure, as such things always do to a child. From the moment it was first discussed, I was excited and eager to go. The reality though was different, like going away on holiday and discovering, while there, that you can never go back home. That half my family were with me did not detract from the sense that I had been lifted up and dropped in an alien place, a place that was not and could not be my home. The word for it, I suppose, is deracination – to be uprooted. That was how it seemed to me. My past was elsewhere, my childhood was elsewhere, my friends, my grandparents, my father were elsewhere.

  That feeling of division and separation cut deep into me then. A sense that who I was and what I needed were not here but somewhere else grew inside me, and continued to grow. That sense evolved, over time, into the restlessness that dogs me even today and that triggered, in part, this journey. It evolved too into an unshakable feeling of exile and of homesickness, and a corresponding urge to extinguish that feeling: to be connected, to belong, to be a part of somewhere and no longer apart. It was what Scott Russell Sanders has called ‘The longing to become an inhabitant’, intensified and distorted by an unwillingness to inhabit the place in which I had to live.

  My separation from Shetland was, I thought, as obvious to others as it was to me. And my antipathy, I believed, was reciprocated. According to the twin pillars of island identity – accent and ancestry – I was an outsider and would always be so. Growing up in Lerwick I imagined myself unable ever to truly fit in. I was often unhappy in school, sometimes bullied, and it was those differences, naturally, on which bullies would focus. For the first time I discovered that I was English, not because I had chosen to be so, but because that was the label that was tied around my neck. For a while I wore it proudly, like a badge of distinction, but in the end it didn’t seem to fit. My unsettledness in those early years, my sense of exile and longing, did not find a positive direction until I was sixteen, when I decided to go and study music and to live with my father. To make that choice – to decide the place where I would be – was enormously important. And then came the accident, and choice, again, was gone.

  Shetland, like other remote parts of Scotland, is scarred by the remnants of the past, by history made solid in the landscape. Rocks, reordered and rearranged, carry shadows of the people that moved them. They are the islands’ memory. From the ancient field dykes and boundary lines, burnt mounds and forts, to the crumbling croft houses, abandoned by the thousands who emigrated at the end of the nineteenth century, the land is witness to every change, but it is loss that it remembers most clearly. For some, these rocks reek of mortality. Their forms are an oppressive reminder that we, too, will leave little behind us. In ‘The Broch of Mousa’, the poet Vagaland wrote of how ‘in the islands darkness falls / On homes deserted, and on ruined walls; / The tide of life recedes.’ People have come and gone from these islands, and with them have passed ‘their ways, their thoughts, their songs; / To earth they have returned.’ We are left only with the memory of stones.

  The island of Mousa was once a place of people. It was once home to families, to fishermen and farmers, who lived and died there. But now the people are gone and their homes deserted. The island has been left to the sheep, the birds and the seals, and, in the summer at least, to the tourists. On the day I visited, there were fifteen of us – British, Scandinavian and North American – making the journey on the little ferry, Solan IV, which carries passengers between April and September. It is a short trip from the stone pier in Sandwick to the jetty on the island, and as we galloped across the grey sound I looked about at the other passengers. One, a man wearing beige combat trousers, checked shirt and red baseball cap, consulted a handheld GPS for the full five minutes of the crossing. He never looked up, never looked out at the water or the approaching island, just stared at the little screen in front of him. It was an odd way to experience the journey, but I was jealous of his gadget, and of the accuracy it promised. I wanted to see what he could see.

  A remote island of just one and a half square miles might seem an unusual tourist attraction, but people come to Mousa for several reasons. First, there is the opportunity to explore an island once occupied, now uninhabited (what you might call the St Kilda factor). There is, too, the chance to see birds and seals, which take advantage of the lack of people to breed here in large numbers. But most of all, people come here for the broch. While Mousa is just one of around one hundred known Iron Age broch sites in Shetland, and several hundred in the whole of Scotland
, it is nevertheless unique, for only this one still looks much as it did when it was first built, over 2,000 years ago. For this fact alone Mousa would be impressive, having withstood two millennia of human and climatic violence; but no less remarkable than its longevity is the actual structure itself, standing at forty-four feet: the tallest prehistoric building in Britain. In shape, it is rather like a power station cooling tower, bulging slightly at the base, where its diameter is fifty feet, and slimming gently, then straightening to vertical towards the top. Constructed entirely of flat stones, the broch is held together by nothing more than the weight of the stones above and the skill of the original builders. It is an outstanding architectural achievement. Inside is a courtyard, separated from the world by double walls more than three metres thick. And between the two outer walls a stairway winds upwards, giving access to cells at various levels, and ultimately to the top of the tower, where visitors can look at the island spread out around them.

