The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel

The boat as transport and fishing tool has shaped so much of Shetland’s history and its culture. We worked the land, true, but all too often a poor, thin land, and in desperate times fishing kept us alive. It made us who we are, a virile, confident, skilled and highly adaptable people with many stories to tell and a unique tongue in which to tell them.⁷

I had assumed, when reading all the admiring writing on the age of the sixareen, that the narrative of Shetland fishing must be one of decline from a golden era when saithe or ling could be plucked from the sea at will, so was surprised to find that the catches of Shetland ships have never been greater than they are today, the technological skill of earlier boatbuilders growing through the age of nets and herring (rather than lines and ling), then steam, motors and engine grease. The question of whether such innovation has been wholly positive – saving lives, but devastating sea life while reducing the number of livings to be made from the sea – is a different matter altogether.

In the serene conditions of the first few days, I felt distinctly un-intrepid, with Shetland’s boating tradition a constant reminder of what humans are capable of when confronting the profound forces of the ocean. I moved slowly on, finding kayaking most pleasurable at night, when winds were lowest and the light dramatic. Between spells of paddling I worked through books I’d picked up in Lerwick, discovering more about the traditions and stories of these islands. Much of this reading was done in the boat, rocking gently on the swell as I rested. Without the splash of constantly rotating paddles, birds and animals often popped up close by, some reacting with surprise but others with curiosity at this bright intrusion in their midst. One gannet appeared within touching distance, allowing me immersion in the infamous ice-blue eye. Like a salt-rimed sea swan, it arched its wings defiantly, but made no sign of moving off. Seated on the waves, the bird’s white tail feathers and black wing tips stretched a surprising distance from its bill (which, slightly hooked, resembled interlocking plates of some long-tarnished metal). Minutes later it launched itself past my bow, bouncing repeatedly on the water and coating my camera lens in sea spray: as elegant as a camel on ice. When I landed, I couldn’t resist a look at the Shetland dialect ‘wird book’ I’d brought along, in case this maritime language had words to evoke things I’d been seeing. To my pleasure, sea spray was brimmastyooch.

It took three leisurely days to pass down Unst then Yell and reach the Shetland mainland. The crossing from Yell to the mainland was the most challenging hour since Unst. With tidal streams running along the sound, around the imposing Ramna Stacks to its south, and then across Fethaland (the finger thrusting out from north mainland), there was no possibility of tackling the whole crossing during the brief slack water between the incoming and outgoing tides. Today, the overnight cloud refused to lift quickly, and a few gusts from the haaf helped amplify my trepidation. But if I had one regret about my paddle down the difficult stretches of Unst and north Yell it was that I’d been too cautious in taking photos: however unsettling it proved to be, I resolved to use my camera even when among the contorted waters at the Stacks (figure 2.4).

The coast of north mainland – the region called Northmavine – is perhaps the most outlandish landscape in Britain: I’d entered a science-fiction vision of an ocean planet. The first headlands, gnarled, grey and viciously gouged by sea, contain some of the oldest rocks in Britain. These soon give way to young red granite pillars and pinnacles, topped with puffins or Arctic terns, which rise directly from the ocean (figure 2.5). Some are smooth and torpedo-like, others prodigiously spiked, and still others have broad bases cut through by arches resembling the galleries of a flooded cathedral. I thought of ‘the living floriations and the leaping arches’ of David Jones’s long poem The Anathemata; in presenting cathedral architecture as an extension of the natural world, Jones insists that nature and culture shouldn’t be seen as separate. Passing through in windless conditions gave me rare access to each dark transept in these enclosed, steep-sided spaces.

