Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  It must happen quite regularly, as a natural event, because sea birds have built into them a set of buffers against it. They can feed on other fish apart from sandeels. Some years on the Shiants, the ornithologists have found the adults bringing mostly sprats and relatively few sandeels. They can also fly further to find other sources of food. But more important for the long-term survival of the Shiant birds is their large-scale life-strategy. Most of them produce few young but live a long time. The puffin only ever has a single chick, and the chick will be five years old before it breeds, but each bird can live up to forty years. If the timing or the food production goes wrong one year, and the chick dies, that is not going to affect the population of the colony. Only failure year after year, and a dearth of chicks coming forward to breed, will begin to shrink the overall numbers.

  Mike Brooke, curator of birds at Cambridge University Zoological Museum, who has twice been to the Shiants to count the puffins, explained the maths to me. About one in four or five puffin fledglings survives to an age when they can breed. On average they then will breed for, say, ten years. Out of a puffin couple’s ten fledglings, then, two will survive and so the population remains constant.

  These may be the wrong terms, but that sense of robustness, of a marvellously mature and adult approach to risk, with all the elasticity of response that it implies, is, I think, one of the reasons that the spectacle of the summer birds is so stimulating. This life-phenomenon is not sweet, in the way that puffins are often portrayed. Nor is it heroically violent, in the way that nature is often seen. It is a wonderfully sober, serious and ingenious response to the problems and challenges of a sea and island life. What is eternally beautiful about the hundreds of thousands of puffins that come to make the Shiants their summer home is not the individual bird, not the funny little self-satisfied figure in a tail coat and stiff shirt, but this big strong body of genetic intelligence, drawing spectacular life from the hidden abundance of the sea around it.

  There is only one clamouring absence. Throughout history the Shiants were the haunt of the white-tailed sea eagle. I have never seen sea eagles on the Shiants but I have seen them in Morvern, on the Sound of Mull, a pair of enormous, tatty creatures, flustered in the breeze, their wing feathers fluttering about them like the rags of an old bag woman, their wings eight feet across and perhaps eighteen inches from the leading to the trailing edge. You can have no doubt, as the shepherds on Mull know, that these creatures can take living, healthy lambs from beside their mothers. They make the greater black-backed gulls look like pigeons.

  The Shiants were the famous home of a pair for well over two centuries. In 1690, Martin Martin

  saw a couple of Eagles here: the Natives told me, that these Eagles would never suffer any of their kind to live there but themselves, and that they drove away their young ones as soon as they were able to fly. And they told me likewise, that those Eagles are so careful of the place of their abode, that they never yet killed any Sheep or Lamb in the Island, tho the Bones of Lambs, of Fawns and Wild-Fowls, are frequently found in and about their Nests; so that they make their Purchase in the opposite islands, the nearest of which is a League distant.

  Martin was a modern man, a graduate of Edinburgh University, a friend of Sir Robert Sibbald, the Edinburgh physician and botanist, a doctor qualified at Leyden and a corresponding member of the Royal Society in London. His journeys around the Hebrides were partly, as a good seventeenth-century scientist, in pursuit of vulgar errors. And he makes a modern joke: the Garbh Eilean eagles do their shopping in Eilean Mhuire. But he was also a native of Duntulm in Skye, no more than fourteen miles away, and so a Gaelic speaker, and his description, at least in reporting the Shiant Islanders’ view of their native eagles, is filled, I think, with a certain animist respect, an attitude which carries in it a faint echo of those long-distant people in Isbister, who shared their graves with the sea eagles.

  The eagles continued to grace these cliffs until the early part of the twentieth century. Even now, empty as it is, the precise location of the eyrie, high up on the north cliffs of Garbh Eilean, is clear: a smallish place about twenty feet across, protected from below by sheer dolerite columns rising from the sea and protected from above by an enormous corbelled roof of dolerite. Lord Teignmouth saw them here in 1828, and forty years later the highly acquisitive birder Captain HJ Elwes saw this eyrie as one of the ultimate challenges. Elwes had lost any respect for the birds. There were sea eagle eyries reported to him in North Uist, Scalpay, Wiay, Benbecula, above Loch Bhrollúm and several other places in Lewis and Harris. There was even one man, he heard, Dr MacGillivray of Eoligarry in Barra, who had a tame sea eagle for a while ‘and this bird used to follow his sons in their rambles over the island.’ Virtually every eyrie was on north-facing cliffs but the Shiants’ throne was the only one thought to be inaccessible. That is what motivated Captain Elwes.

