Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  Allowing for leeway and the northward drift of the tide, I am aiming for Sgeir Mianish, the rock at the southern tip of Eilean an Tighe. The heading is eighty-eight degrees magnetic, in effect due east. Slowly enough I gain on the Galtas. The shore of Harris retreats and greys. The stripes of the lighthouse on Scalpay fade with the distance. The bulk and reality of the Shiants grows with each yard. The enormous swells coming down from the north were breaking across Damhag in a band of surf half a mile long. In the sunshine it looked Hawaiian; a steepening of the wave along that full broad front, a blueness as deep as a new-born eye, and then above it the absolute white of the wave-cap, tumbling and breaking the whole length of the wave wall, a rippling as the sea crossed the rock bar hidden beneath it. Donald MacSween, the Scalpay fisherman, the tenant of the Shiants for many years after his cousin Hugh MacSween had retired, and now my mentor and guide to the waters of the Minch, had told me about Damhag in a swell: ‘That’s when it’ll be wearing its crown,’ he had said. ‘Crowned white from one end to another.’

  The islands are flushed with greenness and colour. My heart expands at the Shiants’ spring-time welcome. On the bigger Galtas, where there are now no sheep to graze, the sea mayweed, which is like big, luscious chamomile, and the thrift, the sea campion and the rock rose have erupted into flowering cushions of newness. The winter outlines of these islets have changed. Now they are sprouting lumps of new growth, soft-edged warts, coloured carbuncles on the faces of familiar friends. On Galta Beag the sea pinks are so thick that the whole island, even from a mile away, has a pink flush, as if the rock were blushing.

  Once ashore in the spring-time, it is difficult to imagine that the islands could ever be unkind. Winter does not exist. I walk through the new grass with my shoes off. The geese have left it paddled flat but it is already, quite literally, springing back. There are primroses in the clefts of the rock and violets as big as pansies next to the well. Thrift makes its cushions on stones where it seems impossible to derive any sustenance, and next to them, where the sheep cannot reach them, the sea campion or bladder campion makes white gardens in the wilderness. There are forget-me-nots growing by the stream and the first dark, hairy leaves of watermint have gathered at its edge. The lichen glows like cracked lacquer on the cliffs. Big, lush, red campions, some pinker, some paler, grow in the clefts between the columns. English stonecrop, only just lifting its head above the modesty of a lichen, encrusts the grooves and shallows of the boulders. The spear-tips of the flag irises have begun to prod above the surface of the bog, sharp but still flowerless, a stipple of brighter green among the tweed of the marsh plants. The orchids too are now just poking above the grass, and in the marshes the kingcups glow like cartoons of marshland flowers as the snipe flick away from your footstep, a jittering into new life.

  This is what I have come to the Shiants for, year after year, at just this moment. It is a half-season. The new lambs all have the same little bony body, the same strange combination of fragility and resilience, the same jumpy immediacy. On their suddenly vast green grassy playground, they perform from time to time a startling leap, all four legs in the air, a quiver along the tensed back, a sudden blowing off of the synapses, for no real reason and always followed by a look of bemused horror. Why did my body do that? What is this sensory, neural life I have acquired? Am I me? What is this shocking, jerking, stuttering of which I am a part? Where’s my mother?

  Spring here is always beautiful for those uncertainties, for its hesitations and incongruities laid alongside each other without comment or context. ‘I will be fed,’ the lamb’s cry says. ‘I will not be fobbed off. But help me, look after me, I need you.’ And spring replies, ‘I will freeze you and cosset you, I will be everything you have hoped for and nothing you could desire, I will be banks of primroses open to the sun and the reticent, denying face of the vernal squill in shade.’

  It is the season of discontinuity. The other three have a sort of wholeness to them. All of them have something at least of unbroken length and continuity. Think of the summer and what drifts into your mind – or mine anyway – is languor, the breadth of the grass banks on Eilean Mhuire where the thick summer growth stretches unbroken from cliff to cliff, the length of days, the sheer extent of summer; autumn hangs on like an old tapestry, brown and mottled, a slow, long slide into winter, unhurried in its seamless descent into death; and winter itself, of course, has persistence at its heart, a long, dogged grimness which gives nothing and allows nothing and becomes more dreadful each year, one long, wet, dark, hard day after another.

