The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
Many of the places this journey took me are now more free from human habitation than at any time since prehistory. The west has beautiful coastlines and wild ones, but even their remotest fragments are layered with diverse and difficult histories: they are sites of human default not design, shaped by past people but now reclaimed by nature. In the darkest spell of this story, the imperialism of nineteenth-century Lowlanders drove Highland and coastal communities inland, across the sea and to the grave. Part of the community of the island of St Kilda ended up in Melbourne, Australia; the people of Cork formed new Ontario communities; Welsh-speaking settlements were founded in the pampas and mountains of southern Argentina. The stories of these coastlines have stretched across the globe, revealing facets of Britain’s imperial past and present very different from those seen from metropolitan London or Glasgow.
During my morning on Eilean a’ Chlèirich I sought evidence of the people who once eked out livings in this most uncompromising spot. At first, wading through thick, ungrazed foliage, the island felt largely untouched. But I gradually began to see hints of human history shrouded by the plants: chunks of cut stone and roots of an old wall. The earliest human traces here are vestiges of stone circles from a time before written records: millennia over which imagination has freedom to roam. From a later age are scant remnants of Chlèirich’s time as an early Christian retreat; this was the period that gave the island its name yet it is unrecorded in any document from the time. Then there are foundations from structures built by a nineteenth-century outlaw whose banishment from the mainland was recorded in just one short sentence of Gaelic prose. But the island’s stones only really intersect with literary record with traces of the occupation by 1930s naturalists whose brief stay was immortalised in Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years (1940).
Barely anything of any of these people’s endeavours stands above ankle height, yet Chlèirich is layered with past activity, where each successive wave of habitation has been so limited in scale that it hasn’t erased previous histories. Wandering its hollows and hillocks is therefore a historian’s or archaeologist’s fantasy. Indeed, what made Chlèirich feel wild was not just wind, rain and the sounds of the sea, but the sense of being amid remnants of human action that had been conclusively defeated by weather. Humans toiled here centuries ago and my back when I slept had been laid against their labour: the rocks I nestled among had been worked by people, before wind, rain, ice and lichen reclaimed them for the wild. Although the British Isles have no untouched wilderness, their wildness is all the more remarkable for its entanglement with history: this journey would be an exercise in the art of interpreting the intertwining.
In that sense, my plan was an experiment. I hoped to see what could be learned by travelling slowly along these coastlines with an eye attuned to both the natural world and the remains of the past. The decades over which I’ve wandered here are long enough to begin to see changes and to ask what will become of these landscapes. The way in which some coastal regions were emptied of permanent populations now contrasts their growth as sites of leisure. Mountain paths grow wider and un-pathed regions fewer, coastal walking routes are extended and advertised in increasingly lavish brochures. I’d been spending nights on mountains for several years before I happened across someone doing the same, but now the experience isn’t uncommon: in the winter before this journey I even slept on a Cairngorm summit from which the only visible artificial light was the pinprick of a head torch on a distant mountain. Thanks to social media and political devolution, communities from Applecross to Anglesey pioneer new ways of living well while promoting and protecting the needs of nature. The languages of the small rural communities at the edges of the islands – particularly Welsh and Gaelic – grow in ways that once seemed impossible; lost languages like Norn have vocal advocates. ‘Small language’ networks of co-operation and exchange now link Cornwall and Wales with Breton and Galician cultures in ways that echo historic bonds along seaboards. Lynx might soon be restored to a few remote forests just as white-tailed eagles have been returned to seas and skies. Yet even the eagles are still a source of contention: beloved by tourists and naturalists they are resented, even sometimes poisoned and shot, by those who see them threaten livelihoods in farming, field sports or fishing. This book is therefore not just the story of a journey, or an exploration of past and present on the fringes of the British Isles, but a reflection on how far, and in what directions, our current interactions with the coast are reshaping this north-east Atlantic archipelago.
In attempting to tell this aspect of the story I wanted to rely on more than my own experience, so in the months leading up to my journey I made use of every professional and personal connection I had. I travelled to the University of the Highlands and Islands for events on coastal history, meeting, for the first time, the unofficial ‘historian laureate’ of Scottish coastal communities, Jim Hunter. I contacted artists and musicians, including the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (an old friend of the family, who once taught me to play his Orkney-inspired music, but who passed away just weeks before my journey began). And I made use of my role as a teacher: I acquired dissertation students interested in the history and folklore of western Scotland, Wales and Ireland and wrote these places into my courses.
One class about these coasts was especially instructive. This was a seminar on ‘Film and History’ for the University of Birmingham’s MA in Modern British Studies which I taught with a historian of the twentieth century, Matt Houlbrook. We chose early films of St Kilda and the North Sea as the case studies for our students. They began by watching the first moving picture of Britain’s most famous small island: Oliver Pike’s St Kilda, Its People and Birds (1908). Then they watched four films from the 1930s, including John Ritchie’s footage of the evacuation, and Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937) which was set on Kilda but filmed in Shetland. We then chose three documentaries of the eastern coastline – John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) and Granton Trawler (1934) as well as Henry Watt’s North Sea (1939) – each of which places trawlers and fishing at its heart.
The effect of putting these films side by side is striking. They show the process of these coasts being mythologised. By the early twentieth century, the North Sea had come to stand for shipping, industry and progress: its early appearances on film were commissioned by the General Post Office to advertise the vibrancy of fishing fleets and the productive potential of the ocean. Trawlermen haul herring by the thousand from the waves: despite gales and storms, these icons of modern masculinity demonstrate human dominance over nature. Film-makers experiment with advanced techniques of sound and vision as they seek to portray the striving and struggling that make a modern factory of the sea. By contrast, the west in these films signals detachment and underdevelopment. Its communities hold out against terrible odds with only vestigial industries to aid them. A lone woman sits at a spinning wheel the same as the one her grandmother’s grandmother used. A man is lowered from a cliff, draped in a sheet: he waits patiently, alone, to snag a guillemot which can then be salted for meagre winter sustenance. Children scatter, panicked by the strange sight of a camera and cameraman. Our students saw that when watching the east-coast trawlermen the viewer feels like the audience at a performance; when watching films of west-coast crofters and fisherfolk they were left with a feeling more like voyeurism.
The contrasts that appear in these films are fictions. They don’t portray these places as they exist today nor as they were when the films were made; still less do they depict a world that could have been recognised in earlier ages. Yet stereotypes like these are repeated endlessly. Twenty-first-century poets are forced to work as hard as Norman MacCaig did in 1960 to remind readers that Gaelic verse is often small and formal: grandiose romanticism and the wild red-haired Gael live in lowland imaginations, not in west-coast glens and mountains. But I can’t pretend that engrained romantic imagery doesn’t still colour my own, lowlander’s, obsession with these Atlantic fringes. Such notions are resilient to short spells on icy crags or a night in the ghostly remains of a cleared coastal township. But could they survive this journey’s long immersion in these regions? I hoped to find my imagination changed by travel: the mists of Celtic twilight dispelled perhaps, with the delicate textures of mundane and everyday history appearing from the fog. This