These islands are drowned mountains. Six hundred million years ago a vast ‘Caledonian’ range stretched from what is now Norway to the present-day United States. The islands of Shetland were then peaks of Himalayan majesty, before aeons of erosion ground them to their cores. This mountain heritage shapes Shetland’s modern character: the ocean floor falls away from these ‘erosional remnants’ faster than from most of Britain, so that a depth is reached in half a mile that takes a hundred miles to reach from many English shores.⁸ The behaviour of the ocean and the distributions of fish or oil are all defined by those underwater inclines. The first, grey headlands in Northmavine are a rare point at which no remnant of the Caledonian mountains survives, worn down to bedrock laid 3 billion years ago from quartz and feldspar, before laval heat deformed it into the coarse gneiss basement of today. Later, thick sediments settled over this foundation before the clash of continental plates which, through buckling, thrusting and folding, made the Caledonian mountains. When I gazed up at many mainland cliffs, I was staring through cross sections of those ancient hills, with an access to the distant past that is rarely possible from land. The vast variety of rocks – including granite, marble, limestone, gabbro and sandstone – generates the diversity of foliage above. Limestone feeds patches of green munificence, while gneiss and granite starve the ground into blanket bog.

Geological distinctiveness has drawn scientists and artists to Shetland for generations. The driving force behind the great twentieth-century renaissance of Scottish literature, Hugh MacDiarmid, moved here in search of ‘elemental things’, by which he meant old language as well as rocks and the forces that moulded them. In ways that are often neglected, his career was defined by Shetland: it is indicative of the scale of Shetland’s impact on his work that most of pages 385–1,035 in his collected poems were written here. MacDiarmid’s son described the strange scene in their Shetland fisherman’s cottage:

The blazing peat fire, surviving in its grey ashes through the hollow of the night to be fanned fresh with the rising sun, patterned his legs to a tartan-red, and great blisters swelled. But nothing matched the white heat of passionate concentration, the marathon of sleepless nights and days that suddenly ended the sitting around for months indulging in that most deceptive of exercises – thinking.⁹

When MacDiarmid explored these islands – in his own words, ‘rowing about on lonely waters; lying brooding on uninhabited islands’ – he was actually in the company of a geologist (Thomas Robertson) and a fisherman (John Irvine of Saltness). It seems hard to imagine a group better suited to exploring Shetland than these experts in boats, rocks and words. One result of this alliance, MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘On a Raised Beach’, is perhaps the finest evocation of the entanglement of Shetland’s geology, sea and culture ever written. It becomes a kind of metamorphic metaphysical, with a famous opening – ‘All is lithogenesis’ – that rang true as I weaved my way through dramatic features formed from vertical layers of differentially eroded stone. This is a poem that demands to be read aloud, and deliberately snares the reader in thickets of dialect and science: words piled together like stones on the beach.

I dug my MacDiarmid from my dry bag and savoured his insistence that seeing is not enough when we confront Shetland rock:

from optic to haptic and like a blind man run

My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,

Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveloes

Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear

An angle-titch to all you corrugations and coigns.¹⁰

When I reached Ronas Voe, one of the most dramatic sections of this coast, I took a kind of risk I never had before, sleeping at the bottom of tall red cliffs, where a tiny beach of silver-white stones seemed to stretch two yards behind the tide line: just enough space to keep me and my kayak out of ocean. From here, I looked up to Ronas Hill, the highest point in Shetland: a frozen former magma chamber from a huge Caledonian volcano.

Although the days were still fine, this was my first really wet night. Each day so far, I’d stopped kayaking a couple of hours before sleep in the hope of drying out. While at sea, I wear wetsuit boots, neoprene trousers and a thin rash vest that starts out black but after two or three days is mottled silver with salt. Each evening I’d change into warm and comfy land-wear. Sitting back in the sun, with a book by a Shetland author, I’d eat bread and cheese while watching the tides and seabirds pass. But tonight a thin drizzle set in, making the stones of my little beach shiny and slippery.

Rain makes decisions that would otherwise be of little consequence, such as when to change clothes or how to pack the sleeping bag, into significant moments when mistakes can lead to days of discomfort. I had just one set of land clothes (and nothing has ever dried in the hold of a kayak). So tonight, I rushed straight from my kayak gear into the sleeping bag and went to sleep early. Dampness increased as the rain thickened. True to form, my waterproof sleeping bag let nothing in for hours until I was woken by a thin trickle of water rolling down my neck and pooling above my collarbone. I was glad to be sheltered from the wind that had picked up, but decided that the best chance of comfort was to make a very early start.

