After dumping my belongings in the house, and gathering some driftwood and lighting a fire, the first task is to collect some water. I keep a bucket and a shallow dish in the house. There are five or six wells along the foot of the cliff that lines the landward edge of the island’s coastal strip. One or two have beach cobbles arranged around them, to make them easier to use. Others are scarcely more than scoops in the turf, in which the water seeping from the hill naturally gathers. None is datable. A friend of my father’s relined one with the stones he found nearby twenty years ago. Now, although the water-level in it is for some reason a little lower than before, there is no telling it from the others. It might as well have been done a thousand years ago.
The best well at the moment is about a hundred yards from the house. A large piece of driftwood acts as its cover. Silverweed fringes it and a flake of the lichen on the rocks sometimes falls off into the water where it floats as a shallow scooped raft. Water boatmen skid in from either side. It is no good if you plunge the bucket deep into the pool. All you are left with is a brownish and unappetising bucket of stirred-up, peaty soup. But if you take the shallow dish and allow no more than a sixteenth of an inch to slip in over the brim, filling the dish with no disturbance to the body of the water in the pool, you will slowly acquire a bucket of clean, fresh spring water filtered from the hill above.
This gathering of the Shiants’ sweet water, which has never, even in the driest summers, run out, always feels to me like an engagement with one of the oldest layers in the place. Where the materials like this are constant, and the uses to which they are put will always be the same whatever your beliefs, or language, or habit of mind, history collapses. It is as if time has not passed. This delicate sipping at an island spring is the same now as it must always have been. That is the key to something central about the Shiants. History does not move here in a single current, sweeping everything up into one comprehensive pattern of change, but in a laminar flow, different sheets of time moving at different rates, one above the other, like the currents in the sea. At the lowest level, the coldest and oldest, there is virtually no movement. Life down there is still. Gather the water at the well and you are performing a Bronze Age act. Dig over the peaty soil in the vegetable garden and you are doing what has been done here in the Middle Ages. Call Sarah on the mobile phone and you are doing something that wasn’t possible until the late 1990s. This is not, as people so often say of a landscape, a manuscript on which the past has been written and erased over and over again. It is a place in which many different times coexist, flowing at different speeds, enshrining different worlds.
In early spring, the place is paddled flat by the flock of barnacle geese that live here in the winter. The grass lies down where they have trampled it and looks like the hair of a teenager; unwashed, brownish, greased. All over the surface of the islands – particularly on Eilean Mhuire and the southern end of Eilean an Tighe, called Mianish – lie the goose droppings from the flock. Most of them, according to Calum MacSween, Compton Mackenzie’s grazing tenant here, only arrived after the Campbells had left in 1901. Their droppings, MacSween said, ‘spoiled the water in the Mary Island pools, which until then had been sweet all year.’ They certainly aren’t now: foetid, sour to look at, too pea-green even to be tasted. But the geese themselves are worth it. Walk down to Mianish along the western shore of Eilean an Tighe, past the lazybeds that rim the first bay, across the little burn that runs to the shore in one of the dips between the ridges, clamber carefully across the black-lichened rocks – a lichen that grows only in the splash zone where the storms can reach it and the grass will not grow for the saltiness – keep your head down, out of sight of the flock, not disturbing the sheep either, which would alert the geese, and try to come on the birds at their grazing. A dog, of course, with all its carelessness, would be a disaster and cannot be allowed. Previously, without much of a shift in mentality, I would have had a gun with me. Certainly the early twentieth-century shepherds, Calum MacSween, and his nephew, Donald Macleod (DB as he was known, Donald Butcher), shot their goose dinners when they came to the Shiants early in the year, when the geese were still in the Hebrides, and again on the final visits in November, before the winter closed in, putting the tups on the islands. Then the geese had returned from their breeding grounds in the far north. The barnacles made a better roast, I am told, than the greylag, but were downier. The man plucking them, or so Hugh MacSween maintains, would emerge ‘looking like Father Christmas’, the mass of fine white feathers clogged in his stubble.
