Years afterwards, I read a remark by Jung to the effect that if ghosts are said to be ‘nothing but projections of your own unconscious thoughts and fears on to the outside world, no intellectual acrobatics are needed to turn that sentence around and describe your own fears as ghosts that have taken up residence in you.’ That permeability of the skin, the flippability of inner and outer, seems to me now like a true description of that experience and perhaps of island experience more generally.
Islands, because of their isolation, are revelatory, places where the boundaries are wafer-thin. My sons tell me that night after night, asleep in their tent on the island, they have heard footsteps beside them in the grass. Not the pattering of rats, nor the sheep but something else. And although I have never heard anything like that, I am inclined to believe them. These remote islands are ‘places of inherent Sanctity’ and the footsteps are perhaps some of the last modern echoes of an ancient presence.
Everyone who comes here responds to it. This is not the preserve of outsiders or holiday-makers. The shepherds acknowledge it conversationally enough. For them all it is a kind of dream country, a place over which the mind can roam, to which your thoughts always turn at a spare moment, walking with your mind’s eye across the loved contours of the place. Both Hugh MacSween and John Murdo Matheson, the young shepherd from Gravir, who since 1996 has had the sheep on the Shiants, have talked to me about the Shiants with an intensity outsiders would never credit. We can have entire conversations about hollows in rocks and pools in streams. It is a bond for anyone who comes here, or at least for anyone that allows the islands to envelop them, to be the encompassing limit of their world, even for a while.
That is a strange but perfectly real effect: after a few days here, the place seems to expand. The Shiants no longer seem, as Compton Mackenzie described them, like ‘three specks of black pepper in the middle of that uncomfortable stretch of sea called the Minch’ but a world in themselves. To walk the mile or so from one end of Garbh Eilean to another becomes a day-long expedition. Eilean Mhuire is another continent. The details of rocks and plants, of the little alders growing in the rock clefts, the honeysuckle twined around them, the acre after acre of dwarf willow growing on the marsh, the wrinkles in the turf which might or might not hint at previous lives: all of this becomes as varied as America. The Shiants have no wood but they have hidden places, tucked among the rocks. They have no rivers, but they have streams in which the watermint and the forget-me-nots grow. They have no lakes, but pools around whose margins the turf luxuriates into neon green and across whose still, dark surface the water boatmen paddle like Polynesians between their archipelagos. And they have of course the richness of the sea.
Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant. They are defined by it, both wedded to it and implacably set against it, both a creation and a rejection of the element which makes them what they are. They are the not-sea within the sea, standing against the sea’s chaos and erosive power, but framed by it, enshrined by it. In that way, every island is an assertion in an ocean of denials, the one positive gesture against an almost overwhelming bleakness. They would not be what they are without the bleakness. The state of siege is creative and an island, in short, is life set against death, a life defined by the death that surrounds it. Like the peak of a mountain, or perhaps more like your own presence on the peak of a mountain, it is an image of salvation and of eternity.
It has long been thought that a hermit once lived on the Shiants. On Eilean Mhuire, the tradition is that one of the ruins there was a chapel to the Virgin. That is, I think, mistaken, as will emerge, but what can be said for certain is that the island’s Gaelic name, Eilean Mhuire, is the name given to the mother of God, and is quite distinct from Mairi, the name used since the Reformation by Protestants for their daughters. This, unequivocally, is the Virgin’s island. The men and women of Scalpay, strict church people, when referring to the island in conversation nowadays, call it not Eilean Mhuire but Eilean Mairi, avoiding any taint of Catholicism. The Ordnance Survey officers in 1851 were told that Eilean Mhuire had been a refuge for a priest ‘in the time of Knox’.
That seems unlikely, although the island might conceivably have sheltered one of the Franciscan missionaries who evangelised the Hebrides from Ireland in the early seventeenth century. Perhaps the name of Eilean Mhuire is a thread leading to a more ancient past. The church in the centuries before the first millennium, the age of Columba, not only in Ireland but in the whole Christian world from here to Syria, was deeply devoted to the cult of the Virgin. Hymns to the Virgin were composed on Iona, sung antiphonally there in the timber-built choir. Mary was the embodiment of fertility and hope. She had made good everything Eve had spoiled and the cross to which she gave her son restored everything the tree in Eden had destroyed. Without Mary, the world could never have been redeemed.