This was the day I’d reach St Magnus Bay: a bowl in the side of Shetland, fifteen miles across, 140 metres deep and forty miles along the involuted edge I’d paddle. Many of the most dramatic remnants of Shetland’s tumultuous geological past line its circumference. I decided to take my time over the first stage of this journey, passing down the stupendous Eshaness cliffs before landing in a cove at a tiny settlement called Stenness and walking to spend the night on the precipice I’d kayaked beneath. But conditions were slowly changing. Where the sea until today had been a blue-vaulted expanse with perpetual views, the swell had risen overnight to become a series of narrow corridors whose silver walls could obscure even the tallest cliffs. I’d wondered whether I might see basking sharks round Eshaness, but today they could have passed within feet without me knowing. For most of the day, this swell was immensely peaceful, its phases gentle and unthreatening as I moved through four dimensions with every stroke. But at the bottom of the Eshaness cliffs, the swell seemed to come from all directions at once: unpredictable and disorienting. The way to deal with this in a kayak is less about the arms than the hips and thighs. At leisure, I sit straight-ish, but the means of responding to complex seas is to lean forward, lower the centre of gravity and grip the kayak tightly with the knees, creating a sense of connection with the boat. After a damp night and in cold wind, I was deeply reluctant to roll this morning and relieved once I reached the simpler water near Stenness Island. Here I stopped on the swell to take pictures back along the cliffs, as best I could, and to observe the place I found myself: the bowl of another volcano. It felt strangely appropriate that in a spot where I was separated from writhing magma only by time, I should be plunging and leaping with violent swell, head rhythmically plunging beneath where my feet had been.

I landed at Stenness in time for lunch, left my kayak beside an old haaf-fishing station, and began the walk towards the lighthouse to learn these cliffs by watching the setting sunlight shift across them. Before I’d got beyond the bay, the local crofter approached and we discussed the caves along this coast. He insisted I explore the hollow interior of the island known as Dore Holm, rather than just looking up at its huge arch, and told me about a small entrance just north of the Eshaness lighthouse that had been found only a few years ago. It leads, he said, to a huge chamber inside the cliffs. This was my first reminder that apparently timeless and knowable cliffs are mysterious and shifting. There’d soon be many more.

Next day, I continued along the sweep of St Magnus Bay, spending a night that was close to perfection on the cliff-bound island of Muckle Roe. The cove I pulled into through a small gap in the island’s towering crags was as rich in grasses, bog cotton and small flowering plants as anywhere I’d seen. Unsurprisingly, the products of the slow dissolution of contrasting rocks – a wildly varied sward of grasses and flowering plants – appear in Shetland culture almost as much as fish and boats. The star among young poets writing from Shetland today, Jen Hadfield, is particularly attentive to plants of bog and cliff such as the butterwort:

I’ve fallen

to my knees again not five

minutes from home: first,

the boss of Venusian leaves

that look more like they docked

than grew; a sappy nub;

violet bell; the minaret

of purpled bronze.¹¹

In ‘The Ambition’ she even dreams of becoming butterwort, lugworm and trilobite, though her ultimate ambition is to be ocean, ‘trussed on the rack of the swell’:

The tide being out, I traipsed through dehydrated eelgrass and the chopped warm salad of the shallows, and then the Atlantic breached me part by part.¹²

I sat in this immersive scene and watched Arctic skuas (skootie alan) chase Arctic terns (tirricks) as, in displays of balletic brutality, they forced them to drop their catch or vomit recent meals. And as the air cooled, moths began to clamber up the grasses: after sleepily fumbling upwards they’d shift abruptly, as though at the flick of a switch, into a manic spiral through the evening air.

After Muckle Roe, a long voe leads far inland, ending in the town of Aith. Following the coast now meant plunging into the heart of mainland. Here, I visited Sally Huband – ecologist, nature writer and Shetland-bird surveyor – who made me soup and pizza, as well as providing valuable local knowledge for the next stages of my journey. Sally explained several of the characteristics of Shetland’s wildlife that had struck me as I travelled. She told me, for instance, that the absence of peregrine falcons is partially explained by the dominance of fulmars in their favoured nest sites: when threatened, fulmars spit a thick oil that’s enough to debilitate a peregrine chick or compromise an adult’s flight. Sally had just flown back from the outlying island of Foula where she’d been collecting great-skua pellets as a favour for a friend who needed them before going to Greenland. Her descriptions of Foula’s geological and biological distinctiveness convinced me that once I’d finished my month’s journey south I would have to make my way there: without reaching Foula I couldn’t claim to have travelled Atlantic Shetland.

