Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  It was not a new process. People had been draining out of the farthest Hebrides for generations. In 1549, there were forty-two inhabited islands attached to Harris and Lewis. By 1764 that had sunk to sixteen. In 1841 there were still sixteen (although not the same ones: some fertile islands such as Pabbay in the Sound of Harris had been cleared; others, much less suitable, reoccupied by the land-hungry). More than a hundred Hebridean islands have been abandoned since 1549, but most of them were deserted between 1549 and 1764. It is a sign of how rich a place the Shiants were that, despite their distance from any other shore, and despite the ferocity and difficulty of the seas around them, the people should have gone only after most other islands had been left.

  There is a chance, although I think it unlikely, that the people were evicted from here. In the spring of 1796, the Seaforth estate cleared a large number of people off many townships across Lewis, a total of five hundred and seven tenants and thirty-one tacksmen. The sheriff officers were paid fivepence a mile (measured one way only from Stornoway); their assistants fourpence a mile, to travel out to the townships and give the news. It was considered important that ‘the subtenants should also receive a verbal notice each from the Ground Officer.’ The documents are sobering enough, name after name written out in the clerk’s slightly shaky copperplate hand, all of them, as the writ for 22 March 1796 puts it,

  to hear and see themselves decerned & ordained by Decrees and Sentence of Court to flit and remove themselves their Wives Bairns Familys Servants Subtenants Coaters & dependants and all and sundry their Goods and Gear forth & from their pretended Possessions above mentioned and to leave the same void Redd and patent at the term of Whitsunday being the fifteenth of May next to come, to the end the Pursuer by himself or servants may enter thereto Sett use and dispose thereof at pleasure in all time coming.

  One of the tacksmen named in these 1796 Summons of Removing is ‘Murdoch Macleod, shipmaster in Stornoway, Tacksman of Limerbay and Shant Isles’. Is it possible, then, to think of the Ground Officers arriving here with their written summons, bringing them into house after house, first by the shore, then up to the middle valley, following the cow path between them, ducking into the low doors of the houses, showing the people the names of ‘Murdoch Macleod’ and of ‘Shant Isles’ (everyday Gaelic in the 1790s already had a leavening of English and the inhabitants of the Shiants were not necessarily illiterate: remember the Bible binding on the house floor) and giving them the verbal notice, eight weeks, until Whitsun, to leave, just as the puffins were coming in, just as the manure was to be spread on the fields, just as the year was to begin again?

  It is possible, but I don’t think anything so dramatic happened here. When also in 1796 the Reverend Simson describes this most outlying part of his parish, he implies that there has been only one family here for a while. That cannot mean the place had just been cleared. The Summons of Removing, or Warning Away Notice, can be explained as a bureaucratic mechanism by which the terms of Macleod’s lease were changed, or by which the landlord gave it to someone else at a higher rent. It was a sign of something already being at an end, not the instrument by which it was ended.

  The roofs of the abandoned houses fell in. The archaeologists found, just beneath the modern turf, the thick residue of the collapsed roof lying directly on the ash and charcoal of the abandoned floor, an earthy layer, rummaged about in by the rats. In amongst the rotted turf and thatch were thirty-four iron boat strake rivets. The house must have had a piece of a boat patching the roof. (Freyja would produce thirty-four rivets from a section of her hull three feet deep and seven long.) Inevitably, in a place where timber was so short, a washed-up boat, perhaps part of the wreck they had been plundering in 1769, would have been put to good use.

  It was this hunger for timber – a constant in the Hebrides, but everything is heightened at this time – which lay behind the most shocking of all the stories associated with Shiants. I took Freyja across to the scene of the Pairc Murders one evening, a calm and beautiful journey, with the mountains of the mainland opalescent in the evening sun, and lenticular clouds, as smooth as sucked sweets, hanging over the hills of Lewis. The sea at the mouth of Loch Claìdh lay as still as marble next to the shore. I could look down into its green depths twenty feet to the cobbled bed and see the starfish sprawled across them. On shore, with the sheep nosing among the stones, was the ruined and abandoned hamlet of Bàgh Ciarach, ‘Gloomy Bay’, where the murders of 1785 were committed. The buildings lay in shade, plastic flotsam clogged the beach and I had no desire to land. This is known as the most haunted place in Lewis and I was happy to stay offshore in Freyja, looking at the sour abandoned township from the comfort of her thwarts.

