The Frayed Atlantic Edge

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.