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Besieged by the Sea

In May 1937 Vita Sackville-West wrote to Harold Nicolson:

I’ve got another activity in view: three tiny Hebridean islands for sale, advertised in the Daily Telegraph today, 600 acres in all. ‘Very early lambs. Cliffs of columnar basalt. Wonderful caves. Probably the largest bird colony in the British Isles. Tworoomed cottage.’ Do you wonder? I have written to the agents for full particulars and photographs. They cost only £1,750.

It was their son Nigel Nicolson, aged 20 and still at Balliol, to whom she sent the particulars and who fell for the remote Shiant Islands at first sight and resolved to buy them. By August they were his, and he planned to spend a month there on his own to familiarize himself with them, ordering supplies from Fortnum & Mason, which were duly unloaded on to the beach by a local fisherman after their elaborate overnight journey by train and boat. Nicolson waved the man off, dragged the waxed cardboard boxes up to the stone bothy that provided the only shelter, and started to unpack, only to discover a polite note informing him that owing to Railway Regulations it had not been possible to include the safety matches requested. ‘Trusting this will not be of any serious inconvenience, we remain, Yours, etc . . .’

Every boy scout is taught how to kindle sparks from dry bracken, and by dint of dismantling his binoculars Nicolson managed to do so, but he was unable to leave the resulting frail flame untended for more than a couple of hours at a time. Out walking one day, stark naked – not unusual in wild places at the time – he was aghast to stumble upon a bucolic yacht-load of visitors picnicking directly on his route back to house and fire. Eventually he was forced to pick his way back past them with ‘an apron of gossamer fern’ and as much dignity as he could summon, to revive his precious but by now dying flame.

Despite such minor setb

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In May 1937 Vita Sackville-West wrote to Harold Nicolson:

I’ve got another activity in view: three tiny Hebridean islands for sale, advertised in the Daily Telegraph today, 600 acres in all. ‘Very early lambs. Cliffs of columnar basalt. Wonderful caves. Probably the largest bird colony in the British Isles. Tworoomed cottage.’ Do you wonder? I have written to the agents for full particulars and photographs. They cost only £1,750.

It was their son Nigel Nicolson, aged 20 and still at Balliol, to whom she sent the particulars and who fell for the remote Shiant Islands at first sight and resolved to buy them. By August they were his, and he planned to spend a month there on his own to familiarize himself with them, ordering supplies from Fortnum & Mason, which were duly unloaded on to the beach by a local fisherman after their elaborate overnight journey by train and boat. Nicolson waved the man off, dragged the waxed cardboard boxes up to the stone bothy that provided the only shelter, and started to unpack, only to discover a polite note informing him that owing to Railway Regulations it had not been possible to include the safety matches requested. ‘Trusting this will not be of any serious inconvenience, we remain, Yours, etc . . .’ Every boy scout is taught how to kindle sparks from dry bracken, and by dint of dismantling his binoculars Nicolson managed to do so, but he was unable to leave the resulting frail flame untended for more than a couple of hours at a time. Out walking one day, stark naked – not unusual in wild places at the time – he was aghast to stumble upon a bucolic yacht-load of visitors picnicking directly on his route back to house and fire. Eventually he was forced to pick his way back past them with ‘an apron of gossamer fern’ and as much dignity as he could summon, to revive his precious but by now dying flame. Despite such minor setbacks, Nicolson’s instinctive love of his islands only grew with time, and he bequeathed them to his son Adam as a twenty-first birthday present. Sea Room is Adam’s own love letter to the Shiants, written after more than two decades of growing intimacy with these stark, indifferent rocks, as he prepares to hand them on in turn to his own son Tom, just coming of age. This is no romantic evocation of a Rousseau-like idyll, but a raw appraisal of a place of infinite riches yet grinding poverty, of songs and stories, strife and struggle – yet his account is imbued  with such passion that it left me almost feeling homesick for somewhere I’m unlikely ever to visit. His account of these acres of ‘rock, grass, cliff and wilderness, stuck out in the middle of the Minch, between Skye and Lewis, besieged by the sea around them’, summons up a magnificent empire in miniature, home to half a million puffins, multitudes of seals and seabirds, and a host of shadowy ghosts. Whoever holds the deeds to these islands – as Compton Mackenzie did shortly before the Nicolsons – finds himself nevertheless there on sufferance, for this inhospitable Hebridean outpost offers no concessions, and over the ages boatloads of luckless men have foundered in its seas and on its shores. A real sense of ownership comes only with complete abandonment to ‘this wonderful sea room, the surge of freedom which a moated island provides’. Adam Nicolson has indeed surrendered himself to these islands over the years, exploring every geological nook and cranny, teasing out the shadowy history of their human traces and contours, immersing himself in the cycle of their seasons, until he feels at times ‘no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have no existence apart from it.’ And what stories he finds to tell – stories to be savoured most keenly, it must be said, while tucked up in the warmth and cosiness of a winter evening, the wind howling outside, the fire crackling and dinner in the oven. For life on the Shiants was never for the fainthearted. Even getting there was troublesome: the treacherous Minch was reputedly once home to the Blue-Green Men, ‘strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who come aboard and sit alongside you in the sternsheets, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same metre and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew’. Or your boat might be skewered by a diving gannet, though if fortune was on your side, the bird would so effectively plug the hole he had just made that he saved you all the bother of bailing your way to a watery grave. (Adam commissioned his own birlinn, a sailing boat once used by highland chieftains and descended in form from Viking craft, to collapse the gap of centuries in sailing there.) Such dangers apart, the islands have always sung a siren’s song, their velvety slopes offering perfect pasturage for flocks, and their waters teeming with fish. And though it is more than a century since the last family departed – the stout-hearted Donald Campbell and his stalwart daughters, whose beauty turned every head in the Western Isles – there are traces to be found of human habitation since Neolithic times, an ebb and flow of occupation, advancing and retreating like the tide. In the mid-eighteenth century there was still a small but viable crofting community hunkered down with their cattle and sheep, the odd pony, and plots of vegetables, oats and barley – almost the last of 3,500 souls who had over the centuries somehow scratched a precarious living from land and sea. Perhaps five families in all, each living in a long, low backhouse with a central hearth, a floor of clay mixed with sheep dung, meat and fish hanging from the rafters to cure in the smoke, and only the odd stone or piece of washed-up timber to sit on. Beyond a simple kerb of stones were the animals – cows, goats, sheep, ducks, hens and dogs – cooped up hugger-mugger with the family all winter on a steadily mounting heap of dung. One can only imagine the fug that enveloped the entire household as the dark months of the year rolled by, until with the warmer winds of spring the east wall could be knocked down, the sty cleared out, and the whole place sluiced down and freshened up for the summer. Life was harsh and everyone, young and old, had to pull their weight; the frail were given short shrift and were stripped of their flocks once they were unable to cope with them any more. And yet a complex interdependence threaded the community together: Nicolson quotes a wonderful account by Alexander Carmichael of the tigh cèilidh, the story-teller’s house, where all would stream in out of the sleet and wind to huddle around a bright peat fire, the elders seated on benches and the children perched wherever they could find a toehold, and where a kind of primitive book club seemed to operate:

At the pathetic scenes and distressful events the bosoms of the women may be seen to heave and their silent tears to fall. Truth overcomes craft, skill conquers strength, and bravery is rewarded. Occasionally a momentary excitement occurs when heat and sleep overpower a boy and he tumbles down among the people below, to be trounced out and sent home. When the story is ended it is discussed and commented on, and the different characters praised or blamed according to their merits and the views of the critics.

It is a bright picture to hold on to, for this tightly meshed little community was not to survive much longer – but that is another story, and a sadder one. Joyful, though, is the glorious invasion of birds in spring, in their countless thousands; first the barnacle geese, then billowing waves of guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, kittiwakes, shags, skuas and gulls of every description. Two per cent of the world’s entire population of puffins descend upon the Shiants in April after their winter wanderings, and the islands come alive with a ‘whirring, eddying, a seething throng of life, drifting, and swooping, and winging in the wind, or pitching and heaving on the water’, as a nineteenth-century naturalist put it. Compton Mackenzie was told that ‘the Puffin comes, always on a Sunday night and remains for a week to clear out his burrow and prepare his nest’. True or not, by mid-May their eggs are everywhere, and these infinitely comical creatures are busily strutting around and batting their bills at one another. ‘Ludicrous and lovable puffins!’ writes Nicolson. ‘Their sociability is as stiff and predictable as an evening in an Edwardian London club. Gestures of deference are required of any newcomer, and a little accepting dance of stamping feet is made by those already settled with cigars around the fender.’ Loyalty to the same burrow means they tend to pair for life. At the other end of the spectrum is the shag – ‘an extraordinary, ancient, corrupt, imperial, angry, dirty, green-eyed, yellow-gaped, oil-skinned, iridescent, rancid, rock-hole glory that is Phalacrocorax aristotelis. They are scandal and poetry, chaos and individual rage, archaic, ancient beyond any sense of ancientness that other birds might convey.’ If this is the way you like your ornithology served up, Sea Room is the book for you. In the early Celtic Church the wild goose was a symbol of the Holy Spirit, and Nicolson explores the inherent sanctity of this ‘desert in the sea’. This numinous sense of holiness, unfounded in anything but hazy legend and supposition, was abruptly focused by the excavation under Adam’s very eyes of a large flat stone, the size of a loaf, clearly incised with a cross-within-a-circle: the pillow-stone of a seventh-century monk or missionary, probably a follower of Iona’s St Columba, come to spread his holy word among the Shiant islanders. And the reason for its burial face-down beneath the ruins of the backhouse? By the 1720s, when this ancient totem of Christian faith was interred, the new reformed church in its fervour demanded that any reminder of the old Popery, with its magical aura of associations, be expunged. It could now only be nurtured, literally, underground, while the new printed Gaelic Bible marked the growing reach of influence from the mainland and the slow draining of the islands’ lifeblood. For many years it was enough for Adam Nicolson to walk the islands, immerse himself in their atmosphere, relish their otherness, and ask no more. But having asked the questions, he had to find the answers, however obscure some of them might turn out to be. Sea Room is an astonishing, illuminating tour de force; who would have thought that those ‘three specks of black pepper in the middle of that uncomfortable stretch of sea’, as Compton Mackenzie once described them, could expand to a whole world of such dreamlike dimensions? Nicolson has written a homage, elegy and handbook all rolled into one, so stoke that fire and settle down to visit vicariously a destination ‘as sweet as Eden and as malevolent as Hell’. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Ariane Bankes 2010


About the contributor

Ariane Bankes recently compiled, with Jonathan Reekie, the New Aldeburgh Anthology, another homage to place, but one considerably less demanding of its visitors.

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