  May 4 1868

  To Shiant Isles in smack – Got there about 1 – on the way 5 eagles were in sight at one time. – 2 golden and 3 white-tailed –.

  The eagles’ nest was in the highest part of the cliff which is quite perpendicular and positioned as far down that the rope would only just reach it. It was a very nasty place altogether, but Sandy [Maclver, the keeper from Eishken in Pairc] said he thought that he could get it, so we let him down. When he had gone about 23 fathoms he stopped so long that I was afraid something was wrong, so I ran round to see and found that Sandy was so giddy from the twisting of the rope that he could do nothing. He said he could not make out where the nest was even then and that the rock hung over too much to get it. So we pulled him up. I am much annoyed at our failure, and I had made so sure of getting the eggs in the Shiant Isles. – back to Eishken.

  This extract from Elwes’s journal is preserved, without comment, in Harvie-Brown’s notebooks, now in the Library of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. Elwes was the rule, not the aberration. Harvie-Brown also reproduces nature notes from another near-contemporary called Hogg: ‘10 April 82. Brollum Hill, Loch Shell. White-tailed sea-eagles. Both birds shot in both places. Very fine old birds.’

  It may well have been the invention of the camera which brought this habit to an end. On his visit to the Shiants in 1886, Harvie-Brown had a photographer with him, William Norrie of Fraserburgh, and in The Vertebrate Fauna of the Outer Hebrides, which Harvie-Brown published in 1888, he included a plate taken by Norrie of the northern cliffs of the Shiants just below the sea eagle’s eyrie.

  It is the earliest photograph of the islands in existence and is peculiarly uninformative: a misty set of columns which look the same today as they did over a century ago. Other photographs which Norrie took of the Campbell family, mentioned by Harvie-Brown in his journal, have disappeared.

  But the naturalist, not averse to killing large amounts of wildlife himself (his collected skins were also deposited in the Royal Museum) writes rather differently about the sea eagle:

  In 1887 the Shiant islands pair were still ‘to the fore’ and gave our party a fine opportunity of watching all the phases of their flight. Long may they continue in their inaccessible retreat; and may the broken overhanging basalt columns, which project far beyond the giant ribs of similar structure down below, resist the tear and wear of time, and prove a sheltering roof to them. So far as we are concerned we are pleased with a feather (‘tickled with a straw’, if you like) which we picked up on the boulder-strewn beach below the eyrie, ay and a great deal more than if we had shot the bird.

  This charming, serious and energetic man was ahead of his time. In about 1905, although the date is uncertain, and the name of the culprit unknown, the last of the Shiant Isles’ white-tailed sea eagles was shot. Compton Mackenzie heard that it had been done by ‘a clergyman collector’ but there is another possibility. The Eishken estate on Pairc was certainly killing ‘vermin’ on the Shiants’ cliffs up until the 1930s and perhaps beyond. When I asked Tommy Macrae, a practised raconteur, loved throughout Pairc, who worked as a keeper on Eishke
n for a good part of the twentieth century, what was meant by vermin, he had a one-word answer: ‘hawks’. His father, a keeper on Eishken in the 1930s, used to go out there to kill them. Elwes had seen a ‘Falcon’ on the Shiants as well as two sea eagles in the 1860s but there were no hawks on the Shiants in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s. Only recently has a pair of peregrines re-established itself on the east cliffs of Eilean an Tighe. The persecution by the gamekeepers from Eishken, intent on eradicating the ‘vermin’ to protect the grouse, was persistent for decades. It seems as likely as not that the sea eagles were shot in the same cause.

