Читать книгу The Frayed Atlantic Edge - David Gange - Страница 9

Thermometer and barometer measure our seasons capriciously; the Orkney year should be seen rather as a stark drama of light and darkness.

George Mackay Brown

LATE SUMMER BRINGS uncertainty. It was mid-August by the time I resumed my journey and, in contrast to the long calm days on Shetland, the Orcadian sea changed hour by hour. Sun, squall, sea mist, rain and rainbow passed across the coastlines fast enough to make each morning feel like a time-lapsed month. When winds shifted, water responded: weather was conducted through the shell of the boat and into me, dictating the experience of each new stretch of coast. Not just perception but emotion drifted with the moods of sky and sea. This ranged from the giddy joy of lurching along, propelled by a following swell, or the anxious focus when gusts brought side-on breakers, to serenity on flat seas that seemed perfectly safe and infinitely spacious.

Phases of transition from calm to chaos were often the most sublime, binding beauty and fear together. Not for nothing are the islands of Orkney said to evoke sleeping whales: they are peaceful mounds with awful potentials. As the month progressed I saw, felt, and, for the first time, photographed, parts of waves that seemed more the habitat of surfers than paddlers. These were not the long strafing breakers that come with heavy swell (I still had some leeway before the truly wild weather of autumn); they were the standing waves that twist and coil over any obstacle to a running tide.

Atlantic waters are deceptive in changing weather. In the midst of a tidal maelstrom, hospitable seas can seem beyond the reach of imagination; yet unseen gentleness might be just a few wave crests away. This was driven home to me at the north-west corner of the island of Rousay, where the sea’s tidal features are named with the detail of a city suburb’s streets. Here, emerging from a tide race called Rullard’s Roost I hit a mesh of tide and swell so fierce that I had to head for shore: I thought my day was done within an hour of setting out. Yet five minutes later a more coastal line allowed me through: I could barely see evidence of conditions to cause concern. Much of successful kayaking is in the choice of routes between the shifting waves. As important on the water as arms or balance is a cool head through the roaring, swirling, chilling and grinding that batter the senses in a threatening sea.

Not just the weather, but also the landscapes were now defined by contrasts. On the first islands I passed, transitions from thundering cliffs to the placid undulation of cattle farms are sudden yet somehow seamless. No single landscape lasts more than a few hundred yards. On the most north-westerly island, Westray, the imposing, sixteenth-century edifice of Noltland Castle looms over a large modern farm; seen from the sea, the two occupy the same small space. Beside them, near the spot where surf meets sand, a sprawl of tyres and polythene marks a recently excavated sauna, built by the island’s Bronze Age inhabitants.

This landscape looks at once spacious and cluttered. Centuries and functions, whether sacred, industrial, defensive or recreational, are pushed together at sparsely situated sites. Around them, in wide fields that are almost moorland, the earth is loaded with low-lying detritus of millennia. When I wandered ashore, I found myself watching each inch of ground for traces of the past until every broken plastic bucket or scrap of rope became an artefact. The sounds of breakers, cattle, lapwings, tractors and voices also took on that character: items in the soundscape felt as distinctive of this place as did objects in the landscape.

After making my way north by roads and ferries I had kayaked out from Pierowall, Westray’s capital village. Its small grey buildings perch around a colourful little bay: tall yellow hawksbeard flowers and bronze kelp line an arc of golden sands and green sea. Pierowall was known to the Norse as Höfn and a row of pagan graves suggests it was a Viking-era market. When Rognvald Kali Kolsson stopped here there was a clashing of cultures: he met Irish monks whose hairstyles he mocked in verse. This pretty, ancient port was my place of departure but it wasn’t northerly enough to be my true starting point.

I began by kayaking north-east. The small island of Papa Westray, known locally as Papay, thrusts a rugged and disruptive head north of Westray and into the Atlantic’s flow. As I paddled into the mile-wide sound between islands I found myself grinning with pleasure to be back among the waves. I’d missed the ocean’s noise, the tension in the arms as they pull a paddle through water, and, most of all, the sense of unrooting that rocking over waves creates. I kayaked carelessly, enlivened by cold splashes from the bow and paddle. Yet before I’d even really got started, I felt the lure of Papay’s past.

This island proved to be the most improbable place I’ve visited. Its history emerges from waves and grasses in ways that feel surreal. Sometimes traces of the past are recent and mundane but still evocative of island life. My route reached the island at a pretty place where low cliffs are topped with a small, strangely situated structure that is blackened by burning. It stands on its isolated outcrop because this picturesque inlet faces directly into south-westerly wind and swell. For decades the vulnerability of this spot made it the ideal rubbish dump. Litter on the scale of cars and sofas would be thrown down the rocks and carried away by winter storms that were more muscular and reliable than any binmen. Local lobsters still dwell, perhaps, in the rusted boots and bonnets of Ford Cortinas.

As I rounded the island, the surprises became more venerable. I passed an enormous kelp store, a remnant of the decades round 1800 when Papay was a global centre of this major industry. Paddling past, and beneath one of the most spectacular chambered cairns in the world, I landed on a sandy beach beside a small and unassuming isthmus of stones and seaweed. I’d intended to wander up the cliffs and visit a monument to the extinction of an Atlantic seabird. But the spot I’d landed at was not what it seemed. At first, I thought I was hallucinating as I saw patterns in rocks where seaweed was strewn like tea leaves. But the more I stared, the clearer the geometry became: a cobbled platform took shape, then hints at a low stone wall. These sea-smoothed structures were centuries older than the era of kelp but, for now, the nature of their making remained a mystery.

I wandered up the cliffs to find the monument I’d stopped for. In 1813, ‘King Auk’ was the last great auk in Britain. These birds – penguin-sized relatives of the razorbill – were once prized for feathers, meat and eggs, but by the early nineteenth century the collection of stuffed birds had become a favourite pastime of Europe’s elite. What could possibly cement a wealthy collector’s status like the large, impressive corpse of ‘the rarest bird in the world’? There are many discrepancies in narrations of the events of 1813, but it seems that ‘local lads’ had killed King Auk’s mate by stoning the previous year. Now William Bullock, impresario and keeper of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, had written to the lairds of Papay requesting the very last bird for his collection. The obliging lairds tasked six local men to row to the third cave along the north Papay crags. King Auk leapt from his perch into the sea and a marksman, Will Foulis, fired and fired again. But the auk was agile in the water. Eventually cornered, King Auk was bludgeoned to death with oars. The bloodied prize was soon in the hands of couriers to London where it became a feature of Bullock’s ever more elaborate displays, to which another one-off, Napoleon’s carriage from Waterloo, was later added.