Dedications were made to the Virgin all over the Ionan world. But the Mary of Iona was not the keening figure at the foot of the cross which the later Middle Ages would make of her. Instead, the focus of the Columban devotion was on Mary’s gift to the world, the remaking of the universe in her womb, her conceiving and delivering of the Kingdom of Heaven. She was, in other words, the image of holy fertility.
Eilean Mhuire is an island of astonishing richness set in the middle of the wild sea, where the grass even today clogs your feet as you walk across it in midsummer, seventy-five acres of extraordinarily fertile pasture, a rolling meadow two hundred feet above the sea, surrounded by cliffs, where the lambs fatten so quickly that, as John Murdo Matheson, the shepherd, says, they are always ‘ready for the hook by the end of August’, and the sorrel grows in miniature, heady-scented forests. It is not difficult to recognise the resonance of that fecundity for the early Christians. You can quite literally roll in it, wrapping yourself in the fullness of life on Eilean Mhuire.
Is this a key to the attraction of the Shiants – and of other equally fertile islands – for the Dark Age saints? Those early Christians would have absorbed from the Gospels and from the writings of the Desert Fathers in Egypt and Syria what has been called ‘the theology of dispossession’. This was the doctrine which, as the Celtic scholar Dr Thomas Owen Clancy has written, ‘lay behind the Irish attraction to peregrinatio, in which the ascetic would leave home, lands, family and wealth, and seek salvation on a distant island.’
In a fallen world, redemption could come only by abandoning the everyday and by finding in the desert the pearl of great price conceived in the Virgin’s womb. No Hebridean island I know fits the description of a desert pearl better than Eilean Mhuire. It is in itself an icon of the Christianity that held sway here a thousand years ago.
There is a long-standing confusion that must be clarified. In the late seventeenth century, Martin Martin said of the Shiants that ‘Island-More hath a Chappel in it dedicated to the Virgin Mary’. Since then, this has been taken as a reference to a building on Eilean Mhuire, because of the coincidence of the names. That is a mistake. The chapel was not on Eilean Mhuire but on what is now known as Eilean an Tighe and was until the mid-nineteenth century known as Eilean na Cille or Church Island. The passage runs as follows:
Island-More hath a Chappel in it dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and is fruitful in Corn and Grass: the Island joining to it on the West is only for Pasturage. I saw a couple of Eagles here … those Eagles are so careful of the place of their abode, that they never yet killed any Sheep or Lamb in the Island … so that they make their Purchase in the opposite islands, the nearest of which is a League distant.
Apart from Martin’s muddle over ‘West’ – Garbh Eilean is in fact north of Eilean an Tighe – h
e is describing a situation in which Eilean an Tighe contains the Chapel and Garbh Eilean the eagles. Eilean Mhuire is the place in which the eagles ‘make their Purchase’.
Several times in the nineteenth century, travellers in the Hebrides had pointed out to them the ‘cell’ of the hermit on Eilean an Tighe. The artist William Daniell saw it in 1815. John Macculloch, the geologist, saw it four years later and TS Muir, visiting on 21 July 1859, while conducting the research for his ‘Ecclesiological Notes on Some of the Islands of Scotland etc.’, found after landing on the beach and coming to the shelf of ground immediately to the south of it on Eilean an Tighe, that ‘on this level space, there are traces of a burying ground, and the foundation of what seems to have been a chapel of small size.’ By the 1850s, then, at a time when the islands were empty for a while, the site of the chapel had virtually disappeared.
The archaeologist Pat Foster re-identified the cemetery in the summer of 2000. It is a hundred yards or so north of the present house, a low mound on whose surface there are still one or two fragments of Lewisian gneiss, which might or might not be grave markers. The mound has been dug into at some time and there is a story still current in Scalpay of a woman finding a skull here in the 1930s. There is the ruin of a building within the western side of the mound, which has some squarish masonry in it, but has clearly been built up and adapted since Muir saw the chapel reduced to a ‘foundation’ in 1859.