Back on the water I headed for the mouth of St Magnus Bay, but before I could round the lower lip a large island blocked my route. For any sea kayaker, Papa Stour is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Shetland: a mile-wide rock with a twenty-two-mile coastline, pocked with some of the deepest and most complex caves and arches in Europe. It is stranded in the ocean amid speeding tides, and I decided to break the journey through them with a night high on the island’s cliffs. I watched a trawler pass the remote Ve Skerries (another ancient knuckle of bedrock) as a group of Arctic skuas clucked and quarrelled like the drunk family at a seaside caravan park.

Papa Stour also appealed to Shetland’s first geologists. In 1819, Samuel Hibbert described his arrival across transparent water, which made the boat appear ‘suspended in mid-air over meadows of yellow, green, or red tangle, glistening with the white shells that clung to their fibres’. He observed ‘red barren stacks of porphyry’ that shot up from the water, ‘scooped by the attrition of the sea into a hundred shapes’. Hibbert described many customs, including the Papa residents’ tradition of trapping seals in the famous caves to club them until ‘the walls of these gloomy recesses are stained with their blood’; but he gives a more picturesque vision of his own journey underground:

The boat … entered a vault involved in gloom, when, turning an angle, the water began to glitter as if it contained in it different gems, and suddenly a burst of day-light broke in upon us, through an irregular opening at the top of the cave. This perforation, not more than twenty yards in its greatest dimensions, served to light up the entrance to a dark and vaulted den, through which the ripples of the swelling tide were, in their passage, converted by Echo, into low and distant murmurs.¹³

Hibbert was a polymath prone to taking long excursions in corduroy breeches and leather gaiters, accompanied by his dog (delightfully named Silly). It was one of these excursions that took him to Shetland in 1817, but his relationship with the islands was transformed when he happened across commercial quantities of chromite on Unst. In 1818 he began a geological survey covering all the archipelago. In the evening or during storms, he would appear at the doors of crofters, seeking bed or food. Then, according to his daughter-in-law, he would ‘retire to rest lying down in his clothes, dry or wet, on a bed of heather or straw, but not always sleeping, for swarms of fleas might lay an interdict on sleep’. On Papa Stour his hosts treated him to tusk fish and ‘cropping moggies’ (spiced cod liver mixed with flour and boiled in the fish’s stomach). Such dainties, he writes, should make Shetland a place of pilgrimages for discerning gourmands. He adds one caveat: for variety the poor islanders sometimes resort to coarse foodstuffs like lobster.

In the morning, I explored the caves, though I couldn’t pass far into their depths, lacking the conditions that Hibbert recommends ‘when the ocean shows no sterner wrinkles than are to be found on the surface of some sheltered lake’. I then swung round the headland beneath St Magnus Bay. Passing under yet more rugged cliffs, I called in on the memory of Vagaland at Westerwick, before embarking on the final stages of my Shetland voyage.

Once I was beyond the geological spectacles of the north, I made my way towards a world of small, fertile islands that were long smattered with settlements but are now home only to sheep. The day I set out through these islands was my first experience of the infamous Shetland haa and so the first time I really had to navigate. After ten minutes on the water, I tore my new compass from its plastic packaging and checked I could read it as I rocked. The conditions were haunting. Sometimes the haa sat flat against the gentle, three-feet swell. At others, it hung just inches from the water and tendrils of grey-white cloud seemed to stroke the surface of the waves. I had intended to spend the night on the island of Havera. But this, I’d since heard, was a place without streams: its community had been sustained by two wells that, a century later, I couldn’t afford to rely on. So I aimed first to find my way between the Peerie Isles (peerie being Shetland dialect for small) to the outside tap at the local Outdoor Centre.