The cairn I visited on the cliffs above King Auk’s perch was put in place by local children. Concealed in the memorial, beneath a bright red sculpture of the royal bird, is a time capsule containing the message they wrote to the future:

We wish there was still a great auk to see. We hope that people won’t have to build more cairns like this to remember things we see alive now. We humans gave a name to this bird, now only the name is left. If you who are reading this message are not human, remember us with kindness as we remember the great auk.¹

The fate of King Auk marks Papay as a place of endings. But after I’d battled round the island’s violent northern headland, I reached sites that spoke instead of beginnings. The most famous is the Knap of Howar. This is the earliest known constructed house in Europe. Built as a family farm around 5700 BC the land its occupants tilled and grazed has been eaten away by water until the Knap is nestled in reach of sea spray. Its concave walls and intricate cupboard-like enclaves are missing only soft furnishings and whale-rib rafters. Rabbits burrow all round. As they dig, they disinter refuse from ancient human meals: worn oyster shells, and great-auk bones, whose flesh was stripped millennia ago. Like so many sea-lapped sites, the Knap of Howar inspires conflicting responses. Thoughts are easily lured towards ideas of timelessness, yet everything about this site has been transformed: the quality of its earth and the nature of its foliage have been slowly altered by the creeping proximity of ocean. If timelessness exists anywhere on earth, it is not in sight of the sea.

Even the Knap of Howar is not the most immediate and affecting spot here. A little to the north, St Boniface’s Kirk stands on the site of older holy places. Northerly gales flay earth from every inch of coast, changing topography by the week. Grasses and wildflowers cling to steep sandy soils where summer respite from storms provides the fleeting chance of growth before roots are ripped away and flung into autumn. It’s easy to sit and stare into the ocean without comprehending the structures of rock and shell around you. From every inch of land the ocean takes, there appears a new facet of a large medieval settlement.² I’d glanced around layer upon layer of exposed walls and floors before I began to notice the refuse beneath them: thousands of shells of limpet, oyster and winkle clustered where they’d been littered after feasts. Storms here have disinterred whale vertebrae, from even grander feasting, and red quernstones for grinding grain, made of rock not native to the island. Remnants of the processing of pig iron and fish oil imply a community that worked the coast in sophisticated ways.

There’s something evocative about the daily changes occurring at this unmarked, uncelebrated site. The configuration of buildings and shells seen on any visit is immediately taken by the ocean, never to be witnessed again nor recorded. It’s impossible to categorise such places. Most of this island fits both poles of many binaries depending on the light you choose to see it in: human/wild, timeless/changing, productive/barren. Everything seems both out of place and perfectly positioned, and our frameworks for comprehending the coastal past feel entirely inadequate.

Unable to imagine what it must be like to live in a landscape so immediate but so inscrutable, I knew I needed help. Before setting out I’d contacted Papay’s ‘biographer’, Jim Hewitson. Jim told me he and his wife Morag intended to travel no further than the Old Pier, 500 metres from their home, for the rest of the year: when I passed, he said, I’d find them at home or in a nearby field. In the early afternoon, I knocked on the Hewitsons’ door and was led into an old schoolhouse. On one wall was a large map marked with Papay’s historic place names. Elsewhere were images from the island’s past including a painting of King Auk. This was pinned beside a memorial to a French kayaker who visited when paddling north. He’d planned his journey with his wife before her untimely death. Having undertaken the voyage alone, he disappeared, presumed drowned, before reaching Shetland; I didn’t dare ask whether he and I were the only kayakers to have visited the Hewitsons.

I sat with Morag and Jim, consuming tales of island life along with tea and croissants. Then we wandered the coast. I was soon told, in no uncertain terms, that my desire to find explanations of the coast’s mysteries was not an acceptable approach to the island. Life on Papay, they insisted, involves coming to terms with mystery, not seeing it as a problem to conquer. Jim and I revisited the strange cobbled structures of the beach I’d landed on. He told me that archaeologists call it a medieval fish farm, used by monks from a monastery that may or may not have existed when Papay might or might not have been the centre of an eighth-century bishopric founded by Iona monks (or someone else). Yet Jim and Morag’s children have found antlers in this ‘fish farm’; perhaps this was actually a spot for trapping deer whose movements would be impeded in the soft coastal ground. I was left wondering about the boundaries of ‘mystery’. Without Morag and Jim’s help it would have been impossible for me to write about the island at all. Before our conversations I had answers to bad questions; I was left with much better questions but no hope of answers. And I’d been given a reminder that archaeology is rarely about discovering or confirming facts, but more often a process of inventing the most plausible possible stories.

As we walked, pieces of Papay stone continually issued from Jim’s pockets. One contained fossilised raindrops. Another was a Neolithic hammering tool. A third had been scratched at some inestimable date with a design that echoed the hills of Westray as seen from Papay. This was Jim’s illustration of the power and persistence of island mysteries: it was probably – almost certainly – nothing, but it might be a rare piece of millennia-old representational art. I was reluctant to abandon a place with so many surfaces to scratch, and it was chastening to think I’d been tempted to kayak straight past. As a parting gift, Jim gave me an oyster shell. This was one of the many extravagantly ancient relics unearthed by the Knap of Howar’s rabbits. Or else, perhaps, the oyster was alive and well until last year, when a black-backed gull had torn it from the seabed.

