Читать книгу: «The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel», страница 6

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.

THE WESTERN ISLES
(September/October)

FROM THE SIXTH century to the twenty-first the long chain of Western Isles, which stretches 130 miles from the Butt of Lewis in the north to Barra Head in the south, has been pivotal to the formation of North Atlantic cultures. These islands are marked by their early-medieval role as sites where ‘thalassocracies’ – the sea superpowers of Norway and Ireland – competed for control. Lewis seems so much like a Gaelic-speaking twin to Nordic Orkney that my leap from Scotland’s east to west felt, but for the language spoken, like a short exercise in island hopping. Catholic Barra, however, is far more like an Irish island than anything that might be encountered in the north. The cultural difference between Lewis and Barra thus exceeds anything the distance would imply. But an outsider’s experience of travelling these diverse islands today is defined by language. As the only great expanse of land where Scottish Gaelic is the medium of life for thousands, this is the primary site in which the tongue’s future is defined. The isles, in all their contrasts, are thus united by a rich sense of history and a vigorous commitment to community and culture. This vibrancy has much to teach historians. The Western Isles in 1970 – hog-tied by national policies that paid no heed to local variation – were not the thriving place they’ve become. The last half-century has seen dramatic rejuvenation that makes this region a model for how peculiarities of place can be assets for modern, global life.

But the processes that shaped these cultures reach back beyond historic travels of the first Irish monks, and there’s no way to read the islands’ pasts without grasping the geographies that shaped the ebb and flow of local fortunes. This western geohistory is as different from the young, mutating archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland as it’s possible to be. Places such as Barra give the impression of impossible permanence: they’re entirely ancient bedrock that has lain, unyielding, since before the birth of the Atlantic. Large expanses feature few obvious glacial scars: these rocks seem barely to have registered a mile-high pile of ice grind over them. Seventy million years ago, volcanic chaos accompanied the opening of the Atlantic. From the traumas that separated Scotland from Labrador the laval fangs of the Inner Hebrides were born: the mountains of Skye, Rum and Mull are young rock cascades suspended in motionless pouring. But even ructions on this scale were too superficial to cause much change in the old, hard gneiss of Barra. The Outer Hebrides look on a geological chart like a timeless, providential flood wall, built to take the oceanic savagery that would otherwise shred soft tissues of the mainland.

The human consequences of this resistant rock are extensive. Focused on their stand-off with ocean storms, the stone has little left to give the land. The sea corrodes all exposed iron, breaking cars to atoms, but the rock lies incorruptible: nutrients leached away aren’t replaced by slow mineral breakdown. For all it gives the earth, this gneiss might as well be the concrete of a car park. Such stubbornness is a problem for those who wish to make a living from moorland crofts, but it also stymies those who try to read the land. Since few peoples proved able to inscribe this stone, the cup-marks, whorls, crosses and scripts etched along the Atlantic seaboard are absent even from huge sacred monuments like the Callanish stone circle. A standard tool of historic interpretation is missing. So an oral culture, preserving stories through centuries, plays a special role in efforts to interpret the landscape: the skills required of historians, and the attitudes taken to evidence, are different from those employed elsewhere.

Paradoxically, this bleak landscape defines the islands’ sheltered east better than the wilder west, where a strange quirk of the Atlantic transforms the nature of the coast. At sites such as Broo in Shetland, I’d seen arid sand that blew in from the ocean to smother fertile earth. But in the Western Isles the relationship of land with sea is reversed, and nowhere is the providence of the ocean more immediate: Cuan Siar (the Gaelic Atlantic) implies very different things from Nort Atlantik in Shetlandic. At each green dune and golden strand the ocean gives far more than it takes away. Long, violent breakers on these slowly shelving shores accumulate tons of calcareous shell-sand and heave it, waveful by waveful, ashore. This sand soothes acid peat like an antidote in venom. The sea is therefore ‘loved’ as well as ‘feared’ in the words of one of the islands’ many poets, Iain Crichton Smith; it is not just ‘monster’ but also ‘creator’.¹ In the dunes – whose unique flowering grassland born of shell-sand is known as machair – the sea stirs the most dazzling display of verdant growth imaginable. At the exposed edge, marram grass takes hold, its tight, spiky stems withstanding ocean storms and its seeds released only by gales. A few feet of marram can fix loose sand in place, and in its shelter the carnival begins. Red fescue, sand sedge, buttercup and primrose go through cycles of growth and rot which rejuvenate these sand-lands every season. Cloud clings to the high, peaty ground inland, while sun shines more often on these low, flower-clad expanses. Looking up from the kayak even at the end of summer, it’s as if the foreground was painted in children’s colours: a shock of vivid greens, yellows, pinks and orange. Behind is a sombre painting in night-time hues of brown, blue-grey and black (figure 4.1).