A hazy folk-tradition of a saint or hermit, an ancient island name, ruins which certainly don’t sound earlier than medieval, a burial ground which cannot be dated: that until the summer of 2000 was the limit of the muddle and the knowledge.
A discovery made by Pat Foster’s archaeological team changed that. The excavation of the house, whose larger findings will be described later, had reached its final day. All fortnight, one intense squall after another had moved up the Minch. The sun had shone brilliantly in the intervals, but those dark, cold showers were like little patches of night travelling through the mornings. A cold wind blew them in from the south. As Pat had indefatigably stalked the islands, mapping out all the early sites, Petr Limburský and Linda Čihakova, had taken charge of the excavation. Both are among the most brilliant of young Czech archaeologists, the most careful of excavators, patient beyond belief, able to sift, it seemed to me, the brushings of one eighteenth-century week on the house floor; the peat ash and charcoal, the fragments of broken pot, the odds and ends of daily life; from those of the week after and of the week before. As the final investigation of the year (a party from Prague would be returning each summer for perhaps another five years) Linda had decided to cut a trench – ‘sondage’ was the more glamorous word she used – through the floors of the house to see if there was anything immediately beneath them. In the trench, about half-way along the house, immediately next to the northern wall, she slowly uncovered a smooth, flattish round stone about twelve inches across, deeply buried in the clay and peat ash of the mid-eighteenth century.
We all came to look at the revealed upper surface of the stone. Even in situ, it had an air about it, simply through the perfection of its shape: not the knobbled awkwardness of most of the wall stones, but this organic circularity, this fullness and shapeliness. It looked as yeasty as a loaf. Jana Žegklitzová, the draughtswoman from Prague Castle, had been baking bread for us every day in the oven in the house, and Linda’s stone looked like one of Jana’s loaves. ‘She must have been up here this morning!’ Linda laughed, sitting back on her heels on the clay floor, reddened with the peat ash trodden into it two hundred and fifty years ago, and pulled her hair back from her face.
Linda approached the stone with her trowel. On her hands and knees she cleared the soil from around it and then with her fingers slowly turned the stone over to see what was underneath. It was heavy and as the stone rolled over on to its upper side Linda jumped back and away, shrieking at what she saw, holding her hand to her mouth. Deeply carved on the underside, the side which had been set down and buried in the floor, was a four-armed cross set within an equally firmly carved circle, just in from the outer circumference of the stone.
The four quadrants left by the cross stood proud, doughily pillowed like scones. Clay clung wetly in the carved grooves. An encircled cross, buried face down in the floor of the house: clearly this was something that had been significant twice, once in its making and once in its burying. I carried the cross stone down to the house and we photographed it there against the silverweed and the grass. It was the culmination of the dig, the conclusive find, a reorientation of this place, its history and meaning.
I sailed back to Harris with the stone beside me in Freyja, a touchstone, the most beautiful man-made thing the Shiants had ever known, heavy and perfect, radiating significance. It belonged, like everything else recovered in the dig, to the Queen, but she graciously allows excavators to hang on to their finds for a while so that their origins and meanings can be understood. It will eventually end up in a museum, perhaps in Stornoway, perhaps in Edinburgh. Feeling like Little Jack Horner with my plum beside me, I travelled Britain with the stone. I wanted to know what it was and I wanted to know what it meant. I showed it to Professor Charles Thomas, the first of the modern excavators of Iona and one of the leading experts on early Christianity in Britain. He was definitive. ‘It’s a grave marker, a primary grave marker. They put them either in the grave or on the grave. Not before the seventh century AD; probably somewhere between the seventh and tenth centuries. You can’t date them more precisely than that. They didn’t exist before AD 600 and they became more elaborate after 1000.’ And what was it doing in the early-modern house where we had found it? ‘People, at least until the modern reform movement, would always have been very receptive to these things,’ Professor Thomas said. ‘They would have taken it there from the grave. They would have liked it in the house.’