Orkney is often celebrated for the balance its people have sustained between the industries of land and sea. In comparison with Shetland, the more fertile earth shifts, slightly, the balance of subsistence onto the land and away from the ocean. To the islands’ great bard, George Mackay Brown, Orcadians are ‘fishermen with ploughs’ although others suggest they’re better described as crofters with lines and nets. The most celebrated Orkney historian, Willie Thomson, addressed the same theme with reference to the Orkneyinga Saga. He introduced Orcadian trade by evoking an ally of Earl Rognvald – Sweyn Asleifson – who is sometimes labelled ‘the ultimate Viking’.³ Like centuries of later Orkney folk, Thomson insists, Sweyn whiled away the year on his home island attending to agriculture; he only set out on ocean voyages in the interstices of the farming calendar. As I paddled from Papay to Westray, a tiny fishing boat motored back to Pierowall over flat blue sea; soon I saw a Westray woman herding cattle from a sea cliff to a gentle field a hundred yards inland. A huge bull bellowed its resistance. Never on this island was I out of earshot of either cattle or the chug of inshore vessels. Never did I find a coastal spot to sleep where I was certain cattle wouldn’t appear around me.

Yet as I kayaked I became increasingly uncomfortable with the tradition of emphasising the contrasts and complements of land and sea. These coasts were thickly marked with remnants of industries at the margins. For centuries, every job at sea was matched by a dozen people working not the land, but the shore. If boats were constant protagonists in Shetland story and history, then the intertidal zone plays that role in Orkney: it runs through island literature in ways that are entirely unique. Memoir after memoir of Orkney life makes the shore a major character when boats are only incidental presences. A striking example was published by the poet Robert Rendall in 1963. This memoir, Orkney Shore, sold well on the islands, yet is almost unreadable today because of the knowledge it demands of Latin and dialect names for coastal species. Rendall compares his memoir to old-fashioned sugar candy held together by a central piece of string; his life, he says, is the uninteresting string, his depictions of the Orkney shore the delicious candy. A far more palatable, if emotionally challenging, memoir of coastal life, Amy Liptrot’s account of recovery from addiction in The Outrun, brings the tradition of identifying Orkney with its shoreline up to date.

It’s tempting to trace the origins of this theme back centuries. Whereas in most of Britain land ownership ended at the high-water mark, a different custom prevailed in Orkney: Udal Law, imported from Norway in the ninth century, extended kindred land rights to the lowest tidelines. Where in Scotland the intertidal zone was sea, in Orkney it was land. According to Ruth Little, director of a 2013 arts project called Sea Change, ‘Orcadians are thresholders’ whose access to the margins has defined their identities.⁴ Even today, the conventions of Udal Law are sometimes successfully evoked against commercial threats to coastlines.

Many shoreline activities that families undertook related to fishing. Limpets were knocked off rocks for bait, nets were mended and lines prepared. Island women carried home the catch in heather creels before cleaning, splitting and drying fish. In a community where men were often offshore, Westray women performed many tasks that were elsewhere gendered male. 1920s photographs show women waist-deep in water hauling boats up Orkney beaches. They cut and carried peats, brought in hay and collected seabird eggs. Groups of neighbours in this deeply social community would go down to the shore and collect seaweed, whelks and spoots (razor clams) or lay nets across the fields to dry.⁵

Many coastal tasks were distinct from both fishing and farming. My hope as I kayaked Westray’s coasts was that I might teach myself to see the shores as resources. That leap of imagination into the perspectives of Orkney’s past involved putting aside modern attitudes to eating puffins, bludgeoning seals, or spending the evening in a room lit and fragranced by blubber or fish-oil lamps.

As I reached Westray from Papay I passed a tiny skerry called Aikerness Holm (figure 3.2). This is nothing more than a flat pile of shattered flagstones in the ocean, yet a crudely built structure, like a misplaced garden shed, is perched upon it. I landed and looked round. Today, this would be unpleasant, cramped conditions for one; but here, in the nineteenth century, four or five men would spend their summer collecting seaweed with rakes and barrows, returning to Westray only at weekends. They’d burn heaps of seaweed, sending huge palls of blue-beige smoke floating to the island and obscuring sights and smells behind the infamous ‘kelp reek’. The result of their burning was an alkali used in distant cities to make soap and glass.

Yet this tiny skerry is more famous for another major industry of the shoreline. On this spot, countless ships were wrecked. Later, in the archive, I’d listen to recordings of Westray folk describing aspects of island life.⁶ The windfall of goods from Aikerness was prominent among their recollections: the most infectious guffaw to issue from an islander came from Tommy Rendall when asked the question ‘Did any pilfering go on?’ He told of errors made with things washed up from wrecks, such as the time when half the stoves of Westray were ruined because anthracite was mistaken for domestic coal. He told of customs men, whose task – to prevent the contents of wrecks from ‘disappearing’ – made them the most hated people in the islands (besides perhaps the lairds). Customs men were the butt of endless plots, tricks and jokes. Known locally as ‘gadgers’, these snooping officials are still recalled in Orkney descriptions of unruly children ‘running round the hoose like a gadger’. But Westray’s ‘bounty of the sea’ was in fact hard-earned. The people of the islands saved countless lives, rowing small boats out in all conditions to extricate crews from stranded vessels. Like much of island life, this was an improvised affair. Even in the early twentieth century the region’s only sea rescue equipment was on Papay, because of the coincidence that the City of Lincoln, a ship large enough to carry such gear, had been wrecked there.

The first sea creatures I saw as I rounded Westray’s northern headlands were seals. Whiskered snouts protruded from surf in almost every inlet. I’d soon discover Orcadian seals to be the friendliest and most playful I’d ever crossed paths with, but that’s not because their relations with humans have been peaceable. Two days later I suddenly realised how many small structures I’d been paddling past were placed with sight lines to intertidal rocks where seals lounge. They were shooting stations (figure 3.3). Seal killing was once an enticing pursuit for Orcadian crofters: a single sealskin sometimes had the monetary value of a week’s farm labour. And a seal served many other purposes, providing food, warmth, light from oil lamps and even protection for harvest machinery: anything vulnerable to rust was coated in seal fat for the winter. There is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to see use of these marine-life fats and oils as ‘traditional’ or even ‘barbaric’ rather than ‘modern’: it was oil from north-east Atlantic basking sharks that lubricated moving parts in the Apollo moon missions.

It was not so much the import of cheap oils as new passions for wild animals that put an end to the seal trade. But recordings in the archive suggest the economic benefits of the seal to have changed rather than died out. One Westray resident, Alex Costie, recalled the end of seal hunting:

All the greenies, the likes of Greenpeace, were protesting so much … that totally destroyed the markets, but I have discovered nowadays how easy it is to get money for showing a tourist a seal that I am now the most reformed seal hunter you would ever come across.