  As Donald Macdonald, the historian of Lewis, has described, and as Dan MacLeod of Lemreway told me the story, the people from the village of Mealasta in Uig had gone to Gairloch on the mainland for wood to build some new houses. When in the Sound of Shiant on their return, a terrible storm out of the north-east overtook them. In a blizzard, they were forced to seek shelter here in Bàgh Ciarach, where two or three houses were occupied by poor people called Mackay: ‘The natives of these parts, seeing the weakened condition of the crew, frost-bitten and unable to defend themselves, and envious of their boatload of tree-trunks, killed each in turn by hitting him on the head with a large stone contained in the foot of a stocking.’

  As Dan Macleod told me, ‘the bodies were buried in a bog and an unusual kind of weed has been growing there ever since.’

  The women of Mealasta thought their men had drowned but one night the ghost of one of them appeared to his sweetheart and sang her the song called ‘Bàgh Ciarach’:

  The girl of my love is the young brown-haired one.

  If I were beside her, I would not suffer harm.

  This year my family are seeking and searching for me,

  while I lie in Gloomy Bay at the foot of a pool.

  The men of Pairc threatened us with axes,

  But our utter exhaustion left them unharmed.

  Duncan, the mountain man, attended to me:

  the world is deceitful and gold beguiles.

  While climbing the hillside I lost my strength.

  By the crags of the headland the blond-haired boy was murdered.

  The young woman woke with the words of the song and its tune on her lips. The next July she was at the yearly cattle market in Stornoway. A huge crowd of people was there. Among the crowd, as Dan Macleod said, ‘the Uig girl saw a jersey she had knitted herself, for her dead lover, on the shoulders of a man from Pairc. She recognised the pattern of her stitches and she grabbed the wool, pulled at the man, but he broke away from her and disappeared into the crowd. No one knows if he was ever brought to justice.’ Another version, told by Donald Macdonald, says instead that the girl was looking through a pile of blankets for sale at the fair. As she picked through them, she saw, on one of them, in its corners, the small pieces of tartan she had sewn in there herself. It was Nicolson tartan and the men from Mealasta were Nicolsons.

  It was late on a summer night, after eleven o’clock. I turned Freyja southwards, raised the sail and started back along the Lewis shore to Scalpay and the MacSweens. A light northeasterly blew in over my left shoulder. The motion through the still water at the mouth of Loch Seaforth was as easy as those first days’ sailing in Freyja in Flodabay. The water rattled against the boards of the hull like a ruler against the railings of a fence. For all the melancholy of the eighteenth-century history here, I felt happy, at home on the summer night sea. The dogs slept on the boards at my feet. The moon rose as the Shiants sank into the dark and at one in the morning, as Freyja and I slipped in between the arms of Kyles Scalpay, I watched its reflected light around me, scattered and broken on the bubbling of the tide.

  13

  ONE DAY LATE IN THE SUMMER – it was 13 August in 2000, the 19th in 1999 – the puffins leave. In the morning, the place is as full as it has ever been and the sky at the colony quivers and flick
ers with the hundreds of thousands of bodies in flight. The rocks on the boulder screes around Garbh Eilean are incandescent with the yellow of the lichen and the air is thick with the tang of guano. You then turn your back to some other task. The boat needs fixing, the rushes around the well should be cut away. Look again, in the afternoon, and the birds have gone. The place is empty. The rocks glow as they ever did, but nothing lives among them. Acre after acre of the colonies is empty; silence clings to them. The sudden stillness is haunting, sianta is the Gaelic word, and these are now the Shiant Isles. The guano fug still wafts around you. The rocks are still spattered with it, the kittiwake droppings white where they have fallen straight down the cliff from each rock-ledge nest, the guillemots’ brown on the ledges where the birds have stamped and shuffled across it for the summer months. But the party is over. What the Shiants could offer – a place for an egg, near a sea full of fish, away from predatory enemies – is no longer needed. For the rest of the year, dispersal across the ocean is the better option.