  There is none of that in spring. Its music is broken and jerky, moving backward as much as forward, offering gaieties and delicacies only to withdraw them, with frost as much as warmth in its heart. Botticelli’s Primavera does not belong in the Hebrides but it is the true image of the Hebridean spring. Among the crowd in the picture, it is Flora who commands your attention. She walks barefoot through a meadow. The flowers are brooches on its cloth. Her dress, arms, neck and hair are garlanded with flowers. Her manner is delicate but definite, like a Grace but more tentative, or like the Venus behind her but newer, less knowing. There is nothing lush here. Flora is in the process of becoming: the embodiment of life as life actually emerges. That is why, like spring, she is still slightly withdrawn. She still has something of the winter in her. And every time I walk around the early spring-time Shiants, I see her on the path ahead of me, picking her way between the stones and the flowers.

  The Barnacle geese are on their way to Greenland. They follow the spring north, catching the wave of new grass as it sprouts under the sunshine. The birds are tuned to the world, to the planetary fact of the northern hemisphere tipping towards the sun and their journey is an elegant and perfectly measured surfing on the breaking wave of greenness that ripples towards the Arctic with the spring. From a satellite you could see them, long skeins of the goose bodies, sewn like stitches into the air, travelling in family and in island groups, flogging north with the lengthening of the days. From offshore islands along the entire length of the west coast of Ireland, clouds of them from the coast of County Clare and the Arans, a huge concentration leaving from the Inishkeas at the tip of County Mayo, others in Sligo Bay, a scattering all along the coast of Donegal, up to Malin Head, over to Islay and Tiree, from one island after another the flocks have lifted away.

  The Shiant birds have joined them. Day and night they are making their way to the Faeroes and then on to the valleys of north-west Iceland, concentrating in the spring-time in their tens of thousands, descending en masse to the wet river pastures of Húnavatnssýsla and Skagafjarðarsýsla before heading off again, across the Denmark Strait to the breeding grounds in north-east Greenland, between Kangertittivaq and Orléans Land. There, at last, in a savage stretch of country, whose hinterland is one enormous glacier, sliced with deep fjords and glacial valleys, and on the islands that lie offshore, they arrive for the nightless summer months to breed. The Shiant geese, it is thought, will remain together there, recognising each other, a flock within a flock, and will return together in the autumn with their young.

  The geese are en route for a few weeks each spring and again each autumn. If you could watch the North Atlantic over the centuries, you would see their passage flashing on and off twice a year. From the west coast of Ireland, across to the Inner Hebrides, up past the Shiants to Rona and Sula Sgeir, on to the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland, this is a line creased into the palm of the world’s hand. It is also a map of something else. These were the paths taken by the Celtic hermits between the sixth and the tenth centuries. Is it possible that they, in search of ‘a desert in the ocean’, followed the track the geese had blazed for them? It is often said that the wild goose became a symbol in the early Celtic church of the Holy Spirit. There is no evidence for that. But this is a separate question. Did these wonderful birds lead the churchmen, by example, to the north?

  Whether in the wake of the geese or not, the idea of holiness clings to the Shiants, as t
o other islands. Remoteness from the world looks like a closeness to God and intriguingly, it turns out that the association of islands and holiness predates anything Christian. There was an important Christian moment on these small Hebridean islands but it was part of a much longer continuum. There is some evidence that, in Britain in particular, islands were thought of as holy places long before the Christian idea of the hermit arrived here from Egypt in the sixth century. Three pieces of evidence coalesce. In Plutarch’s essay ‘On Oracles that have ceased to function’, the Athenian scholar and philosopher reports a conversation that occurred in Delphi in about AD 83. A traveller called Demetrius of Tarsus, a grammatikos, a literature teacher, had just returned from Britain. The traveller told the priests at Delphi what was happening at the far end of the world:

  Demetrius said that many of the islands off Britain were uninhabited and widely scattered, some of them being named after deities and demigods. He himself had sailed, for the sake of learning and observation, to the island nearest to the uninhabited ones, on an official mission. This island had a few inhabitants, who were holy men, and all held exempt from raiding by the Britons.