By the time I reached the end of my first day’s travel I was at the end of Westray’s western peninsula, Noup Head. I climbed the cliffs of this dramatic promontory and slept beneath an imposing Victorian lighthouse. I was back among gannets. Shortly before I came in to land, one eccentric bird approached my kayak and clamped its beak around the bow before swimming alongside for a while (figure 3.6). When I watched them from the cliffs, these tardy birds – the last of the colony to leave for the ocean – were exceptionally bad-tempered, like autumn wasps, protecting their enclaves from each other with a noisy vigour I hadn’t witnessed before.

Next morning I awoke surrounded by half a dozen curlew and, further away, a flock of lapwing. I steeled myself to the task of imagining them as breakfast. Westray folk once used dried strips of seal hide as rope for lowering islanders down from precisely the spot I’d slept to snare birds on the cliff face. In the archive, I listened to discussions of the subtle ethical considerations behind the collecting of eggs and wildfowl. The first brood of lapwing eggs, Tommy Rendall said, was always gathered in, but then lapwings were off limits for the year: the second litter, being further into the summer, was more likely to be raised successfully than the first. I was intrigued to find that some of those interviewed had not entirely shaken off old habits of seeing wildfowl as food:

The guillemots that came here, they still come here … you’ll no get any more here unless you build more cliffs because the cliffs are full of them … It was always a great source of food for the old folk you see. No expense, you didna have any vets’ bills or anything … you know it is very dark-coloured flesh that’s in them … sometimes they were just stewed but usually they were just boiled, you know boiled until the flesh fell off the bones, fried up with onions.

We used to eat eider ducks more than guillemots because there were more eider ducks in our area … and cormorants was better still, especially the brown ones, the juvenile ones. The meat in that is tender, better than any of the other birds I would say, apart from curlews … but nobody seems to eat that sort of thing nowadays. They are just dying of old age and going to waste.

As subsistence activities, these practices tend to evade the historical record. Never in British history has there been a market for the meat of young brown cormorants, however tender. The community activity of catching spoots on the biggest ebb tides of the year (for which children were even taken out of school) could produce a huge surplus of razor clams, but without refrigeration there was no potential for that to be exported either. Children might make a few pence from collecting whelks or catching coastal rabbits but that was the limit of such trades. These shoreline practices, unrecorded in tallies of import and export, are the great forgotten industries of Atlantic coasts. They were local, but far from peripheral because life itself depended on them.

The most marketable of traditional coastal pursuits is unsurprisingly the one that has survived. Every day I saw small creeling boats, most of which gave me a hearty wave as they motored through the tides. The potential to exchange lobsters for money means that not just fishermen or farmers have kept creels; for two centuries at least, almost everyone could supplement their income in this way. Many islanders recall collecting lobsters with particular pleasure: ‘The smell o’ the sea, a creel coming in with a lobster flopping, the tail banging about, it is a grand sound, a grand sight.’ Some added that they didn’t eat lobsters themselves (‘well, perhaps just a small one’): these were seen not as food but money.

After Noup Head, Westray’s dark cliffs alternate with gentle grassy slopes and long white sands. Farmed extensively but spectacularly un-intensively, each of these landscapes is stalked by sheep and large tawny cows. Between the modern farms on my skylines were many other abandoned buildings dating from a time of much more intensive usage of this landscape. Such ruins, with their sagging and crumpled flagstone roofs, attest to the slow exodus from the island. From over 2,000 residents in 1880, Westray had around 1,000 by 1940 and little over 500 by the turn of the millennium.

The 1930s were key to this process because two island industries collapsed. One was herring. From the mid-nineteenth century, fleets of drifters, like pods of orcas today, followed herring from the Western Isles to Orkney and Shetland. Their crews lived on ship and had limited contact with islanders, but Westray men took on the task of keeping fleets supplied with coal. The herring season saw the arrival of hundreds of women who gutted the fish. Unlike the men, they became fleetingly, precariously, integrated into Orkney life. As one islander, Jack Scott, recalled, ‘suddenly, one beautiful day in summer 300 girls would appear … they were Gaelic-speakers and we didn’t know what they were saying to us’. Scott went on to recount the pranks these women played on young island boys. The gutters were also associated with the arrival of exciting things: new Harris tweed suits for schoolboys and, for adults, exotic goods like cherry brandy and peppermint wine. After a summer of singing and accordion-playing the women were gone: ‘it felt as flat as a flounder when they went’. Another island resident, Meg Fiddler, recalled the legacy they left behind in knitwear to last the year. Many photographs of these 1920s gutters show fashionably dressed women who look more like film stars than modern prejudice against the smell of herring might lead people to assume. A slump in herring numbers signalled the industry’s demise. In 1939, the buildings used by gutters and sales agents were commandeered for the war effort and, for Orcadians at least, the industry was dead.

Kelp was another rich trade that hit hard times: this was an export entirely dependent on the whims of distant industries. At the peaks of a kelp boom whole families helped build huge piles for burning. Westray and Papay were as alive with the smoke and fire of industry as Manchester or Coalbrookdale. Orkney was unique in making large local fortunes from kelp. Elsewhere, aristocratic lairds considered trade unseemly so rented the shore to incoming kelp crews. But Orkney’s merchant lairds pursued the trade with their resident workforce. These landowners could manipulate labour with ease because many Orcadian tenants paid rent in labour rather than money or goods. Their lives involved being constantly on ca’, moving at the laird’s command between tasks of land, coast and sea. This is one reason why remnants of the kelp trade litter Orcadian shores. Most such ruins are from the first kelp boom after 1750; the end of this glut, in the 1830s, sowed some seeds of Westray’s downward demographics. But other structures belong to a second boom when demand for iodine between 1880 and 1930 resurrected the trade.

Few people undertook the hard, unpleasant work of making kelp unless they were forced to, but the experience of compulsion varied according to the character of the lairds. The Balfours who owned much of Westray were not, it seems, especially unkind: ‘You never got good lairds’, Tommy Rendall noted, ‘but the ones we got here were maybe the least bad ones.’ Across the narrow Sound of Papay, the Traills were fierce autocrats who worked their tenants hard. Countless grisly stories are still told of them. There’s the tale of a cruel Traill who was thought to have died until knocking was heard from the coffin at his burial; without a word exchanged, the only people close enough to hear – the crofters forced to carry the box – lowered him into the ground anyway. Another Traill was supposedly so corrupt that plants refused to grow on his grave in the Papay cemetery.