  Will Self has called Mousa Broch ‘one of my sacred sites. For me, comparable to the pyramids’. And that comparison is understandable. The broch is beautiful and mysterious, imposing and tantalisingly intact. Yet we know almost nothing of the people who – around the same time that Ptolemy was marking Shetland on the map – decided to build this structure. It is safe to assume that the architects of Scotland’s brochs were a militarised people, for the towers’ defensive capabilities are obvious. But there is something about this broch that implies more than simply defence. Its massive size seems beyond necessity, and the sheer extravagance of it suggests that, if security was the primary concern, it must have been built in a state of extreme paranoia. So perhaps a more likely possibility is that the brochs were built not for defence alone, but as acts of self-glorification by Iron Age chieftains. They were status symbols, born of a bravado much like that which created skyscrapers in the twentieth century: a combination of functionality and showing off.

  That this particular example has survived so perfectly for so long is partly a result of its remoteness, and partly because nobody has ever had the need to take it to pieces. While other ancient buildings have been plundered for useful material over the millennia, Mousa’s beaches are still crowded with perfect, flat stones, providing all the material the island’s inhabitants ever required. The rocks which helped to create such an extraordinary structure have remained plentiful enough to help ensure its long life. And today, those rocks are protecting other lives too. Press your ear to the walls of the broch and you will hear the soft churring and grunting of storm petrels, the tiny seabirds that patter their way above the waves by day, returning to the safety of their nests at night. Seven thousand storm petrels – eight percent of Britain’s population – nest on this island, on the beaches and in the broch itself. The building seems almost to breathe with the countless lives concealed within: past and present hidden, sheltered among the rocks.

  The people who built this broch, who lived in and around it, seem far out of reach to us today, an enigma. Archaeologists and historians examine the available clues carefully and they make assessments, suppositions. But in our desire to eradicate mystery from the past, and to understand and know these people, we forget one crucial point. We miss the real mystery. Sitting on the grass beneath the broch, looking back towards the Mainland, I scratched my wrists and brushed the midges from my face. There was no wind, and the insects were taking advantage of the opportunity to feed. The clouds hung low over the sound, and draped softly onto the hills across the water. What struck me then, as I leaned back against the ancient stone wall, was not the great distance and difference that lay between now and then, nor was it the tragedy of all we do not know. What struck me was the sense of continuity, and the deep determination of people to live in this place.

  Rebecca West once wrote that certain places ‘imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy’. This stamp is what Lawrence Durrell called ‘the invisible constant’; it is the thread that holds the history of a place together, the sense of sameness that cuts through the past like a furrow through a field.

  In Shetland, human society has evolved in both gradual and sudden movements. For a few hundred years people built brochs, and then they stopped. In the two millennia that followed many other changes took place. New people came, bringing a new language and a new religion, before they too disappeared when the Vikings arrived in the late eighth century. Yet despite these changes, despite all that came and went in that time, always it was the land that dictated the means of survival. The Norsemen arrived as Vikings, but they became Shetlanders. They became fishermen and farmers, just as the Picts had been, just as the broch-builders had been, and all those before them. Crops were sown and harvested; sheep and cattle were reared and killed. The land scarred the people, just as the people, in turn, scarred the land. If there is an ‘invisible constant’ or identity bestowed by a place upon its inhabitants, it could only be found there, in that relationship, that engagement with the land. It is not inherited, but earned.

  As I walked slowly back towards the boat, a cloud of Arctic terns – called tirricks in Shetland – billowed like a smoke signal from a beach just ahead. Some of the birds drifted southwards, swooping then hovering above me, pinned like little crucifixes against the sky. Everything about the terns is sharp – beak, wings, tail – even their cries are serrated. And their tiny forms belie an aggression that can terrify the unwary walker. Like the Arctic and great skuas that share this island with them, tirricks attack without hesitation anyone who seems to threaten their nesting ground. There is no subtlety in their assault. They simply wheel and swarm above, then dive, each in turn, screaming as they drop. It is enough to discourage all but the most determined of trespassers.

