Sea Room. Adam Nicolson
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to make the best of his last weeks of freedom.
One fine day, with three other boys, I decided to make a hail and farewell trip to the Shiant Islands. My father was away fishing, and my mother did not like the idea very much; however my heart was set on the trip and after getting up early and packing some food and drink in a small cask, we set sail, swathed in the calm early morning sunshine.
When they arrived, they ‘roamed all over the island, collected a lot of eggs and watched the thousands of birds that assembled on the cliffs. We had taken shotguns and ammunition and passed the time away shooting at the puffins.’
Only on the way home from their puffin-shooting trip did the schoolboy crew find themselves in trouble. As they left the Shiants, the wind that day seemed suddenly to get up from the north-west – almost precisely the direction they needed to go – and the boat had far too little weight in it to push itself into the wind.
The bright calmness of the morning gave way to a darkening moody sky and we began to have difficulty beating against the wind in our light, unballasted boat. As the sea got choppy we shortened the sail and had to take it in turns to bale out furiously as the spray washed over the boat making it harder for us to steer and retain control.
Eventually, after many hours, late in the evening, they managed to get into the shelter of Kebock Head, tucked in under its big brutish cliffs, which could protect them from the northwesterlies. A little pool of still water lay under the lee of the headland itself. There they had to wait on their oars, unable, with this wind, to sail up Loch Odhairn into Gravir. At midnight, the boys heard the thudding note of a propeller. They set light to a tarred rag and attracted the attention of a trawler which towed them home. Their parents were out searching on the headlands and nobody noticed the trawler coming into the loch bringing their sons in from the sea. The last hope, so they guessed, was that the boys might be sheltering under Kebock Head, and the Gravir families made their way there across the moor. ‘When they arrived at the Cabag [the Gaelic spelling of Kebock Head] and discovered that there was no sign of our whereabouts they feared the worst.’ Donald MacPhail put the experience behind him. ‘The menacing mass of the Shiant Islands,’ he wrote many years later, ‘never again held any mystery for me. Only a painful memory. My father saw to that.’
A famous and beautiful Gaelic song, still sung at ceilidhs and in the great annual competition, the Mod, can stand for all the laments over those who have drowned in the Shiant seas. In the spring of 1786, the young and handsome Allan Morrison, a shipmaster from Stornoway, who usually traded between Lewis and the Isle of Man, took his boat down the coast of Lewis to Scalpay, where he was to be engaged to Annie Campbell, Campbell of Scalpay’s daughter. In the Stream of the Blue Men, off the Shiants, the wind turned, as it does, his boat was swamped and he and all his crew drowned. Annie Campbell, broken with grief, wasted away and soon died herself. There is no burying ground on Scalpay. The soil is too thin and still today the Scalpay dead are carried over to the sandy soils on the Atlantic side at Luskentyre to be buried. Annie Campbell’s father took her body in a coffin by boat to the most distinguished of all the burying grounds in Harris, at Rodel, in the south-eastern corner of the island. On the way there, another storm came up at them and to lighten the boat, the coffin had to be thrown overboard.
Soon afterwards, the body of Allan Morrison was found washed up on the shore of the Shiants and a few days later Annie’s body was found at the same place.
The song – this is the Shiants’ only brush with Hollywood: it was sung in the film Rob Roy – is in the voice of Annie Campbell, grieving on Scalpay for her lost lover. It survives in many versions, some of them still sung in Cape Breton, in Canada, where the descendants of emigrating Hebrideans took it in the nineteenth century.
Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee; hó rì rì rì u ho, e o hùg hoireann ó, Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee.
I am tormented,
I have no thought for merriment tonight but only for the sound of the elements and the strength of the gales … And brown-haired Allan, my darling sweetheart, I heard you had gone across the sea on the slender black boat of oak … Brown-haired Allan, my heart’s darling, I was young when I fell in love with you. Tonight my tale is wretched. It is not the tale of the death of cattle in the bog but of the wetness of your shirt and of how you are being torn by the whales. I would drink a drink, in spite of everyone, of your heart’s blood, after you had been drowned.
I TAKE THE BOAT SLOWLY in to the beach. Her iron-shod stem slides, grates and then halts on the stones. I jump ashore and push the small grapnel anchor between the shingle. It is a way of pinning the boat to the island. However seasick I feel, this of course is the moment. I am walking at last on the familiar shore, awash with the familiarities of the place: the slip of one stone against another, the smell of the seaweed rotting in the nostrils, knowing without even watching them the flickering presence of the birds as they take this route between the islands, the great inviting wings of land spreading out on all sides, the surge and draw of the sea on the shingle. And above all that, the core sensation of island life: knowing the world is held at arm’s length by that sea, afloat on the privacy, buoyed up by the knowledge that here I am alone. It can, oddly enough, be a shared feeling. I remember arriving here one morning with John Murdo Matheson, the young shepherd from Gravir, a man, if this is possible, more in love with the Shiants than I am. We were waving goodbye on the beach to the fishing boat that had brought us, watching its wake curve around the rocks of Garbh Eilean, and he said to me, not looking at me, but our shoulders rubbing, ‘It’s as if the world’s been cut off with a knife, isn’t it, Adam?’
But now I am alone and I inspect the place, the first time I have been here since the previous autumn. It is like looking through old letters, a slowly growing recognition of a well-known thing, its atmosphere stealing up on you, enveloping you like the smell of bread from an oven. Your body remembers the movements of island life: the hauling of the boat up the beach, the tying it on to the mooring ring, the touch of sun for a moment, the endless wind, as if you were listening all day to the whispered roaring in a shell held up to your ear.
But the beach looks odd. In summer, it extends between Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe in a smooth and well graded expanse of pebbles, cleanly sifted and sorted in a shallow grey arc between the rocks of the islands on either side. Now, in April, it looks as if a team of bulldozers have been at work over the winter. The enormous volume of stone which in summer makes up the centre of the beach, one hundred and fifty yards of it, thirty feet high and a hundred across, has been shouldered aside, roughly barged into mounds which are humped up against the rock buttresses of the islands. This is the work of the winter storms, an unthinkable battering. A third of the fence posts along the cliff edge are broken off at their base, pieces of perfectly good square-section timber, four inches by four, snapped and held now by the wire they were meant to support. Posts don’t last long. After they have been here a year or two, the winter wind has so picked away at the wood that they have returned to younger versions of themselves. The little side stems of slightly harder timber which had been buried by later growth as knots, have withstood the eroding wind and now stand out from the shrunken post as truncated branches. Each post looks like a fossil tree.
I unload Freyja, piling my belongings on the beach above the rising tide. It takes half an hour. Then I row Freyja out to a depth where she will not ground at low tide, anchor her there, inflate the dinghy, row ashore, pull the dinghy up the beach and tie it fast to the wrought iron rings which are hammered into cracks in the rocks.
The landing beach is two hundred yards or so from the house and everything must be carried up over a small rocky rise and then along a level grassy platform to the door of the house. It is, through sheer repetition, the most familiar two hundred yards of the islands, as known to me as the knots in the