These stories were just a few in an array I heard while on these islands. Storytelling is, in fact, among the biggest and most beguiling industries of this shoreline. Few forces generate the serendipity of story as prolifically as the capricious and connecting sea. Even my boat provoked tales. When I arrived on the island, a Westray man looked my kayak up and down and told me that this was the first place in Britain to see such a thing. He dated this improbable event to an even more improbable date: 1682. Foolishly, I mistook this for an odd joke and failed to press him with questions. Yet the idea stuck with me enough to look for it in the small archive on the island. I found that the story of ‘Finn-men’ arriving by kayak in the 1680s was a venerable one. In a book of 1939 Iain Anderson wrote:

Their appearance was, of course, almost unaccountable to these islanders, who recorded that their boats appeared to be made of fish skins, and so built that they could never sink. I think it may be accepted that these strange visitants must have been Eskimos who had been blown to sea when fishing off their own coasts. What seems to be most remarkable is that the Finn-men when seen in the vicinity of this island were still alive, and that when the islanders attempted to catch one of them, he escaped with ease owing to the speed of his kayak.⁷

These kayakers, if they were truly here, were as likely to have been Sami people from Finland as Inuits brought by the North Atlantic Drift. But by the time I reached the archive I’d come to terms with the idea that a historian’s critical faculties needed to be used for purposes other than sifting truth from falsehood: deciphering the meaning of Westray stories was a subtler affair altogether. I’d met a dark-haired man who claimed to be descended from ‘dons’ of the Armada stranded here in the sixteenth century. I’d heard tales of Westray ‘whale shepherds’ herding pods of 300 cetaceans into local bays to take their teeth, and I’d heard the strange story of Archie Angel. This young boy had been discovered on the Westray shore after the wrecking of a Russian ship. He was named when the name plate of the ship, The Archangel, was discovered in the sea. Archie was integrated into Westray society so that generations of islanders had the surname ‘Angel’. A host of things make this story unlikely (how did the islanders read a Cyrillic name plate?), but they are all beside the point. In a place where people washed ashore have so often played roles in the community, and where many houses have timber from wrecked ships built into their structures, sea stories shape island identity: the Just So stories of Westray life. In these tales, facts that can neither be verified nor falsified, yet have a certain pedigree, are the most powerful ingredients of all. The way in which history shapes Orcadian identities through stories and everyday artefacts feels somehow more immediate and pervasive than in anywhere else I’ve travelled.

Every month of my journey introduced new aspects of the Atlantic. The most immediate difference between kayaking Shetland and Orkney was the sea crossings. The main island chain of Shetland is packed tightly together. Although deep and treacherous, the drowned valleys that bisect the ancient mountains are narrow. In most places, crossing as the tide turns means there’s little to worry about: each tricky stretch can be traversed in the time it takes the tide to reassert itself. Not so in Orkney. Although the islands are smaller, the distances between them are greater and the behaviour of the sea is more complex as it fills and vacates the inter-island gaps. Whether in ebb or flood, tidal flows coil back upon themselves. These eddies draw beguiling patterns on the water. Shimmering silver discs like pools of mercury pass through zones of dark ruffles. Bubbles, as if from the snout of a giant sea beast, rise where eddies meet. Veins, ridges, crests and watery fins drift slowly across the surface. The forces of swell, chop, tide and eddy sometimes work in concert, amassing as great heaps of sea. At other times they work in counterpoint, becoming complex cross-rhythms in an oceanic fugue.

Centuries of Orkney seamen have each spent years learning the major ‘tide sets’ of their area because – contrary to popular belief – tides aren’t regular or predictable. As one seasoned Orcadian, Gary Miller, puts it:

You get a tidal prediction book but that’s all it is … they could be a lot stronger, if you’ve got a higher or low air pressure it can alter the tides, or the temperature of the water or the weather or if it’s been windy … there’s that many variables.

Learning tides meant learning which movements arrive early if a headwind is blowing, and in which regions water might run against prevailing flows. Local seafarers can explain everything of the tides around them. But for a kayaker passing through, these performances are yet more Orkney mysteries: tidal events defy logic like the acts of some inscrutable and wayward will. It’s hard to believe this pulsing, breathing sea isn’t alive. It feels far more superstitious to think that the interplay of cosmic orbs is weaving localised motions that – in this very moment – force your bow to buck and twitch.

Leaving Westray to cross to the island of Rousay was my first tidal challenge. From Westray’s western cliffs I headed east between the headland at Langskail and the rocks called Skea Skerries. From here I could see the skerry of Rusk Holm, where the ‘holmie’ sheep graze seaweed, and a nineteenth-century tower was built for them to climb to safety when seas submerge their ‘pasture’. I continued until almost at the south-easterly extremity of the island, then turned my bow south into the firth and steeled myself to paddle hard for Rousay’s north-east headland. The golden sun was low, casting dazzling light across close and foamy ridges of sea, and with wind entering the firth from the east, a messy chop moved against swell that came in from the west. Small waves crossed large waves, merging and birthing pyramidal wavelets. These conditions conspired to make tidal movement impossible to read but easy to feel: the kayak’s bow and stern took on minds of their own and my energy was spent less in moving forwards than in keeping my course. But the crossing was quicker than I’d feared (just a taste of what was to come). The particular local threat was that reaching Rousay offered no respite, because this island is the fixed point in a vortex of tides. Its headlands are sticks thrust between the spokes of a turning tidal wheel. It was here, after landing for the night, that I was forced to retry the tricky headland at Rullard’s Roost.

The Rousay coast is famous among historians. Known as ‘the Egypt of the North’, its number of ruins is matched only by the volume of stories that arise from them. The sounds to Rousay’s east and south are its relic-lined Nile. The small isles in the tidal river are as historic as Elephantine or the cataracts south of Aswan. Prominent among them are Orkney’s two holy islands, Egilsay and Eynhallow. There is no landscape in Britain, besides perhaps the Wiltshire henges, which matches this few square miles for historic depth and diversity.