Wandering ashore through the machair onto dank rough moorland, the details are no less contrasting. September and October were the perfect months to see this. Where the rock holds sway, summer had gone. Slimy, nicotine-yellow smudges, once shining bog cotton, were peppered with crisp brown cadavers of tiny heather bells. Both mouldered in pallid clumps of sphagnum moss. These acid hills are no drier than the sea. Where the rock and peat reach the shoreline, vinegar meets brine. But sand dunes clung to summer: white mayweed, pink centaury and yellow trefoils still shone out, even when the grasses round them faded into winter. The disjunctions between the dark land and the bright are almost unbelievable in scale. Rich tropics and blasted Arctic wastes are separated by a broken drystone wall. And these contrasts have formed every stage of island histories.

Competition for the rich coastal land defined the push and thrust of skirmish, treaty and contract, whether made by locals with Edwardian landowners or between the sea civilisations of the Norse and Irish Celts. But not just conflict was driven by these patterns. Local ways of life responded too. Perhaps the most romanticised element of Western Isles history is the system of transhumance formed around the shieling: the stone or wooden bothy at the heart of summer pastures. Each summer, rich coastal crops, engorged by shell-sand, would be guarded from animal interference by leading herds to seasonal communities on the dark moorland interior. The bright nights on these wild moors, where the song and dance of ceilidhs filled still evening air, have long been evoked as symbols of premodern tradition, attuned to nature, in contrast to the antagonisms of modernity. The late-Victorian Celtic revival set a trend for shieling songs and poems: William Sharp, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser and Edward Thomas were among many who rehearsed such themes. Thomas linked the arts and crafts of moor-dwellers with the wild art ‘painted by the wind’. In Kennedy-Fraser’s Gaelic shielings, natural beauties – a dew-draped, sun-lit gentian and a ‘white lily, floating in the peat hag’s waters’ – are like the eyes of ‘Mhàiri, my beloved’. For William Sharp, as for countless others, long evenings on isolated moorlands primed tales of illicit trysts. The shieling was ‘the hut of dalliance’ and, in one Skye place name, Araidh na Suiridh (‘the Bothy of Lovemaking’). The last evening of summer (Oidhche na h-Iomraich, or the night of the flitting) became for these storytellers the great set piece of song, dance and romance: the ceilidh to end all ceilidhs.

Twentieth-century ethnologists repeated these themes when they approached the Western Isles; Victorian assumptions concerning traditions entrained to nature died hard, as did voyeuristic images of happy primitives. A 1938 interpretation of shieling practices, penned by the ethnologist, E. Cecil Curwen, was even entitled ‘The Hebrides: A Cultural Backwater’. Such articles belong to a time when shieling customs were giving way to standardised farming practices. As transhumance began the slow slide from living memory, folklorists and antiquaries took new interest in collecting recollections from the last generation to live the practice. They reinforced old themes of free immersion in pristine nature:

First night out on the moors was always strange … The smoored fire and her brood sleeping were the only familiar things … Round the bothy she could hear animal noises which gave her a sense of security. The silence was also occasionally disturbed by the cackling of grouse, the bleating of sheep, the splash of the jumping trout.²

When intensive farming practices proliferated, and landlords’ efforts to ‘rationalise’ production banished communities from the land, many hillsides and coastal fields where low-intensity growing and grazing once took place were abandoned to the wild. Claiming peatland for farming requires the constant, back-breaking effort of kneading shell-sand through the peaty loam. Untended, such efforts unravel and bright lands fade to darkness: ‘The hills that were green when I was a boy’, one local told geographers in 1961, ‘are now black.’³ Rushes and flags conquer the wet land while heather reclaims solid clods. As I travelled south, I slept on islets unlike any I’d stopped on before. Some were swamped with rampant foliage because, despite their staggering fertility, they’ve been ungrazed for a century. Small birds, voles and rats delve narrow tunnels through the densely woven grasses, and animal tracks are neither sheep nor rabbit but otter.