  At just this period, another man called Demetrius (or perhaps the same one: there are few Greeks mentioned on Roman inscriptions in Britain) left two small bronze votary tablets at a temple in the Roman city of York. One was dedicated to the ‘Gods of the Governor’s Praetorium’. The other ‘to Ocean and Tethys’, the male and female deities presiding over the wildness of the outer sea. And again, at this same period, the last years of the first century AD, Agricola was conducting large-scale sea-borne explorations of the west coast of Britain, sending a fleet around Cape Wrath and through the Minches. It is at least a possibility that Demetrius was describing the situation in the Outer Hebrides and the Shiants may well have been holy for millennia. And were these islands once, I wonder, named after a Pictish deity, as Demetrius described?

  What can only be called a pagan sense of the holiness of islands lasted well into the historical period. When Martin Martin in the 1690s asked a man of Lewis

  if he pray’d at home as often, and as fervently as he did when in the Flannan Islands [a group to the west of Lewis], he plainly confess’d to me that he did not: adding further, that these remote Islands were places of inherent Sanctity; and that there was none ever yet landed in them but found himself more dispos’d to Devotion there, than anywhere else.

  Because of this sense of ‘inherent sanctity’, a whole set of superstitious rules applied to the language people could use on the Flannans and to the way they could behave.

  Customs of this kind are not recorded for the Shiants but the same conditions apply. They, too, are never given their true name in Gaelic but are called ‘the Big Islands’ or even simply ‘The Islands’. What is it about islands that summons this tiptoeing around them? This is difficult and speculative territory, but it is worth considering why, outside any Christian framework, islands have for so long felt holy. The Christian experience is centrally shaped by the experience of Christ in the desert, and by the idea that Satan and the flesh can be overcome by exposure to the dangers of a desert place. That idea is important in the history of hermits in the Hebrides, but leave it aside for a moment and other aspects of islandness move to the foreground.

  For want of a better word, the holiness of the Shiants, their numen, the inherent spirit which the Lewisman described to Martin, is tangible enough. Only once in my life have I felt it strongly enough to be disturbed by it, but that single experience has entered my own private understanding of the place and it remains an underlayer which shapes everything I know and feel about the Shiants. The first time I was there on my own, I was nineteen and an undergraduate at Cambridge. Donald MacSween had dropped me on the beach and I had with me no more than my one or two boxes of supplies, books and candles, a small canoe and a dog. I had waved goodbye to Donald’s boat, the Favour, as it disappeared around the rocks on its way back to Scalpay and I spent the day of my arrival arranging everything I needed. I collected wood from the beach and water from the well, I unpacked my stores into the house’s cupboard and laid out my sleeping bag. I was there alone with a dog. I had three weeks’ literal isolation in front of me.

  Even then, before I had learned what I know now, I knew the islands had a reputation. Their name in Gaelic could mean ‘haunted’ as well as ‘holy’. And there was a more recent story. In about 1911, a man was said to have gone to live in the house which had been finally deserted by the Campbells only a few years earlier. He had his furniture delivered by boat and his stock of sheep. He set everything up in the two simple rooms, one for living and cooking, the other a bedroom. He lay down to sleep and in the middle of the night woke to find an old man at his bedside. ‘Do you realise,’ the figure said in a straightforward and conversational tone, ‘that you are sleeping on my grave?’

  As soon as he could draw the attention of a passing fishing boat – he was said to have set fire to the heather on the top of one of the islands so that its whole upper surface sprouted a blazing head of flame – he left again, taking with him his furniture and his pots and pans. Except for visiting shepherds and lobstermen, the islands had been deserted ever since.

