The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
of Skye in the south.
Although I’ve stood at 10,000 feet on peaks in the French, Swiss and Japanese Alps, the vistas from the rough knuckle at the centre of this tiny islet felt like the most expansive I’ve known. The British Isles are undoubtedly diminutive, yet this magical morning made me realise that how small they really are depends on how you measure them. The straight-line distance from Land’s End in the south to John O’Groats in the north is just 603 miles (shorter than some roads in a state such as Texas or Ontario). Yet the first hundred miles of longitude on the mainland’s north-west coast hold thousands of miles of coastline, with mountains, bays, estuaries, cliffs and islets that would repay a lifetime’s exploration. Looking from Chlèirich at hills I’d climbed and stretches of coast I’d kayaked showed me that all I knew from two decades of wandering was mere fragments of something huge. I wondered what it would take to change that, and it was in that moment that the need to undertake this journey was born.
A few hours later I stopped in the port town of Ullapool. My mind had raced all morning as I tried to work out whether the plan I’d hatched could work. I headed for the town’s two bookshops and filled three bags with reading that might help me think this through: tales of travel, natural histories, poetry, and accounts of Highland and Island life. Then I sat in a café, overlooking the pier from which ferries embark for the Western Isles, and began to consider the realities of what I was dreaming up. The trip couldn’t be continuous: with a little planning, I could arrange my life to free up two weeks of each month, but the rest would have to be spent fulfilling responsibilities back in the English Midlands. This discontinuity would have two distinct advantages. It could spread the journey across the seasons, revealing every facet of the turning year on these weather-ravaged coastlines. It would also allow me to equip myself to tackle each stretch in the ways that suit it best: where one month I’d sit low in the water and power my kayak through the waves, the next I could don crampons to cross snow-clad peaks, or fix ropes to rock and descend into networks of mines and caves.
Over brunch in Ullapool I used my phone to search for things that could help me. The journey would require a large expedition kayak (five feet longer than the one I’d used that morning) to handle rough seas and hold gear for several days (figure 1.2). But the broken landscapes of the far north also made me look for a boat I could carry. I found a two-kilogram packraft: an inflatable vessel that could sit at the bottom of my rucksack until asked to carry me across a loch or along a stretch of river. Travelling like this I could spend my nights on islets and peaks with sight lines to the ocean and aim for 24/7 contact with the coastline.
Five hours later than intended I began the nine-hour drive south, but the sense of excitement was still building. Over the following months I renegotiated my life, striking deals and compromises to buy me time to travel. I rearranged my books so that the most accessible shelves in the house held only reading for this venture. I brushed up my learner’s Welsh, and began to acquire a little Gaelic, so I’d have some access to more than just English writing on these coasts. I mounted a two-metre-tall map on the wall of the room I work in and started to annotate its edge. I chose my starting place and date: Out Stack (a skerry north of Shetland) on 30 June. And I began to contact people who might help me on my way.
I’m a historian by profession: I teach courses and write books about nineteenth-century Britain. Like the work of many historians, my writing has focused, so far, on a few urban centres: it has done no justice to geographical diversity. I knew from past journeys that it would be hard to imagine places with histories, cultures and current conditions more different than, say, Shetland and the Isle of Barra, yet to many people these ocean-bound extremities might as well be interchangeable (and neither is likely even to be mentioned in a history book with ‘Britain’ in its title). This journey would be a quest to comprehend and articulate the intense particularity of the places on this coastline; in undertaking such a project I felt I could become a more rounded and responsible historian of the British Isles.
This is an especially significant task because the predominance of southern and central England enshrined in so much writing on Britain is a relatively recent development. It’s not all that strange a fact, for instance, that in 1700 the island of St Kilda, now habitually presented as fiendishly remote, was among the most thoroughly documented rural communities in Europe. Metropolitan culture tends to take today’s geography for granted, despite the fact that the British Isles were turned inside out by roads and rail. Mainland arteries – the Irish M8, the English M1 and even the West Coast Mainline – now run through the centres of their land mass rather than along the external sea roads that predominated till the railway boom of the 1830s. Since what would once have been miraculous – instantaneous communication across any earthly distance – has become ordinary, and what was once ordinary – travel by boat across a stretch of fierce sea – seems miraculous, attempts to empathise across centuries falter. Coasts and islands carry very different meanings than they once possessed: associations with remoteness and emptiness have replaced links with commerce and communication. This was part of the reason why travelling these coastlines felt like a way of thinking myself into the world of people I write and teach about.
But there were other reasons why this felt right. The belief that wandering the landscape is a productive technique for historical research is not unusual, or at least it didn’t used to be. The links between historians and the outdoors were once strong. In the 1920s, for instance, G. M. Trevelyan wrote his classic histories of Britain while wandering Hadrian’s Wall. Trevelyan soon became patron and champion of the many outdoors organisations that were all the rage after 1930. The links between tramping the countryside and doing history were still so clear in 1966 that when the Oxford historian Keith Thomas noted the rise of new kinds of scientific historian, he described ‘the computer’ replacing ‘the stout boots’ worn by ‘advanced historians’ of preceding decades.1 Simon Schama wrote some of his best work in the 1990s, including a book called Landscape and Memory; at that time he frequently spoke of the ‘archive of the feet’.
I discovered Trevelyan’s writing in my teens, in a small Welsh bookshop on a family holiday, and learning about him was one of the things that set me on the trajectory towards my current life. At that time, part of me wished to work in the nearby national park, and part to write histories. Trevelyan made the two seem not just compatible but complementary. From that moment on, it was thinking of history as something that happened in negotiations between humans and hills, valleys, rain, wind and sea that drove me to be a historian. And I seem to have assumed from the beginning that reading and reflection are best done outdoors.
In those early years, while a pupil at the local comprehensive on the edge of the Peak District known as the Dark Peak, I’d wander past pubs and churches, new factories and old mills and onto the moors, where I’d try to memorise the physics formulae I needed for exams (only occasionally would short-eared owls or golden plovers distract me so much they’d write off a day’s revision). My life over the two decades since then has been a quest for better ways to escape into the wild to think. From the modest moorland of the Peak District, to Scotland’s least-peopled places and the hostile grandeur of Alpine ranges, my travels have extended and my attitudes to nature, work and literature become increasingly entwined. Now, whenever there’s something I need to learn in detail I pack a bag with books and choose an atmospheric place to wander: I spend days over an unhurried journey and sit reading amid dramatic landscape. I’ve come to think that, with food and drink to spare, there are few luxuries more profound than getting well and truly lost for days among mountains. Staying still with a book for hours is also an excellent way to experience nature: a movement in the corner of the eye becomes a stoat between the boots; a sudden, startling noise is ptarmigan clattering onto nearby rocks; strange exhalations are a passing pod of porpoises. I have seen things, through this stillness, that I never would have otherwise: the most candid behaviour of otters and the preening habits of the little auk (figures 1.3 and 1.4). The associations this has created can be incongruous: Thomas Hardy and sea eagles, or Rebecca Solnit and long-tailed skuas. But it is this practice of reading, thinking and writing outdoors that has begun to hone the habits that make a