I am here to look. I feel more protective of the barnacle geese than of any other animal on the Shiants. They are the winter-spirits of the place. Hardly anyone else comes here in March or early April. The place is more private then. None of the modern train of yachts which anchor in the bay on summer nights dares cross the equinoctial Minch. The private winter islands are the realm of the geese. Come on them slowly. They are scattered across the grass, black and white – white chest and head, a black bib and neck, a black back next to which the wings are barred with grey and white stripes which from a distance gives the effect of moiré or ruffled silk, as elegant and concordant a crowd as the racegoers in My Fair Lady, perhaps four hundred of them, relentlessly pecking away at the ground beneath their feet, looking up now and then, a wary eye, but then face-down again to the grass, tugging at the stems, eating, eating. They are busy. This is no holiday. There is none of that standing around, displaying to each other, socialising, or looking bored, which the puffins and other fish-eating birds do later in the year. The goose’s life is dictated by its intestines. Even these barnacle geese, a smaller and more delicate version of the Canada goose, need to eat all the hours the day gives them. They are flying herbivores and that is their difficulty. Fish-eating birds can acquire the protein hit they need in a few sharp, efficient dives. A cow can invest in an enormous set of stomachs, through which the tough grass stems can be serially fed, slowly digesting the cell walls of the plant within which the most nutritious proteins and sugars are locked. But as the American naturalist David Quammen has written, ‘A Hereford is not obliged to cope with the delicate physics of flight.’ A goose can’t afford all those voluminous stomachs. It can’t even afford to have a stomach that is full. Overladen, it would never fly. As a result, most of what a goose eats passes straight through it in a couple of hours. That’s why a goose is as loose as a goose, and that’s why the Shiants in the early spring-time are carpeted in their droppings.
They are as innocent and flighty as deer. The flock moves in its grazing like a shoal, a turn of a few degrees communicated somehow at the same instant throughout the pack. There is an ever-present suggestion of a tremor even in the way they stand and walk. But for all the beauty of that sight, that million-fingered responsiveness, this land-life on the grass seems to be no more than an interruption to their favoured state. They belong in the air. Lift yourself for a moment, so that more than your eyes and hat appear above the geese’s horizon and it is as if you have blown a breath of wind across the flock. The four hundred of them rise and shimmer like a single piece of cloth lifted by the breeze. The edge of the crowd nearest you moves first, and that beautiful supple sheet of the rest of them follows on with the same ripples in their white heads and black necks, the same slow crooner’s elasticity in the muscles, and same ineffable languor, all synchronised as if tied by invisible threads. A human crowd, suddenly made aware of a threat or danger, would shatter, each shard dispersing as if shot. The flock of geese does the opposite, more whole in the air than it had been on the ground, turning on the wind, a single wing, before beating out over the Minch, down over the small, grassless rock at the southern tip of Eilean an Tighe, Sgeir Mianish (‘the rock of the middle headland’ in Gaelic-cum-Norse) before flogging over into the wind to the equally inviting grass on Eilean Mhuire, a mile and a half away to the east, a coughing, guttural chatter as they pass.
I may be drawn to them but they don’t care for me. They are only h
ere because people like me so rarely are. I have pursued them once but once only. Having disturbed them down on Mianish, I walked the mile back to the beach where the dinghy was tied up, launched it, rowed the mile across the bay to the landing place on Eilean Mhuire, hauled the dinghy up the beach there, climbed the two hundred feet up to the top of that island, walked the half mile down to its eastern tip, the promontory called Seann Chaisteal, the Old Castle, only to see the flock which had been grazing happily there for an hour since I had last disturbed them, lift with that wonder grace, a slow-motion departure, back across the tide-rippled sea to the headland where I had first encountered them.
Sometimes looking up from digging the garden, or sorting out the boat, or collecting firewood from the beach, I will see the flock of Shiant geese strung out against the sky, or wheeling in the gusts that ripple and billow off the back of Garbh Eilean. It is only a question of time before they leave, at some time in April. This is the gateway to summer and I have never witnessed it. All that I have ever noticed is a sudden absence. The paddled turf, the ubiquitous droppings, even the weather, all seem the same, but the geese have gone. It is like a death, or the descent of Proserpina into Hell, a removal of that life-presence which animates a place. The Shiants, then, are like an island from which the inhabitants have been cleared. Nothing has changed except the thing that changes everything.