  There is a footnote to the story of the Shiant sea eagles. They were seen again over the Minch between the islands and Pairc in the last few years of the 1990s. A pair, descendants of those which since the 1980s the Nature Conservancy and its successors have been reintroducing to Rum and the Inner Hebrides, set up their nest somewhere in Pairc. The present owners of the Eishken estate welcomed and treasured them. Ravens harassed the eagles at their enormous nest but people did not. The officers of Scottish Natural Heritage were considering installing a closed circuit camera so that these precious creatures – there are some twenty-two pairs with territories in Scotland – could be continuously monitored. The nest was littered, just as Martin Martin had described it, with the bones of their victims. Through binoculars you could see on the nest the remains of puffins in the summer-time and fulmars in the winter. These eagles were also making ‘their Purchase in the opposite islands.’

  Despite all of this and despite the wonderful midsummer glory of the Shiants, there is something troublingly wrong. The modern Minch is an illusion of perfection. The range of pollution in the sea here, even apart from the radioactivity drifting up from Sellafield, makes alarming reading. Some of it is visible. Ships’ crew and fishermen throw overboard about three or four pounds of rubbish per person per day. A ship as a whole, it is thought, chucks on average another two hundred and ninety tons of cargo-associated waste into the sea every year. Landlubbers are no better. So-called Sewage Related Debris is increasingly made of plastic. SRD, as it is discreetly termed, includes sanitary towels, tampons, nappies, condoms, bandages, tights and medical waste. Most of the sewage in the Minch area is untreated and so all of this is discharged directly into the sea. I have sailed past much of it in Freyja.

  The beaches of the Shiants are nowadays lined from end to end in multi-coloured plastic rubbish, and I can walk the length of them finding loo cleaners, soft drink bottles, cans of Coke with Japanese script, dolls’ heads, Dettol and Domestos where in the past the shore was scattered with fish boxes on every one of which was the instruction ‘Return to Lochinver’.

  I don’t want to overstate this. The Minch is not a poisoned place. Life here seems more complete than anywhere I know, miraculously uncontaminated considering how near it is to the huge industrial centres of Britain and Europe. But there are signs of something under strain. In addition to the stream of radioactivity pouring into the Minch from the Irish Sea, levels of cadmium and copper were found here in concentrations much higher than expected for coastal waters. These metals probably come from the rivers of industrial England.

  The deep health of the sea is the great unaddressed issue of environmental politics. It remains both a toxin-sink and the most egregious example of a property that is over-exploited and maltreated because it is held in common. No one owns it to protect it. Everyone abuses it because it isn’t theirs. The fiendishly complicated population dynamics of sea plants and creatures and the birds around them is not properly understood but there is one big, alarming signal: the sea eagles that fly over the Minch are failing to breed. That is as good a sign as any that more attention needs to be paid and more precautions taken. The Shiants’ corbelled eagle-throne is still empty and I won’t be happy until it is occupied again.

  Then, in the house on Eilean an Tighe, I will think of those emperor-birds in residence on Garbh Eilean. Like lairds in their Highland fastness, they will scarcely show themselves to the world at large. The sea eagle is not a self-promoter, does not engage in the sort of daily noisy business of more ordinary bird life. He has his self-regard and his reticence. He is known to be there, a sovereign presence, and there is no need to flaunt it. Eagles colour the country they inhabit, but it is a glimpsed presence not a displayed one. I would not need to see them, but only to enjoy the reverberating knowledge that somewhere on that cliff they were staring out to the north across the Minch, the only truly imperial creature in the British Isles, standing three feet from talon to eye, immensely strong, a creature which, if rarely seen, nevertheless sinks deep into the consciousness, a symbol of grandeur, distance, acuity and imperium.

  Occasionally perhaps, inside the house with my daughters, a friend outside would shout, ‘Look, look!’ We would go out. The sky is a bright blue and on the lip of the hill above us, perhaps four hundred feet above the house and the sea, is the sea eagle. That incredible wing is spread like a floorboard above us. It is a black stroke on the sky made with a fat-bladed pen. There is little you can do when watching an eagle quartering the ground on which you stand but gawp at its leonine presence. Those sprung wings held in a shallow V, a slight flex to them as the air shifts beneath it, the primaries flared at the tips, its quivering, delicate fingers feeling the wind and its own place in it. In the field-glasses, I can see the eagle’s head moving, never still, surveying the country, to and fro across us, across the map of house and shore and the abandoned fields. The bird is taking us in, calmly, circlingly, from its ever higher position of distant knowledge. Analyst, examiner, assessor-king.