  It occurred to me, almost too late, that I had forgotten why I was here on the island. The departure time for the ferry was approaching, but I pulled the map out of my bag and tried to locate the parallel on the paper. I was only a hundred metres or so from the line, it seemed, so I hurried ahead to find it. But when I turned the next corner I stopped again, for standing just where I was heading was the man in the red baseball cap, staring down at his GPS. Clearly he too was looking for the parallel. The man took a few steps back, and consulted the gadget again, head down. By this time he was only ten metres or so away, and soon noticed that I was standing watching. He turned, as if to ask what I was doing. I smiled the best smile I could muster, which probably looked more half-witted than friendly. He didn’t smile back. I wasn’t sure what to do. I could have spoken to him, told him that we were both looking for the same thing, but somehow the seconds passed and we continued to stand there, each hoping the other would just go away. I had no particular desire to explain myself, and he, it seemed, felt the same way. It was an awkward moment, and in the end it was me who gave up and moved on. I nodded, then put my head down and walked towards the jetty, where the little boat was waiting.

  GREENLAND

  in passing

  To reach Greenland from Shetland required a detour in completely the wrong direction, through Scotland and then Denmark, via Amsterdam. From Copenhagen I took a flight back over the North Atlantic, crossing almost directly above Shetland again, and arrived in Narsarsuaq, a tiny airport that clings between Greenland’s southwestern coast and its icecap. My final destination was Nanortalik, a village further south still, but I took my time in getting there, enjoying the chance to explore a place I expected never to see again.

  Public transport in Greenland is by boat or by helicopter – there are no roads between communities – and in springtime it is largely the latter. On the last of my flights, from Qaqortoq to Nanortalik, we lifted calmly from the tarmac, then thundered up and over the fjord, flying low above bare valleys and hillsides, over tundra, lakes, rocks and snow. Below, the land stretched out in a patchwork of brown and green, studded with scraps of white and blue and grey. And then, suddenl
y, the sea.

  In my travels south along the coast I had seen a lot of ice. In Narsaq, I had walked across beaches strewn with stranded bergs, decomposing in the warm spring sunshine. They were a thousand forms: some pointed, with sharp fingers and shards; others smooth, like the curves of muscle and flesh on an animal. Some were as large as cars or caravans, others I could lift and hold in the palm of my hand: tiny fragments, faded almost to nothing. I wandered among these shapes, watching their quiet disappearance, and I felt a peculiar kind of grief. Here was a difficult presence, almost alive and almost unreal, like shadows made solid, or crystalline astonishment. Out in the water beyond, the icebergs were much bigger, but still somehow precarious. They seemed out of place in the sunshine, beside the colour of the town and beneath the blackness of the mountains. Bright, blue-white against the vitreous shiver of the water, the ice like clouds took form in the imagination. Reclining bathers, ships, mushrooms, whales and kayakers. They seemed caught in constant imbalance, between two worlds.

  But now, from the window of the Air Greenland helicopter, I saw something else entirely. Stretched out beneath us, reaching away to the horizon and beyond, was an immense carpet of sea ice, a dense mosaic of flat, white plates like crazy-paving on the dark water. I felt immersed. As far as I could see, the fractured ice lay tightly packed. Great slabs the size of tennis courts, and bigger, were crammed together, and between them smaller pieces in every possible shape. This was storis – pack ice formed in the Arctic Ocean, east of Greenland. Each winter, a dense band of this ice drifts southwards on the East Greenland current, rounding Cape Farewell in the first months of the year, then moving slowly up the southwest coast, disintegrating as it goes. The whole scene was unfathomable. There was nothing for the eye to hold on to; all sense of scale was lost. Here and there an iceberg protruded, but it was impossible to know how large they were. When we buzzed low over a cargo ship, slogging its way through the solid ocean, it looked far too small, like a toy, dwarfed by the cracked expanse of white and glacial blue all around it. I took the camera from my bag and held it up to the window.