Not until the nineteenth century did anyone understand this disappearance of the goose and its sudden re-emergence at the end of the year. There was a general belief that the birds hibernated somewhere or other, an idea that went back to Pliny and Aristotle before him. The barnacle goose was thought, but only by the credulous, to retreat into and later emerge from the goose barnacle, a crustacean which attaches itself like a mollusc to the rocks and has a shell which resembles the beak of goose. There is no need to be too condescending about this: still no one has any idea, for example, of what happens to the basking shark in winter. They disappear every autumn only to reappear the following spring. Whether they go out into the mid-Atlantic, or swim south to warm waters or hibernate on the sea floor, it remains invisible to us, and unknown.
There is a strange connection between the Shiants and the question of disappearing birds. According to the late-nineteenth-century Roman Catholic priest and folklorist, Father Allan McDonald of Eriskay, ‘the corncraik and stonechat are called eoin shianta on account of their disappearance in winter. The opinion is that they are dormant all winter, and that they should be so and not die makes people consider them eerie or uncanny or sianta.’
Certainly, that word runs true to the experience of a bird that departs without warning. The emptiness it leaves is haunted by the retinal image of its presence. You feel for a few days that the geese must still be there and that you are simply failing to see them. It is then that the Shiants come to feel like eerie islands.
The Gaelic word probably lies behind the Shiants. ‘Si’ in Gaelic is pronounced ‘sh’ and ‘sianta’ transliterates as ‘shanta’. The ‘i’ in the modern spelling of the word, which is a phonetic transcription of the Gaelic, is a mistake. Either ‘Siant’ or ‘Shant’, not ‘Shiant’, is the way it should be spelled and pronounced. Only those reading from maps ever say ‘Sheeant’. The Old Irish word sén, meaning ‘a blessing’ or ‘a charm’, derives eventually from the Latin signum, meaning a sign of any sort, especially the sign of the cross. From that comes the verb sénaim: ‘to bless’, ‘to make holy’. Its passive participle in Old Irish is sénta, a word which evolved in modern Irish Gaelic into séanta, meaning ‘consecrated’, ‘hallowed’ or ‘charmed’, with a haze of meanings hovering around its outer edges meaning ‘haunted’, ‘spooky’, ‘otherworldly’. This is the word which is often spelled in Scottish Gaelic sianta.
Examples of the name are scattered across Gaelic Scotland. There are sacred mountains in Jura, near Callander and in Ardnamurchan, all called Beinn Sheunta. There is a Loch Seunta, ‘Holy Loch’, in Cowal, and a cave, an Uaimh Shianta, ‘the hallowed’ or ‘the sacred’, in Applecross. There is a Shian Wood north of Oban and a stone circle at Shian Bank in Perthshire. In Skye, Martin Martin described a Loch Siant in the seventeenth century, of which the water was thought to cure diseases. There is a brackish Loch Shient in North Rona, although the derivation of that may be different, describing the sea spray with which the pool is filled. Most curiously of all, there is a record, in one of the Irish Chronicles for the second half of the fifth century, of the Isle of Man having its name changed ‘from Inis Falga to “Ellan Shiant”, that is “The Holy Isle”’.
The Shiant Islands, full of magnificence and strangeness, protected by the Stream of the Blue Men, standing out in the Minch tall, mysterious and beautiful, a challenge and an invitation to any man with a boat and a modicum of courage along hundreds of miles of coastline from Sutherland to Skye and from Ness to Barra, said, as so many of these islands are, to have been the hermitage of a Celtic saint in the Dark Ages: these are the Holy Islands of the Minch.
Most of the names of places on the Shiants are Gaelic and not particularly rich in association or significance. They describe parts of the islands in the way a Crusoe would, by looking at them, by saying what they are, rather than by associating them with anything that might have happened there in the distant past. So there is a Big Beach, a Beach with Boulders, a Washing Place, a Cormorant Head, some Rocks of the Bay, a Seal Point, the Kittiwake Rocks, the Hole of the Seals – the natural arch at the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean – and the Point of the Fank (the gathering place for sheep on Eilean Mhuire). Most of these still have the attributes by which they are named. Sheep are still gathered on Eilean Mhuire at the Bid na Faing. The seals do indeed lounge and wail on the point that is named after them. There is a kittiwake colony not far from their rocks, and there are shags (the Gaelic word sgarbh does not distinguish between a cormorant and a shag) forever standing with their arms outstretched, drying their feathers on the point named after them.