Mist is an excellent ally in wildlife watching. Today, not much after 4 a.m., an otter stood and watched as I drifted quietly by, while several red-throated divers, known here as rain geese, left it late to sidle off. Conditions, landscape, wildlife and atmosphere had all changed dramatically since St Magnus Bay. After landing and stocking up on water I set off for Havera, a place I’d long been intrigued to see. Slowly, the mist rose, wisps clinging to the moors east of the island, so that Havera gradually brightened from the west. Soon, it was stranded in a wedge of weak light beneath dark and silent skies. Clouds still licked the feet of the rough pewter cliffs long after their brows were clear. As I entered the mile of open water between mainland and the island, the swell was slow and gentle. On this day more than any other, the strange sensation of movement in multiple dimensions was something my body would retain: when I slept, many hours later, the cliffs seemed to undulate beneath me.

Havera is surrounded by richness. Nories and tysties surfaced laden with sand eels; forests of green-brown kelp seemed to grasp towards the surface. I’d planned this day and the next to give me time on the island. Here, if anywhere, I could begin to comprehend the lost communities of Shetland and the ruins that line the shores. The Havera folk left behind an archive, including recordings describing life on the island. A collaborative project of photography, research and writing used these to build a beautiful book, Havera: The Story of an Island (2013). I’d saved this to read in situ, where I could follow up each reference to a hill, promontory (taing) or rocky inlet (geo) by exploring it myself. Later, I’d spend a day on the Shetland mainland listening to recordings of the people of Havera and contextualising the extracts in the book. This was my best chance so far to explore the ‘archive of the feet’.

Travelling south, I reached the island at the deep clefts of Stourli Geo and Brei Geo on its north side, and used a dialect poem, Christina de Luca’s ‘Mappin Havera’, to guide me towards a landing. This poem begins with a warning:

Havera’s aa namit fae da sea.

We could box da compass

o wir isle; hits names markin

ivery sklent da sea is med,

da taings an stacks an gyos.

If on your wye ta Havera

an mist rowled in,

ivery steekit bicht spelt danger;

you had ta ken dem, ivery een.¹⁴

The poem then provides the necessary ‘kenning’, tracing the aids and obstacles encountered by fishermen at the island’s edge, until spying safety at ‘Nort Ham,/wir peerie haven/Mak for dere if you can’.

Having followed these directions, I pulled into Nort Ham at the island’s south-east corner (figure 2.6) and was met with an onshore sea of wildflowers and grasses. I pulled my boat up among the buttercups, where I found the egg of a wheatear (sten-shakker), plundered by a neater and more precise predator than the bonxies who might ordinarily be culprits. But there were also sten-shakker fledglings, less cautious and more curious than their chattering parents. Without this pretty sheltered inlet at Nort Ham, Havera might never have been inhabited. Over centuries, the people and goods that entered or left the island came through this tiny gap: the community’s single link to the world beyond.

I packed myself a bag of food and warm clothes, since new weather seemed to blow in by the hour. Havera has several landmarks I wanted to investigate. The most substantial is the abandoned village packed tightly into the corner known as Da Yard, which was the last place in Shetland’s small isles to sustain a population. In 1911 it boasted twenty-nine occupants from five families. Inland, there are two outlying buildings. One is an old schoolhouse, the other the imposing trunk of a huge ruined windmill: a meed (sea mark) visible from many miles away. I decided to take my bearings according to the landscape before investigating the ruins. This proved trickier than expected since most headlands were colonies of terns: to disturb them is not just harmful to a threatened species, but also draws a volley of intense and committed dive-bombing far more likely to cause injury than the infamous attacks of great skuas (a bonxie attack is never conducted in such numbers or with such frenzied persistence).

When I finally found a spot to sit and read, I was gazing out onto Havera’s satellite, West Skerry. Each spring, island sheep and cattle were swum here, across the hundred-yard sound, to protect the Havera crops. This ridge of rough pasture, completely separate from Havera’s arable land, was key to the success of the island community. But it is arable richness that was Havera’s greatest asset. The island is less than a square mile in size, yet its interior is not the rock- and wrack-strewn waste found on many islets of similar area. It’s an unlikely idyll of well-drained, fertile earth, perpetually replenished by soft limestone that intrudes in veins through the region’s granite bones. From the era of Neolithic field boundaries (still sometimes traceable), to the moment when the crofters left, this limestone made Havera a fine place to grow grain. Indeed, its name is probably derived from hafr, the Old Norse for ‘oats’.