  I knew the story but I didn’t want to pay attention to it. I did not want to be alarmed at the prospect of being alone on this big, remote and empty place. I had been here before with others and loved its many uncompromised beauties. The idea that it was haunted lay somewhere in the background, in the basement of my feelings. More, I was filled with a deep underswell of excitement and pleasure at being out there, exposed and unfettered, at the feeling of being dangled in a solution of such richness, so uninvadable. But perhaps, now, looking back on it, these twenty years later, I can recognise that those are the pre-conditions for an awareness of the metaphysical.

  I know I was frightened because I moved the bed from one room to the other. I moved it in other words away from the grave and went to sleep there, deeply ensconced in the red, downy sleeping bag. The dog, a terrier, was curled up on the mattress beside me and the fire was well stoked, flaming and then glowing.

  Nights are not long in northern Scotland in mid-summer. Real dark only lasts for three or four hours, but when it comes it is as black as night ever is. There is no sodium haze. There is no electricity on these islands, but I had a torch with me. Right in the middle of this dark darkness I suddenly woke up. The dog, a terrier, keen to dig any rat out of any hole, not a fearful creature by any account, was standing on the bed next to me, shaking, utterly alert, staring at the far side of the room. I shone the torch over there. Nothing to see beyond my own pots and pans, the washing up bowl, my own coat hung on the back of the door.

  His fear infected me. I felt at that moment colonised by terror. There was nothing to see, but my torch made the places where it wasn’t shining even darker. The dog would neither move nor relax. There was no sound beyond the swell on the shore fifty yards away. I began to shake, dragged the dog down into the sleeping bag with me and then pulled its hood over the two of us, the torch still in my hand, cocooned from that fear. I couldn’t sleep. The dog and I shook together. From time to time I would make a little eyehole of an opening at the top of the bag where I was holding its rim gripped in two fists, waiting for the light to come, for colour to drain back into the shapes and blackness of this room.

  The length of short nights! Again and again that eye, opened on to the world beyond the downy warmth of the dog and the cotton of the sleeping bag, revealed only blackness. It became a matter of patience, of out-waiting the night. At three or four o’clock, the world started to grey. I could put my head out into air. It felt as though the room and I had been through something deep and long together, that used-up sensation of exhaustion and a world clarified because some of its deeper possibilities had been seen.

  I realised, as I cooked breakfast over the fire, that I was exhilarated. Perhaps this was some physiological effect, a drained, post-adrenaline high, but it fel
t more than that, a new intimacy with a place that went beyond the purely aesthetic. I had somehow met its soul. But at the same time I knew I didn’t want to go through it again. It was too frightening. That day, after the sleepless night, I did everything I could to exhaust myself, walking from end to end of the islands, rowing from one to the other, setting pots, collecting firewood from the shore. By the time the evening came, my whole body was slack with tiredness, my limbs drooping like eyelids. The dog had come with me here and there, to and fro, and by early evening it was asleep.

  I drank beer in front of the dropping sun. I knew I would sleep and I did, straight through, waking to find a beam of sun pointing its finger through the window and across the room in a diagonal on to the floor. From my bed I could reach out and put my hand into its light, which felt warm, like sun in a greenhouse. The morning was calm and the sea slick in its stillness. I spent the whole day out in the boat, the dog curled up on a rope in the bow, and the sun plunging through the green water, lighting the guillemots diving there for fish. That was a morning not to be forgotten. Whatever had frightened me that first night now seemed to embrace me. I lay adrift in the boat and felt the arms of the islands around me. They could never frighten me again. If there was a tutelary spirit here, I could live with it, I could love every aspect of it, however bitter its moods, or harsh its treatment of me and that love would, in a way that I cannot properly describe, be returned and sustain me. From that moment I can date my love and affection for this place, an attachment to it beyond the touristic. In the course of those nights and days, the Shiants became a kind of home, a place which would never desert me wherever I might be, the touchstone of reality.