The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 18
There’s barely room to sit on Sgùrr Alasdair’s summit, but one of the first people to scale the peak, the renowned Alpine mountaineer Charles Pilkington, solemnly requested of each climber who followed that they give the fine views ‘at least an hour of [a] misspent life’. Pilkington warned, however, that the inexperienced climber should not be here alone: ‘Sgùrr Alasdair, though not so high, is a true mountain, and not a hill like Ben Lomond or Skiddaw.’ This is, indeed, the only mountain range in Britain to make the seasoned alpinist’s pulse run too quickly for comfort.
I was joined before long by a Yorkshire mountaineer who, like many climbers, had a total loyalty to the Cuillin: bypassing the rest of Scotland, he comes from Halifax each year to climb with Skye’s mountain community. We stayed on the peak, as Pilkington requested, talked mountains and watched the cloud level sink, until we each went separate ways. He returned for music at one of Britain’s celebrated mountaineering haunts, the Old Inn at Carbost, while I wandered the climbers’ playgrounds of the ridges, the cloud turning pink and gold as a huge sun melted through it. By evening the cloud fell so far that low landforms I’d passed on my first day of paddling – the Stoer and the Quairang – stood out above it in the distant north. This was one of the most beautiful nights of my life, all the more powerful for the drab days that preceded it.
By morning, January was restored; the wind had risen and temperature dropped dramatically. Cloud swirled above the tops, only gradually forming a blanket at eight hundred metres. With fingers scraped raw by gabbro scrambles and biting wind, I looked back to Sgùrr Alasdair from Sgùrr na Banachdaich. Peaks with names like Sgùrr Thearlaich and Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich appeared at intervals from speeding billows between. The history of this skyline vocabulary is unique in Scotland, because so many names were altered in the half-century after 1870. Sgùrr Alasdair was called Sgùrr Biorach (‘the Pointed Peak’) until the day in 1873 when the Skye poet Alasdair Nicolson was first to conquer a summit previously thought inaccessible. Nicolson was sheriff in Skye’s main town, Portree, and used his sheriff’s plaid as rope on tough manoeuvres. Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich immortalises a mountaineer, John Mackenzie of Sconser, who was climbing ‘virgin’ peaks by age fourteen; Sgùrr Thearlaich (‘Charles’s Peak’) is named for Charles Pilkington, the Merseyside climber after whom Mount Pilkington, British Columbia, is also named. No other range in Britain lost its local identity to recreational names in quite this way.
The story of the opening of the Cuillin by these pioneers is the story of the opening of Skye to visitors of all kinds. It began with the birth of a new aesthetic, climbers following in the footsteps of poets and painters. Early tourists didn’t approach these mountains from the land as modern visitors do but from the water, entering the Cuillin bowl from the salt loch to the south and disembarking to explore the shores of freshwater Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg – ‘the cauldron of waters’). By this route well-to-do tourists made Loch Coruisk Britain’s national emblem of romantic sublimity.
Walter Scott was among those who extolled the scene. His 1814 journal recounts a journey by rowing boat to the bottom of the ‘huddling and riotous brook’ which drains Loch Coruisk into the sea, where hundreds of trout and salmon were struggling upwards. He described the ‘exquisite savage scene’ where huge strata of naked rock ‘as bare as the pavements of Cheapside’ rise ‘so perpendicularly from the water-edge, that Borrowdale or even Glencoe, is a jest to them’. The effect was desolation more potent than Scott had ever experienced, but ‘its grandeur elevated and redeemed it from the wild and dreary character of utter barrenness’. Scott featured the Cuillin in his poem The Lord of the Isles and commissioned no lesser an artist than J. M. W. Turner to illustrate the scene. Turner too visited the loch although unlike Scott he braved a climb above it, mounting the shoulder of Sgùrr na Stri, a small but spectacular hill on the seaward side of the Cuillin range. Here, he slipped and only ‘one or two tufts’ of Cuillin grass prevented a fatal fall. Turner’s sketches focus as much on watery depth as rocky height, illustrating Scott’s description of Loch Coruisk as a ‘sable ravine and dark abyss’.