At one stroke, the Shiants had acquired their early Christian reality. Columba, the prince-poet-bishop-saint who in the mid-sixth century had founded the monastery on Iona and an archipelago of related monasteries and outlying hermitages in Ireland and the Hebrides, had been an ascetic himself. According to Adomnan, his biographer and the abbot of Iona at the end of the seventh century, ‘He returned to his lodging and reclined on his sleeping place, where during the night he used to have for his bed the bare rock; and for pillow a stone which even today, stands beside his burial place as a kind of grave-pillar.’
Here then on the Shiants was the pillow stone of a follower of Columba. Here his head would have rested in life and with this stone his grave would have been marked in death. I took it with me to the Primary School in Scalpay, and asked Mrs MacSween, the headmistress and form mistress of the upper form, and the other Mrs MacSween, the form mistress of the lower form, if I could conduct an experiment. The children of both classes had to lie down with their heads on the stone as a pillow. It was a holiness test: whoever could treat it as a pillow would be a saint. The beautiful children of Scalpay, their pale, freckled skin and thick black hair, their dark, observant eyes, lay down one by one on the classroom floor. Most of them gingerly and carefully lowered their heads on to the stone, tentative at its hardness. Only two boys passed the test, lying down as if going to bed and believing so easily this was their pillow that they banged their ears into the unyielding stone and were rubbing them for the rest of the day. They were the true heirs of Columba.
The pillow stone’s transforming presence was doing what archaeology was meant to do: the hazy and uncertain were now pinned to the incontrovertible material fact. What had only drifted before in half-imagined half-memories was now suddenly concrete and alive. The legend of the Shiant hermit was true. And the discovery, of course, enhanced the astonishing fact of that memory. With no other sustenance or confirmation, over a thousand years or so, the presence on these islands of an early Christian figure, perhaps bringing Christianity to this part of the world, had, it now turned out, been accurately remembered.
The stone, sitting besid
e me on the front seat of the car, dwelled in its silence. It was a window on another millennium. Everyone who saw it said ‘What’s that?’ A woman at the toll booth outside the Dartford Tunnel said ‘That looks nice.’ A man in a garage thought it was a fossilised meat pie. This most private of objects was making acquaintances. I took it to Dr Fergus Gibb, the Sheffield geologist. I had never been to his office before and as I walked in I stopped. It was exactly like my work-room at home. Its walls were lined with maps and photos, diagrams, sections and analyses of one thing only: the Shiants. It was like a teenager obsessed with Britney Spears. Fergus got out his eyeglass, examined the crystalline structure of the cross stone and pronounced that the rock certainly did not come from the Shiants. It was a nodule of Torridonian sandstone of which there is none on the islands. Its surface had been pecked and battered as if it had been in use for a long time, dropped and knocked and some of the larger crystals had fallen out leaving a skin pored and dimpled like an orange. But almost certainly the stone had been picked up as a largish beach cobble. There were cobbles on the big beach on the Shiants now which in form, if not in substance, resembled the cross stone. So if not from the Shiants, where did this stone itself come from? That was almost impossible to say. Torridonian sandstone outcrops all along the west coast of Scotland for two hundred miles. There is even a submarine exposure of it ten miles or so north-east of the Shiants under the Minch. It could have been washed up on this beach, as cobbles of other alien rocks are. Or it might have been brought there.
Scanning with Fergus the geological map of the west coast, I saw with excitement that Torridonian sandstone outcrops on Iona. Frank Fraser Darling had found a piece of what he thought was ‘Iona marble’ in the chapel in North Rona (although that identification is now thought to be suspect). The foundation of new churches in the ancient world often involved the pioneer taking with him, in a bag blessed by his bishop, soil or stones from the mother church. According to the Icelandic Placenamebook, compiled in the twelfth century but collecting far earlier traditions, an Irishman called Orlyg was sent by St Patrick to Iceland ‘with wood, suitable for building a church and a meeting house and an iron bell, a golden penny and consecrated earth, to put under the corner pillars.’ Sanctity inhered in objects that had been blessed. Was this stone, by any chance, a piece of Iona, made blessed by its carving, carried out into the far north by the hermit who came to settle here? Sadly not: the Torridonian on Iona is too ‘flaggy’ – it makes big paving slabs and not cobbles. This wonderful object had not come to the Shiants from Iona.
Sea Room Page 14