  I know three things about eagles. Their eyes, in whose retinas the rods and cones are packed many times more tightly than our own, have a resolution eight times better than ours. They live in a world of visual intensity whose nature we cannot, quite literally, even dream of. It is said that an eagle can see a shrew twitch in the grass from three thousand feet above it. And, thirdly, if our eyes occupied the same proportion of our skull as the eagle’s eyes do of his, they would be the size of oranges.

  The bird comes back down on to the cliff-top and sits there, inward and disconsolate. The ravens, which live on the same cliff, whose cliff, in their mind anyway, this really is, flip up out of somewhere and start nagging at the eagle. He sits there being bothered by these birds like gnats around him. His stillness makes the ravens look small. As they dive and pirouette around him, he ducks his head like a half-tolerant old dog, just dropping it down into his neck as the ravens make their pass. You have to love the eagle for that, the old bastard being swatted by the nagging kids. After four or five minutes he has had enough and falls off his throne into flight above the Sound. Then you see the heroic beauty of the bird. He beats his way eastwards along the steepening and darkening cliff, heavy wing-beats, long and laboured, each one giving a visible lift to the body, while the ravens play like Messerschmitts around him. The heaviness of that beat, the grandeur of the creature in his dark and rocky surroundings: I remember Shelley’s description of Coleridge as ‘a hooded eagle among blinking owls’. The rest of the passage describes the great, impenetrable Coleridge as

  he who sits obscure

  In the exceeding lustre and the pure

  Intense irradiation of a mind

  Which, with its own internal lightning blind,

  Flags wearily through darkness and despair.

  It is those last lines I want to see in flight on the Shiants, that sagacious, unknowable, all-seeing creature, flying to the east along the fissured cliff, while the late sun slides across the rocks beneath him. That is what I want: Coleridge on the Shiants.

  10

  IN MIDSUMMER, AS THE BIRDS were proliferating around me, and as the cotton grass began to show its white-tufted pennants in the bogs, as the flag irises flowered in the ditches and the meadowsweet bubbled out in the protected corners by the cliffs, the time had come to address the central question of the Shiants. What had happened here? What history was there here? Wh
at explained its emptiness now and the remains of buildings distributed across the islands? The old buildings as I walked across them reminded me of a summer beach after the warmth of the day has gone. You can see where each family has been, their scufflings in the sand, the one or two sweet wrappers and scraps of paper left behind, a can or two, the holes where their windbreak had stood, the marks of dug-in toes beside the legs of a deck chair, all the diagnostic signals of life once lived but now finished, waiting for the tide to roll in over it. That, translated into moss and tumbled stone, was the condition of the Shiants.

  I wanted to find out more about the islands and that was why I had asked Pat Foster to bring his team of archaeologists with him to the Shiants. He had now done his survey. He had made a few tentative guesses as to the nature of the remains he had identified. Now the time had come to dig. What has emerged from their archaeology, and from the historical documents which I gathered, is a rich and poignant story of a community coming to an end. Its struggles and its ingenuities, the changing circumstances with which it had to deal, its final collapse: all that is revealed. What before had been a contourless silence can now be seen as a tiny island microcosm of Highland history at its most critical juncture, the centuries between 1600 and 1800.

  To understand that story, one must go back a little earlier. I asked the leading expert on the history of the Hebridean landscape, Professor Robert Dodgshon, to come to the islands for a couple of days and walk across them with me. The kind of detailed analysis of a single site or building which archaeology can provide needs the broader context of the landscape historian. No island house could make sense without its surrounding fields and sea.

  It is one of the repeated pleasures of life to witness an expert presented with a new set of data. Arriving off Malcolm MacLeod’s boat from Stornoway one morning, Robert could scarcely sit down for a cup of tea in the house before rushing out to see what the Shiants had to say for themselves. An Atlantic storm was slashing around us like a carwash but it made no difference to the scholarly appetite.