The island was generally presented by its last inhabitants as a plentiful and perfect home. Gideon Williamson died in 1999, seventy-six years after he left Havera; he remembered his birthplace as unique in Shetland because its fertile land was not ‘just bits a patches here an dere’ but one great expanse of rock-less, weed-less loam: ‘you could tak a ploo an ploo da whole lot up … Hit wis entirely clean.’ Shetland tradition accords to tilled Havera earth pest-repelling tendencies that verge on the magical.

Yet the topography did have drawbacks. Wells were no substitute for streams because running water had uses beyond cleaning and quenching thirst. The most common ruins I’d passed along other Shetland coasts were small, simple watermills built where rivers met the sea. But the people of Havera had to row their grain to Scalloway (a five-mile crossing) or Weisdale (eight miles) and pay for its grinding. This added labour, cost and risk to the challenges of island life. In the 1860s, a solution was dreamed up: the only windmill ever built in this storm-ravaged archipelago. The innovator might have been Gifford Laurenson, a skilled mason who was entrusted by the Society of Antiquaries with repairing the Iron Age Broch of Mousa (then ‘mouldering into dust’). Between 1848–52, the Laurensons married into Havera families twice, and Gifford’s sister and father (also a mason) moved to the island.

The significance of Gifford Laurenson’s link to the Broch of Mousa is that the Havera mill evokes ancient Shetland more than modern. It stands like a round Iron Age edifice in a region where circular buildings are rare. It is a landmark that, like an ancient fort, puts Havera on the map: the most instantly recognisable of the small islands and, according to one local seafarer, ‘a kinda lodestar for whaar you wir’. That incidental function is all well and good. But so many compromises were made with the mill’s design, in order that it might withstand the Shetland weather, that it was useless for grinding grain: Havera folk quickly quit and resumed their mainland journeys.

The large, ill-fitting stones make the mill easy to climb, so I edged my way carefully up the green and golden lichen to an exceptional vantage on its walls. From here the world of which Havera was the centre could be surveyed. The rough low hills of the southern mainland, with their scattering of small white houses, occupied the eastern horizon, the shores becoming ever sandier as the hills sank and stretched south. These were the coastlines that Havera folk traversed on calm summer days. But beyond the southern extremities of the mainland, thirty miles distant, Fair Isle stood out on the horizon. From there, sweeping west, a long stretch of ocean was punctured only by the mad cliffs of Foula, frequently referred to as the wildest inhabited spot in the British Isles. These two islands signalled a remoter world to which, in certain weathers, Havera most certainly belonged.

I wandered downhill to the village, where small buildings are packed into a narrow isthmus with surprising neatness. This order is a product of the history of habitation. Although Havera had long been lived on (this is probably its first period of abandonment in millennia), the population was increased, and several new crofts built, during a sudden enforced settlement in the eighteenth century when landlords aimed to increase rents from every part of their domain. When the island was abandoned, it wasn’t because of clearance, but was an after-effect of the overpopulation engineered by the lairds. A few Gaelic place names round the coast suggest that some incomers might have been Scots, not Shetlanders; two very different cultures forced together.

The overwhelming impression amid the ruins was of how communal life must have been. Doors and windows of the small neat houses look onto one another, while amenities such as the single village kiln suggest prominent shared spaces (in most of Scotland at this time each croft had a kiln of its own). Inside houses, outlines of two rooms, the but and ben (living room and bedroom), are often clear, although the interiors of some have been converted into well-crafted winter sheep pens. A single habitable house stands on the inland edge of the village. It is used by those who tend the island’s sheep but its occupation seems irregular: a faded chess set and 1990s magazines accompany a toy animal that stares incongruously from a window.

This building shows that the village is not entirely abandoned. But nor is it entirely uninhabited. As I walked around its eastern edge I realised that the honking of fulmars was not just coming from the precipice below, but also from the ruins of crofts: the birds use the village walls as crags. Despite the healthy human population shown in the 1911 census, the last residents left the island in 1923. Jessie Goodlad, born on Havera in 1903, explained why: