The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
lengthy dark age. In contrast, much of what were once referred to as Dark Ages had been eras of great coastal strength and enlightenment, when the intellectual traditions of the Irish Atlantic were the most advanced in Europe. Such reversals abound. The widely celebrated Education Acts of 1870 and 1872 were unmitigated disasters for many coastal zones, while the grim economic recession of the 1970s saw an island renaissance unprecedented for two centuries. All British history looks different when inland cities are made remote by seeing them from Atlantic shorelines, and the most powerful element of a year’s journey by kayak was immersion in that changed perspective.
As this suggests, it’s not just historical narratives but also familiar geographies that these waters erode. I began the journey believing I was travelling down a western edge of Britain and Ireland, and assuming I knew what that implied. But these Atlantic shores were long connected as closely to Reykjavik, Bilbao, or the Moroccan port of Safi as to London. There are echoes of Belize on Orkney shores and Nigerian history laps the coast of County Mayo. Communities at the edges were interlinked. Semi-detached from their land masses, they belonged to ocean. This is evident in the artefacts archaeologists unearth and the stories of shoreline encounters. Rare are the coastal regions that haven’t woven the Armada into their folklore or looked to Scandinavia for ocean-going expertise. Scarcer still are the regions that didn’t gain or lose from imperial encounters. These connections are just as clear in the foliage of British and Irish cliffs as in the records of trade or warfare: unfamiliar plants I sat or slept among often turned out to be a misplaced Spanish saxifrage or Norwegian liverwort.
Lerwick (Shetland) and Kinsale (County Cork) have been absent from London-centred histories of the British and Irish isles not because they lacked significance but because they operated in other geographic frames from Gravesend, Grimsby or Dublin: they saw different migrations of people, animals, goods and spores and seeds. At its most extreme, this phenomenon means that some sites on the Irish Atlantic reveal more evidence of historic sea links to China than to England. As I travelled, I found my preconceptions about Britain crumbling, destabilised from within by the diversity of coastal regions and from without by the stories shared by vast Atlantic littorals. Although the local specificities predominate in much of this book (being usually more obvious from a kayak) it was the moments when immense Atlantic geographies intruded that did most to challenge my mental landscape: one purpose of the final chapter is to bring these issues into focus, exploring what visions of the British Isles might emerge at their shorelines.
Just as the most significant histories often happen on the edges of the islands, the most interesting phenomena regularly occur in the margins between disciplines. Exploring past lives on coastlines meant reaching for ideas from geologists, ecologists, naturalists, geographers, anthropologists, artists, poets, novelists or musicians more often than historians. Seabirds, fish and species of seaweed play roles as significant in this book as politicians or their institutions: they had as great an effect on past shoreline lives, and the importance of island pasts today almost always relates both to ecology and community. Talking to naturalists, ecologists, archaeologists and artists was a highlight of the process of researching this book and I’d love to think that such lines of communication might one day be wedged more permanently open.
These ideas are the big themes reserved for the end of the book: conclusions drawn from the stories of exploring these phenomenal coastlines by kayak. That exploration – the biggest adventure I’ve ever undertaken – predominates for the next eleven chapters. Paddling beneath huge cliffs and across racing tides produced material that suits media other than prose. Though I didn’t dare risk any expensive equipment, I carried a small camera to sea with me in order to take the photographs in this book. But, especially at the start of the journey, I took thousands of pictures. There is therefore a web resource to accompany the project at www.frayedatlanticedge.com. That site includes a photographic record to accompany each chapter, one or two short films, and further practical information for anyone wishing to paddle or research these coasts. It also contains links to the scholarly articles in which I explored the reasoning behind the project, and hosts an extensive bibliography. It is hoped that any reader who, after reading this book, seeks further immersion in the Atlantic waters of Britain and Ireland will find something of interest there.
A Journey in the Making
I REMEMBER CLEARLY the moment I decided to embark on this journey. I’d shaken myself awake from a miserable night. The sun was yet to rise, but the view to the east was already full of promise. With overnight rain departed, a band of rich gold separated dark blue sky from the black silhouettes of mountains. The purring of curlews had begun to restore a sense of warm, active life to this cold, damp world and fulmars were wheeling over the water as the last of the rough night’s swell died away.
The previous afternoon, I’d kayaked to one of my favourite places: Eilean a’ Chlèirich. This was my last night outdoors for some time, and although a short squall was forecast, I felt the need to venture somewhere memorable. Eilean a’ Chlèirich means ‘Priest Island’. This single square mile of rock is uninhabited, and hemmed in by cliffs and boulders which prevent even small yachts from landing. Its upper slopes are home to storm petrels and other creatures that don’t cohabit well with humans. The most remote of the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, Chlèirich is a final, bleak, landfall before the Outer Hebrides.
Setting off from a small calm bay on the Coigach Peninsula, I’d made my way past the largest Summer Isles and along a chain of rocks that rise like wrecks from the sea. The wind had risen sharply as I battled waves on the final crossing and, with arms and thighs aching, it had been a great relief to reach water sheltered by the south-eastern cliffs of the isle. I clambered up the coast while pale November light gave way to storm clouds, and wandered above a patchwork of tiny lochans to the island’s northern point, where spray from a gathering swell soon rose higher than the cliffs. Because of the approaching wall of rain, I couldn’t see the distant islands to the west, so I settled into my waterproof sleeping bag (figure 1.1), with pinkish sandstone boulders for shelter and my back to the weather. I was soon enmeshed in a drift net of wetness: salt-tasting rain seemed to enclose me from every compass point. My memory of those hours is defined by sweet smells of decaying island earth.
In the morning I blinked water from my eyelashes and stumbled to my feet. I was gazing downwards as I stood, carefully nudging the sleeping bag so the water on its shell didn’t spill inside. Then I looked up, and the moment was heart-stopping. I must have turned around four or more times before I gained enough composure to choose a direction to look in. The storm had cleansed the skies so completely that every feature of the seascape was clear and perfect. A vast shattered coastline stretched on all sides: the tattered ocean-gouged fringe of northern Britain.
I was taken aback by the diversity of this view. To the west, the horizon was a long stuttering line of Outer Hebrides. The first rays of sun caught Harris’ highest hill, An Clisham (An Cliseam); its silhouette, which should have been featureless at this distance, was bright with golden-brown glens and ridges. In the foreground, the Shiant Isles, puffin-covered in summer, rose like great bronze whalebacks from the sea. And above the northernmost point of the chain of islands was a stretch of blank horizon that marked open sea till Iceland. To the north-east, the coastline ran towards Cape Wrath, but as the mainland reached its terminus the land refused to give way: some of the weirdest peaks imaginable – Stac Pollaidh, Suilven (Sùilebheinn), Quinag (A’ Chuinneag), Foinaven (Foinne Bheinn) – erupt like deformed molars on a vast fossil jawbone. These strange corroded towers were once sandbanks in a huge riverbed when this region was on the opposite side of the globe from the rest of Britain’s land mass. There are many miles between each peak – long winding drives along narrow one-track roads – but the view from this spot concertinaed them together. The mountains to the south-east are less disorienting: where the northern peaks such as Suilven (‘the Pillar’) and Quinag (‘the Milk Churn’) challenge every preconception of what a mountain is, the hills to the south, such as An Teallach (‘the Forge’), epitomise the pointed peaks and sweeping ridges a child might draw.