After a tidal battle at Rousay’s north-western corner I kayaked through freaks of deep time. Wherever the joins in the Devonian sandstone are weak, caves, arches and gloups have formed. The grey, cream and ochre bands of rock – perfectly horizontal – are deeply pitted, leaving narrow pillars of stone, striped like Neopolitan ice cream, to support the cliff face. An airy space, the galleries of a dark drowned Parthenon, stands behind. The gaps between pillars have old, dramatic names like the Kilns of Brin Novan. The largest such ‘kiln’ is thirty metres deep by fifteen wide: within it, swell churns until it bubbles as if boiling. This movement threatened to pull me in as I hung at its mouth to marvel at the fracturing, scarring and sagging that the sea inflicted. These geological creations felt like the imaginary future ruins of a civilisation lost to the rising seas of the Anthropocene.

But the most remarkable features of this landscape belong to the shorter span of time between prehistory and the Victorians. I soon had vistas across the parish of Quandale, where old abandoned townships are sandwiched between the Atlantic and the hilly moorland called the Brae of Moan. It was only here that the true tragedy of the survival of Rousay’s archaeological heritage struck me. This landscape survives in historic forms because it was once emptied by force. The region I was now kayaking was the only part of Orkney subjected to large-scale clearances in the nineteenth century. It was never transformed by subsequent development, because it was rendered barren by the design of lairds. After its emptying, this became a spacious sheep run offering a few pounds a year for little effort and less responsibility. What remains is a tapestry of overgrown dykes, runrig and small kale yards from which remnants of ruined crofts and silhouettes of prehistoric earthworks loom.

This was once an ancestral landscape and a world formed round burial mounds: it was a sacred place. In the Bronze Age, barrows were built to be visible from dwellings so that the dead continued to occupy the world of the living. Burned mounds also punctuate the hillsides. These are large piles of stones that were heated to boil water (although, since food remains are not found with them, their ultimate function remains obscure). The placement and scale of those in Quandale shows that, like the burial mounds, they were part of the social landscape, acting perhaps to display wealth or status. And the remains of millennia are intertwined. Views from the doorways of eighteenth-century farmsteads were dominated by some of the biggest burned mounds in the world. On Eynhallow, crofts were even built into the ruins of a twelfth-century chapel. This clustering of buildings – sacred, ceremonial, domestic – is not just due to centuries of similar uses of land and sea, but also to active relationships with the past among later inhabitants: folk beliefs, cosmologies and identities were shaped by life in a Norse and Neolithic landscape.⁸ Quandale never ceased to be sacred.

To occupants of Northern Isles farmsteads, relics and monuments belonged as much to the present as the past. Ancient things were recycled into new buildings in ways that were ritualistic. Prehistoric axes were deposited in chimney stacks to protect houses from lightning strikes; Pictish symbol stones were built into thresholds and fireplaces, as were prehistoric cup-marks and spirals. Seasonal tasks, such as cutting peat, planting kale or bringing animals in for winter involved wandering different routes through the historic landscape. This resulted in a seasonally shifting geography of life that is sometimes called the ‘taskscape’.⁹ The farming cycle dictated which ruins were encountered day to day, encouraging seasonal repertoires of stories about the origins and meanings of ancient features. Communal memory was long, and stories that could explain how landscapes reached their present state were particularly resilient; since the end of the nineteenth century, Orkney has had an unrivalled number of folklorists, from Ernest Marwick to Tom Muir, who piece this scattered island memory back together.

Over time, townships expanded and the ancient features outside boundary dykes were drawn into the familiar and domestic world. These changes were never without meaning. Mounds, in particular, weren’t neutral features in the landscape: they were sites at which the world of humans intersected with that of supernatural creatures called trows and hogboon.¹⁰ The biggest mound in Quandale, the Knowe of Dale, figures in Orkney tales of human abduction by the trows. Throughout the British Isles, uncanny associations caused farm boundaries to be sharply diverted round prominent mounds. This is why, as I kayaked past, I was surprised to see farms and mounds in close conjunction: at least two Quandale farms were built with barrows at their entrances. One such farm is called Knapknowes, which in Old Norse means ‘Mound mound’. Even the Knowe of Dale is situated prominently within the township itself. The decision to do these things would not have been taken lightly: the barrows of Quandale, it seems, were given different meanings than those elsewhere. Because the long chain of Quandale memory was severed by the eviction of its people in 1848, even the most accomplished folklorists cannot reveal the nature of that difference.

Estate maps of this region around 1850 depict the area of the township, relabelled ‘Quandale Park’, as empty, showing nothing of the recently abandoned crofts or ancient sites. This was indicative of successive landowners’ attitude to the land: they took great pains to present it as a resource, not as a place with history, traditions and stories. When Quandale did, eventually, reappear as a focus of their interest it was as a playground for indulging antiquarian fads. Many Rousay mounds have indentations in the top where Edwardian landowners and wealthy tourists indulged their passion for relic-hunting. Yet this early excavation arrived later in Quandale than elsewhere: for two generations the land remained too contested for lairds to be willing to show interest in tradition. Walter Grant, the first new laird of the twentieth century, was one of a pair labelled ‘the broch boys’ for their efforts to recover Bronze Age monuments. To Grant, however, a mound was an object to be described in isolation: the subtlety of the sacred landscape, including the complex interplay of its remains from different eras, evaded him and those who followed. Only recently, in the hands of innovative archaeologists such as Antonia Thomas and Dan Lee has the full complexity of this island’s past begun to be understood. Today, the sacredness of Quandale is in its emptiness. The holiest sites, perhaps, are the nineteenth-century ruins: monuments to the victims of the lairds.

From Rousay I crossed to Eynhallow and wandered its short, circular coastline. The twelfth-century chapel here is another exceptionally atmospheric ruin. It is an intricate but crudely built holy place that looks out upon the fiercest tides. I climbed the chapel walls to view the terrifying overfalls that cut the island off from both sides. Folklore holds that Eynhallow was once enchanted and inaccessible to humans: its occupants were magical Finn-men. They called it Hildaland and were banished, by salt and the sign of the cross, only at the time the church was built. After its sanctification, Eynhallow earth was said to repel even mice and rats so that a bag of the island’s ground became a valuable commodity.