  Not everything has yet gone. The skuas are still here and they are teaching their young to fly, the giant juveniles clumsying after their parents, shadowing and modelling their behaviour on the skill and expertise on display in front of them. The baby shags, now just waterborne, cheep like budgerigars in clusters next to the natural arch. There is a mass of snipe in the marsh, fluting at night over their territories, and a short-eared owl, the only daytime owl, cruises low over the rushes for the voles that are its only prey.

  At this turning point of the year, at least in a good summer, the islands have turned Cretan with drought and the grass is so dry that as you walk through it the stems rustle against you. Where the sheep cannot reach, the long bluish threads of the ungrazed grass hang like wigs. Over the stone foundations of the medieval farmstead at the bay, the turf has turned brown, mapping the structures beneath it.

  This is also the moment for the arrival of the most mysterious of all Shiant creatures. In thirty-five years, I have seen it only once. From Stocanish, at the north-west point of Garbh Eilean, I had been watching with my children the north-going stream of the tide as it swept past the Galtas. It was running hard and fast through the big gap between Galta Mor and the other stacks, tailing like a mill race of roily water. Galta Beag was throwing a big curve away to the east, as though the flow were meeting a coffer-dam there. Downstream of all the rocks, the currents were blotched with balloons of upwelling water. Each was as heavy as a pond of olive oil and they were dotted across the stream like the spots on the flanks of trout. This pattern of rough and smooth was spread across an area a mile wide and at least one and a half miles long, the glitter of the turbulence coating a thousand acres of the sea.

  Gannets pay attention to the tide. As it floods, they fish here by the Galtas; as it ebbs they move to the riffles off Seann Chaisteal and Sgeir Mianish. If you want some fish, it’s a good idea to follow them. We launched the boat and dropped our weighted lines just where the running water breaks and shivers over the hidden rock ridges. You haul the fish in, no skill here, the metalled bodies lying on the boards beside your feet, the big coppery pollack, the saithe steely blue, the occasional small, fat mackerel, and sometimes a little red gurnard slipping out of the mouth of the bigger fish, caught just as the prey was in its gullet.

  It was, in that way, an ordinary late-summer day, a taking of the fish which the Shiants have always provided. I baited some creels with the heads of some of them, a fleet of six, no more, and set them – or ‘shot’ them, as the word goes, but that is too dynamic a term for the gentle lowering of these cage-traps into the waters of the Minch – and left them there for the night, when the lobsters would emerge from their rocks to feed.

  I had my sons, my sister Rebecca and my first wife Olivia with me in the boat that day. We were right in the middle of the three islands, the Shiants’ navel, and the tide must have been at dead water. The evening was calm and the Minch was wearing its sleek summer skin, with that oily, rich viscosity which is merely the thickness of plankton in the water, the favoured pasture of the sharks.

  We were in a big wooden dinghy and there were five or six of us in there, floating about between the half-enclosing arms of the islands. Looking up, away to the south, where the sky was daubed by the swell into patches across the water, I saw a fin. ‘Is that a shark?’ I said. The boys thought I was joking. But we looked harder and saw the fin moving through those slack colour-islands of sea and sky. It was a fin and I turned the boat towards it, perhaps two or three hundred yards away. Within seconds Rebecca said quietly, ‘There’s another, there are two of them.’ The fins were trailing each other, one pursuing the other through the soup, perhaps fifteen feet apart. A few seconds more as we edged towards them, the outboard gurgling down into its lowest register, and then we realised, simultaneously I think, the whole boat coming to the same idea: not two sharks but two fins, the dorsal and the tail of the same animal, fifteen feet apart.

