The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
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,