It’s still easy to believe that the fractious white water of the sounds is an enchantment made to hold Eynhallow at arm’s length from the human world. Fulmars and seals take advantage of the safety provided by the tides, patrolling every section of the shore like guardians. I hung around on a patch of still water in the island’s sheltered eastern bay, waiting for the tide to turn, as a group of tiny harbour seals swam repeatedly around and beneath. Glistening round heads came close enough for long whiskers to brush the kayak, their gentle breath audible as they surfaced (figure 3.5). With a warming sun and clear green water rippling over shell sand, this was the perfect tonic to trials by tide: my last moment within the sphere of the enchantment.

The contrast as I rounded the north-west mainland a little later couldn’t have been greater. The wind peaked at sunset, bringing untidy seas (figure 3.4) and forcing a crunching landing into a black, rocky shore. Swings in the weather didn’t let up until I left the islands. The next day, which took me down the western edge of the mainland, began in froth and sea spray. A scarred bull dolphin sped below, warning me away from its pod passing further offshore. Then I passed multitudes of rocky protuberances and crevices; these were bleak but colourful on an afternoon that truly was ‘a stark drama of light and darkness’ (figure 3.7). The day culminated in calm views over the final leg of the journey, including the most famous sandstone stack in Britain: the Old Man of Hoy. I turned inshore at dusk, with Hoy’s red cliffs reflected in the sea to starboard and to port the twinkling lights of Stromness. But before I could explore the bookshop, cafés and arts centre of the first substantial town on my kayak down the coasts, I had to face one of my biggest challenges: the journey between the unrelenting cliffs and tides of Hoy.

Hoy took me two attempts. On my first effort to breach this most treacherous stretch of waters, I tried to take the sting from the crossing by spending the night on Graemsay. I slept by a disused jetty on this small island in the centre of the sound, with Graemsay’s two lighthouses in sight and views across to the orange tinge of Stromness street lamps on the low blue clouds. Despite my precautions, I hit enormous overfalls at Hoy’s north-western corner and was forced back. Even the inglorious retreat to Stromness cost me all the energy, strength and composure I had. I couldn’t help but berate myself. On a sunny day with a gentle breeze my planning had been spectacularly poor. On the two days that followed, winds raged. I waited them out in town, taking the chance to talk with experts in aspects of Orkney and to plan Hoy properly.

On the third day, I set out in low wind but thick fog and rain. Visibility was poor and the waters starkly contrasting. In most regions of the sea, glossy and slowly rolling waves were gentle and rhythmic; but crashing cross-rhythms resulted wherever rock challenged the will of the water. Listening was my chief tool of navigation through the mist, and I was soon immersed in the patterns that lapped the edges of my boat. By the time I reached Hoy’s cliffs, I was surrounded by the boom of breaking waves, listening hard for corridors of silence through the noise.

I took one break during the day, in the only major breach in Hoy’s western cliffs. This wide bay is ‘the Orkney riviera’ of Rackwick, a collection of eighteen crofts and a schoolhouse where generations of Stromness folk once took summer holidays. My landing was through surf, and the launch back out from the beach of boulders was challenging. Rhythm was everything: processions of breakers a few feet tall alternated with short spells of waves at least twice their height. The troughs between waves revealed rocks beneath the water: obstacles that would make it hard to meet the waves head-on. If a spell of large waves and deep troughs appeared when I launched, my situation would be perilous: I sat listening for almost an hour, trying to find patterns and make predictions.

This day-long need to listen intently might, elsewhere, have been a chore. But here it felt like an opportunity. Hoy’s waves have perhaps the most famous patterns and rhythms in the north-east Atlantic; hearing their refraction through art had been, twenty years earlier, the start of my engagement with the islands. My dad was a violinist in the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, where the resident composer was Peter Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max. In my teens, Max had given me lessons in playing his Orkney-inspired music. Until he passed away shortly before my journey began, Max was one of the most significant composers of his era, and Hoy was pivotal to his career. Before he found Orkney, he was the enfant terrible of British music, scandalising metropolitan audiences. In 1971 Max moved to the most remote croft on Hoy, high on the cliffs above Rackwick Bay and a few hundred yards from where I’d landed today. From here he took a leading role in Orcadian life, founding the St Magnus music festival, developing a new Orcadian musical style and evangelising Orkney to global audiences. Each year, my dad’s orchestra would travel to the St Magnus festival and Max would come to Manchester to conduct works inspired by these waters.

To say that these works were ‘inspired by’ the sea doesn’t do justice to the ways in which the Atlantic soaks them through. What separated Max from his peers was his sensitivity to the soundscapes of his environment. He arrived on Hoy in flight from the aural clutter of the city, but his new life wasn’t defined by an absence of noise. It took place in a soundscape that proved far more provocative than he could have imagined. Surf rolls in on both the right and left of the home he chose: the sea and wind here are constant and inescapable but infinitely various. Gradually, Max realised their potential not as surface details, but as the generative force of his art. The sea became his answer to the puzzle that faced all writers for orchestra in the twentieth century: how to compose in ways that resonate with audiences without retreading the classical patterns of previous centuries. Most new methods, such as the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg, proved to be rewarding games for composers but too abstract and cerebral for their patterns to be evident to listeners. Max’s epiphany on Hoy was that the movements of the sea contained a balance between regularity and randomness that was ideal for generating music. Wave forms and sea rhythms were familiar enough to root listeners in experience, yet complex and alien enough to cause shock, wonder and revelation.