  Lovers on St Kilda sang to each other:

  He: You are my turtle-dove, my song-thrush, You are my sweet-sounding harp in the sweet morning.

  She: You are my hero, my basking shark.

  I’ve tried the lines out on a variety of people and they laugh, but for me that is as good as a North Atlantic haiku, at least in its sudden, final turn from everything that is sweet and coherent to the huge masculine simplicity of that other creature, cearrabhan in Gaelic, the unmeasured, the unsugared, unsinging presence of the giant wild.

  It was like that the evening we met our shark. The beautiful surface ease of the sea, its time-lapsed slopping from one state to another and the way it looked like a bed in which you could loll and roll for hours: all that concealed another place. Those two fins were the blades of one world cutting up into the air of another. I stopped the engine, the boat drifted and the grazing shark was moving across our bows. I wasn’t frightened as it turned, a little below the surface now, and circled us, its head as wide as a table, its body the length of two dinghies, its dredger-bucket mouth agape for the food-rich water streaming through it, the skin a mottled grey and a manner as casually proprietorial as a landlord behind his bar, as a Macleod in his Minch. It circled us, one full circumnavigation of the boat, and then moved away, still underwater, its outline breaking up as the coloured sea closed over.

  That was twelve years ago and I have never seen one since. Numbers have certainly dropped catastrophically since the 1940s, and no one knows why. Dan Macleod at Lemreway blames ‘the Norwegians’. Others the rampaging depredations of shark hunters such as Tex Geddes and Gavin Maxwell in the Forties and early Fifties. And there is some evidence to suggest that the shark population goes through boom-bust cycles with a period of about half a century.

  I hope and pray it does because I know that the way to see these animals is not in that rare single sighting, which is rather a twitcher’s view, the precious conservationist with his awe in his pocket, but in the grandeur of the shoals among which Maxwell and Geddes played such havoc. Maxwell had, I think, an admirably complex attitude. He felt no, or little, compunction about shooting these enormous animals. In Harpoon at a Venture, he maintained that to kill a basking shark is no more or less cruel than to kill a herring. But his sense of wonder remained intact. Only from him do I know a description of the basking shark en masse: ‘Down there in the clear water,’ he wrote of one summer day in 1946 off the southern coast of Skye,

  they were packed as tight as sardines, layer upon layer of them, huge grey shapes like a herd of submerged elephants, the furthest down dim and indistinct in the sea’s dusk. A memory came back to me from childhood – Mowgli and the elephants’ dance, and the drawing of the great heaving mass of backs in the jungle clearing.

  That’s what I want: a vastness of vast presences, ranks of them stepping down into the green dark of the sea.

  A couple of weeks later, in early September, the shepherds arrive ‘to take the lambs home’. That is a euphemism: the real destination is Stornoway market,
and then the butcher or, if they are not quite fat, some lush southern pastures where they can be finished. In 1999, Shiant lambs from Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean (those from Eilean Mhuire were, as John Murdo Matheson the shepherd says, ‘ready fit for the hook’) went to a buyer from Lancaster, who sold them on to a farm near Dover, where they spent the winter, fattening a little more, and from where they finally went to the butcher the following spring. There is nothing new in this: upland and island stock have been fattened and finished on richer farms further south, nearer the urban markets, for centuries. The whole of Scotland was laced with the drove-roads along which they travelled.

  Ever since the departure of the old Shiant population in the 1770s, the islands have been a stock-raising place. At first, it was a mixture of the old black cattle and sheep. But improvers soon cast their eye over the potentialities of the place. ‘The Schant Isles are certainly the greatest curiosities I ever contemplated,’ Rev. James Headrick, a geologist who had been invited to Lewis in 1800 by Lord Seaforth, remarked: ‘Were they known, men fond of viewing all that is grand and uncommon in the productions of nature would come from the remotest corners of the world to see them.’

  But Headrick was employed more for an economic than a picturesque survey: