The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
lines across the expanding circle.
More perhaps than any other bird, gannets evoke the bleak world of seaweed, guano, gales, crags and mackerel that sweeps north and west of the British Isles. Spending summer in dense communities, they colonise the steepest and most isolated elements of the Atlantic edge, building a world that looks like an oddly geometrical metropolis. Their chicks are known as squabs or guga, and dozens of these black-faced balls of silver fluff were visible on Muckle Flugga as I passed. During July the guga turn slowly black and leap from their ledges into a journey south that begins with a swim: they jump before they can fly. The young birds then make vast foraging flights, gradually securing a place on the edge of a colony that might be hundreds of miles from their birthplace. Then, they’ll perch year after year in their tiny fiefdom, unmoved by everything the weather of Shetland, Faroe or Iceland can throw at them. I could feel no sense of identity with full-grown gannets, whose command of air and water transcends clumsy human seafaring; yet the guga’s hare-brained, ill-prepared flop into the sea made me imagine it as an emblem of this journey’s running jump into an alien ocean world. If I were ever to give my boat a name (and at least one Shetlander I met was taken aback, even offended, that I hadn’t) I thought an excellent choice would be Guga.
Despite the infrequency of their squawks, the noise the gannets made as they swirled above was extraordinary. The sound of millions of feathers scything the air was enough to drown the ocean. This was the first time I’d considered the importance of hearing to the kayaker: unable to listen for dangers over the sound of the gannets, such as breakers over barriers in the sea, I felt shorn of a tool critical to navigation. And the thousand shadows of these powerful creatures created just the slightest sense of threat. Indeed, besides a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to their sagacity and storge (the familial fondness they show towards their offspring), humans have rarely associated gannets with anything benign. Their appearances in art and literature are shaped by their most characteristic act: the fish-skewering dive from height into the depths. Wings folded back, the angelic, cruciform bird becomes a thrusting scalpel. This is, according to the leading naturalist’s guide to the species, ‘the heavyweight of the plunge-divers of the world’ (and the gannet’s evocative power is such that even this scientific monograph can’t resist noting the bird’s ‘icy blue’ stare).2 In the 1930s, an island joke held that plans were afoot for the canning of ‘fird’ (gannets tasting like a cross of fish and bird) but that no tin could hold ‘the internal violence from the northern isle’: the gannet had come to stand for the storms of its northern outposts as well as its own oceanic stink and sudden plummet.3 And the shift from soaring beauty to abrupt violence has long been a theme to build macabre visions on; as I moved beneath the avian storm cloud I couldn’t keep the most sinister of gannet poems, Robin Robertson’s ‘The Law of the Island’, from needling its way into my head. In this beautifully distilled poem, an island outlaw is lashed to a barely floating hunk of timber, with silver mackerel tied across his eyes and mouth. The islanders who have been his judge and jury push him into the tides:
They stood then,
smoking cigarettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.4
This captures something of the force with which these bright birds, wreathed in shining bubbles, pierce the gloomy depths. Yet real gannets are ocean survivors, not kamikaze warriors, so there was no need for empathy with the island outlaw, and never a Hitchcockian threat in this great wheeling.
In fact, the leisurely hour I spent in the sun at Muckle Flugga would be the last moment of safety for some time. As I began the journey south down the island of Unst I hit a wall of breakers and swell that beat against the most preposterous cliffs I’d ever looked up at. With astonishing precision, fulmars traced the profiles of complex waves that seemed entirely unpredictable to me. Crests soon hit the boat from both sides, forcing its narrow bow beneath pirling water until its buoyancy saw it surge up through the foam. The bow would then smack down – diving through air where there had just been wave – into a sucking surface of receding sea. Twice in the first half-hour an unforeseen peak forced me sideways and into the ocean and I had to flick my hips to roll back upright, wrenching the paddle round to twist my body out from underwater (I was desperately glad of the previous week, spent practising short journeys in surf off North Uist with the most foolhardy kayaker I’ve ever met, my partner, Llinos – figure 2.3). As the last of my gannet escort returned to their pungent white promontories, I felt my sense of distance from everyone and everything keenly. I wouldn’t see another human today, not even a silhouette on the cliffs that tower above. Even if someone was looking down, the roiling stretch of intervening ocean meant we might as well have been a world apart.
Passing down Unst was the hardest day’s travel I’d ever done. In the evening I pulled into the shelter of a small cove, Westing Bay, with the sensation that I’d walked repeatedly through a brine car wash. I set out my sleeping bag on an islet called Brough Holm which, like so many tiny Shetland skerries, has a ruin attesting to productive purpose long ago. Covered in golden lichen, the remnants of this böd (fishing store) stand among deep-yellow bird’s-foot trefoil which gives way suddenly to kelp and bladderwrack: a colourful world of greens, gold and brown that was made still richer by the evening light. The remnants of the Iron Age and Viking sites of Underhoull commanded the landward horizon, with a vantage along tomorrow’s path, which would take me across a major sea road of the Norse world: the sound that separates the island of Unst from its southern neighbour, Yell, was once the easiest route between Norway and conquest.
Safe from the sea, I shuddered at the thought of what today’s journey would have been like in less forgiving weather. I spent sunset drying out while reading about the small boats of Shetland, and thinking of centuries of families who’d rowed these coasts in all conditions.5 Far from an anticlimax, this dramatic day felt like a grand fanfare to see me on my way. Although it would be a while before I learned to sleep well in July’s perpetual light, I did doze for more than three hours that night, mostly unbothered by the outraged squeak of an oystercatcher each time a gull strayed close.
By some kind of miracle, the calm weather in which I set out held for days, with only brief early-morning interludes of cloud and breeze. I was able to travel what should have been the most challenging stage of my journey with few hardships beyond some sunburn round the ears. The two rolls in the maelstrom round north Unst were my only submarine adventures. Covering an average of thirty-two miles a day – not as the crow flies, but in and out of gorgeous inlets with imposing headlands – I still had hours to read or hang around at sea when gannets dived or porpoise fins rolled above the waves. In the orange evenings and white mornings I stretched my legs across the islands I’d chosen to sleep on and nosed round their ruins (I’ve never been anywhere with so many abandoned buildings from so many centuries). I began to think up questions for present-day islanders and for the past Shetlanders whose lives persist in the archives. But this still idyll, I had to remind myself, could not last.
The sensible way to undertake a journey along Britain’s Atlantic coast would have been from south to north. With prevailing sou’westerlies at my back I would have been working with, rather than against, the weather. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. While planning this trip in moments snatched from university teaching, familiar English and Welsh coastlines felt like the wrong kind of start. If I was to make sense of the Atlantic coastline, I had to begin by disorienting myself with total immersion in the seascapes and histories of a place I still knew mainly through clichés of longboats, horned helmets, sea mist and gales. This place is the seam between the Atlantic and North Sea, where waves rule Britannia and always have. It is a coast of staggering diversity as well as a thriving cultural hub: those coasts and that culture are thoroughly intermixed.
The bond between Shetlanders and their extraordinary tradition of small boats is rightly renowned. There are many Shetland dialect poems