Max’s seascapes are far from gentle and reflective, conjuring instead the roaring ocean thrashing at the Rackwick cliffs. Every cross-rhythm and complexity at the intersections of seas is intensified rather than simplified. These works are reminders that the ocean is only occasionally a soothing, pleasant place, and they capture the persistence of its presence in the Orcadian soundscape. When I listen to them now I’m drawn back into coastal nights in the sleeping bag, when the sea roared far louder than traffic outside any urban window. What the day sounds and feels like on Hoy is defined by the mood of the ocean. When the wind is up and the swell rolls in, the water’s power is impossible to ignore, even from inside a house or the island interior’s moorland. Ocean might be the background to all Orcadian life but it is the foreground to the sensory experience of Hoy. Tim Robinson, assiduous chronicler of the shores of Connemara, has perhaps done more than any other author to capture the noise of Atlantic coastlines in which, he states, ‘only the most analytic listening can separate its elements’. Robinson’s writing on this theme draws on the instincts developed during the training as a mathematician and career as an artist which predate his immersion in ocean soundscapes. These challenging sounds,

are produced by fluid generalities impacting on intricate concrete particulars. As the wave or wind breaks around a headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf, the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in narrows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness out of the reiterated fragmentation of pitches, and it can be terrible, this wide range of frequencies coalescing into something approaching the auditory chaos and incoherence that sound engineers call white noise. A zero of information content.¹¹

But no prose could pick out the order in the apparent incoherence of water-noise with the precision and richness of slowly unfolding symphonic music. Max was an obsessive observer, with the pattern-finding skills of a mathematician (there were far more books about maths than music in his home) and he studied these waves intensively over decades. As well as forming his music from the patterns of waves and of seabirds spiralling into the sky, Max filled his music with artefacts of the Orkney soundscape. Curlews, gulls and features of the weather suddenly emerge from the orchestral background. And fused with themes from the natural world are eight millennia of Orkney poetry and story. His subject matter included the runic inscriptions at Maes Howe, the tale of St Magnus, told as the story of a pacifist Viking, and the 1980s battle against the exploitation of Orkney uranium. His close collaboration with George Mackay Brown became the warm, social counterpoint to the cold inhuman ocean in an output of over a hundred musical seascapes.¹² And, like the Rousay crofters, he reworked millennia of Orkney history for present purposes.

Max isn’t alone among Britain’s leading composers in being drawn to Orkney: there’s something about these complex waters that seems uniquely inspirational for music. Once I reached the south of Hoy, the mist cleared into a rich, bright evening. To the south-west, I could see the Scottish mainland. A dazzling white shard on the horizon was the lighthouse at Strathy Point. Its old engine room is now the home of the composer Errollyn Wallen. Born in Belize, overlooking the islands in the Caribbean Sea, Wallen now lives at the other end of the Gulf Stream, on the Scottish coast overlooking Orkney. In a song cycle, Black Apostrophe, inspired by Scotland’s Caribbean connections, she set the seafaring poetry of a Bahamian-born sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose life had also followed the Stream. Finlay had briefly been a labourer on Rousay: an instinctual link to his maritime childhood pulled him north from Edinburgh in the 1950s.¹³ To both Finlay and Wallen Scotland is a sea zone and Orkney distils its archipelagic state. Given the power of water to this verse and music perhaps ‘aquapelagic’ is a better term: these island assemblages are defined by what lies between them. When Finlay left Orkney, he tried to take the waters with him.¹⁴ He named the windblown ash tree by his inland window ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea), noting ‘Tree and Sea are the same in Sound.’ He referred to Nassau as his birthplace but Rousay his ‘birthplace as a poet’. The rest of his life was lived in lowlands, but the boats and tides of Nassau and Rousay infiltrated all he did.

Wallen set two Finlay poems in Black Apostrophe. One was ‘Fishing from the back of Rousay’ which begins a thousand miles away where rollers, loud, relentless and unpredictable, ‘Originate, and roll – like rolling graves – / Towards these umber cliffs’. They crash into land among weed-robed rocks, ‘like sloppy ice (but slippier)’, where limpets are the only frictive aid against a sideways slide into waves ‘that rise and swell / And swell some more and swell: you cannot tell / If this will fall (Boom) where the last one fell / Or (Crash) on your own head’.

Like Finlay’s, Wallen’s sea joins land masses. It’s a conduit between elements of her aquapelagic experience: ‘I often ask myself “how did I get here?”,’ she writes, ‘and I always answer “the sea”.’ The music of Black Apostrophe is united by the sense of a rolling swell, over which evocations shift between Belizian ‘lush tropics’ and Orcadian ‘bleak majesty’, the latter conveyed as much by complex harmonies as by rhythm: ‘it was the sense of crossing the water for a world “out there” that I … wanted to capture’. The sea is a site of possibility and longing, evoking her parents’ desire, in Belize, to cross the Atlantic, and her own wish, in Scotland, to feel the connection between archipelagos.

In listening to the same sea, Max and Wallen sensed different histories. Max heard centuries of explosive dissipation on the Orkney shore: his waves are at their moment of fulfilment, when switches are flicked between violence and silence. Wallen heard instead the sea’s slow accumulation: its transmutation in the long course of travel bringing countless echoes of elsewhere. The Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite calls the motions of connecting waters ‘tidalectics’: ‘tossings, across and between seas, of people, things, processes and affects’.¹⁵ And it’s worth recalling that even the puffin – now emblematic of the north-east Atlantic – is a bird of the Pacific that, 50,000 years ago, crossed the cold waters that once parted North from South America before the Caribbean basin formed. Only with the birth of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea did the Atlantic puffin become distinctively Atlantic. Only then did the warm currents gather from which the Gulf Stream now surges: the gentle climate of Orkney is made by the shores of Belize.

The work of Finlay and Wallen is also a reminder that it’s misleading to think of Britain as a nation that had an empire or acquired an empire; Britain was born from an unequal union in 1707, when two colony-owning states – England and Scotland – were conjoined. From its beginnings, Britain was an empire and the sea was its medium. Money made from west-Atlantic slave plantations was used by British landowners to impose authority on Orcadian populations, and wealth made by those landlords from Orcadian kelp ran the machinery of slavery. Many families who owned Orkney land were connected as closely to India as the Caribbean. Indeed, the South Atlantic sea route, round the Cape of Good Hope, took ships to regions that had more places named after the infamous Traills than Papa Westray or Rousay where the family long held sway: Traill’s Pass, for instance, leads not through Orkney hills but above the Pindari Glacier in the central Himalayas. The elites of Victorian Edinburgh and Glasgow understood the specific textures of places in the East Indies and West Indies better than the diversity of Scotland’s seaboard and knew those places to be far more central to British fortunes than anywhere north of Scotland’s central belt. It’s no coincidence, then, that when Robert Rendall compared Orkney shores to the sugar candy of his childhood he unconsciously used a Caribbean staple to stand for the island nature of his home; in the sound of Rendall’s crunching candy, as much as in the music of Wallen, there echo a thousand stories of an ocean-wide, aquapelagic, world.