Almost certainly, most of these names are quite recent and do not embody a long tradition. They may well have been given by the shepherds who came here seasonally in the early nineteenth century, after the old Shiant population had left. The Ordnance Survey officers, when recording these names in the 1850s, used as their authority a Neil Nicolson or Nicholson (he couldn’t spell) from the village of Stemreway in Lewis. He may not have known the place very well. The surveyors could speak no Gaelic, and so in this way, here as elsewhere in the Gaelic world, much of the information that might have been gathered was lost. The Shiants must once have had a rich suite of names in which the lives of its inhabitants were folded into the landscape and recorded there, but they will never be recovered. A Harris woman, Christina Shaw, when interviewed a few years ago by the ethnographer Morag MacLeod, told her: ‘There wasn’t the length of between here and the gate that we didn’t have a name for, which is not the case nowadays. Every ben and every mound and every hill … I could name them all.’ All of that has been lost from the Shiants.
Here and there, something older can be traced. The islands are set in a Viking sea. Every prominent headland and inlet around them, every stretch of water, and village after village, township after township on Lewis, were named by the Norse. There are three identifiably Norse place names on the Shiants themselves: Stocanish on Garbh Eilean (‘the Headland near the Sea Stacks’), the mile-long line of the Galtas offshore (perhaps ‘the Sea Gables’) and Mianish on Eilean an Tighe, meaning either ‘the Narrow Headland’ (which it is) or, more intriguingly, ‘the Middle Headland’, which it also is when approaching the islands by sea from the south. A Dublin Viking, making his way back north, would see Mianish stretching out towards him in the haze, the Middle Head, around which the flood tide rips. All three of these Norse places on the Shiants are precisely those which any sailor would need to mark and remember. Other than that, apart from one glowing exception which I shall come to in later chapters, the place-names of the Shiants record not memories but forgetfulness, the
washing away of human lives, the fragility and tissue-thin vulnerability of human culture to the erosion of time.
When I realised that the geese had finally gone, I went to stand on the heights of Garbh Eilean, nearly six hundred feet above the Minch at its most languorous and seductive. The sky was draped with the weightless trails of evening clouds. They were the colours of the prayer flags which Buddhists leave on mountain passes and their brightness had been bleached by wind and sun. Below them, in the stillness of the evening, every inch of the horizon was rimmed with distant sunlit mountains. My eye travelled them like a fell runner. Even to name the hills is a roll-call of ancestors, the Shiants’ own king list. In Sutherland, eighty miles away to the north-east, Foinaven and Ben Stack. Going south, Quinag above Assynt, Suilven and Stac Polly. Above Loch Broom, Coigach matches the ragged notches of An Teallach on its southern side. Behind Gairloch is Beinn Eighe in Torridon, south of that, Beinn Bhan behind Applecross. Each mountain in what Martin Martin called ‘the opposite Continent’, is the bass note to the human settlement at its feet. The eye swings around to Rona, Raasay and northern Skye, each wrinkle in the rock picked out by the last of the light. In the distance, with only their upper reaches appearing over the foreground, are the Cuillins and the strange flat summits of Macleod’s Tables above Dunvegan. On the clearest days, Heaval, the mountain on Barra, is visible past the headlands of Waternish and Dunvegan. Hecla and Beinn Mhor follow in South Uist; a gap and then the shark fin of Eaval, the unmistakable signpost for anyone sailing south in the Minch, the islands in the Sound of Harris; then Roineabhal, the hill above Rodel, which for years was under threat of removal by the workings of a superquarry. If the catastrophe should happen and permission were ever granted, five hundred and fifty million tons of it would be dug out over a period of sixty years and this wrinkled horizon would have changed for the first time since the Ice Age. North of it come the mountains of North Harris, the round bull-seal head of The Clisham, the hills of Pairc and Eishken, before the eye swings up to the north-west, to the low mound of Muirneag, north of Stornoway, and the long flat headlands of Lewis beside it. Only then is there a gap in the list, an opening in the ring, and there you look out to the North Atlantic. Nothing till Spitsbergen.
Sea Room Page 7