Scott was obsessed with the Jacobite legacy, and Prince Charlie’s flight across Skye became another means by which early travellers could imagine the island as the last stronghold of authentic Highland spirit. Scott’s heady fusion of history and landscape formed the basis of tourist expectations, and those who followed in his footsteps soon multiplied from dozens to thousands.
The new media that draw many modern visitors to Skye derive directly from the aesthetic built by Scott and Turner. The historical romance of television shows such as Outlander, which opens with the Skye Boat Song, is descended from Scott’s historic novels. Car adverts and music videos (such as Harry Styles’ ‘Sign of the Times’) feature sweeping views of Skye’s landscape inspired by Turner’s sublime. Our own, twenty-first-century moment seems oddly captivated by the aesthetics and interests of an era exactly two centuries earlier. But a wholly modern ease of travel and communication means that Skye is no longer insulated from the implications of its deserved celebrity. Every ground on which that celebrity rests – from the well-preserved historic sites to the wildness of the land in which they’re set – is threatened by precisely those who love them most. And the island, in its need for tourist income, is sustained by the dynamics of its own destruction. The condition – insoluble but unignorable – is Shakespearian in its many forms of grandeur, pathos and tragedy.
ARGYLL AND ULSTER
(February/March)
ONLY IN FEBRUARY did winter truly hit. Finally, the hills were shrouded in snow. Tides like tumbling alpine rivers rushed me southwards along narrow channels of an inter-island world. It was ten days until, beneath the southern cliffs of Mull, I lost sight of the snow-topped Cuillin: for all that time Skye’s mountains stood proud against blue-white skies while brisk easterly winds held dark fug offshore. Stony beaches where I landed were laden with thick, rubbery stalks of brown kelp: storm salads recalling recent gales. But the sea twitched with the memory of fierce sou’westerlies long after the wind turned east: beneath Rum, and along the rough Ardnamurchan coast, high breakers suddenly appeared even when the sea looked safe.
These stretches of coast have dark histories. They’re places where even visitors from Skye have felt flayed by loss. In 1937 Sorley MacLean moved to Mull where he expected comfort and a sense of homecoming at the hearths of clan Maclean. Instead of calm he felt rage:
I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry. Its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the Clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael.1
Mull’s history of emptying is long – much of it pre-clearance – and devastating: the Gaelic community here is but a fragment of those further north. Most Mull residents I met were English or Irish. Some were ocean scientists (most nations have fewer cetacean specialists than the Isle of Mull); others were outdoors guides, or wildlife photographers. The island’s fauna has become its defining feature in large part because the main roads skirt sea lochs: nowhere else in Britain can otters and eagles be so reliably observed from the comfort of a car. I also met kayakers here in numbers greater than elsewhere. In many ways, Mull is already the theme park that Skye folk hope their island won’t become.
Mull’s neighbouring mainland peninsulas are sites of two of the great accounts of cultural loss. One of these, Philip Gaskell’s Morvern Transformed (1968), is among the most significant histories of clearance: an early study that broke with historians’ tradition of open sympathy with the landlords. The other, Alasdair Maclean’s Night Falls on Ardnamurchan (1984), is a personal narrative of communal traditions slowly attenuated. Maclean’s book is a dialogue with the diaries of his father who had been a crofter on Sanna Bay. The father personifies measured reserve through his bare descriptions of change; this is paired with the son’s emotive elaboration of the consequences of that transformation. The two combine into an understated account of the loss of ways of life that carries exceptional force. Such texts cannot but colour a kayak through this region in winter, when holiday homes are empty and the distance to any shops and facilities immense. I thought back to my journeys down the great archipelagos from Shetland to the Hebrides. The islands had rarely, if ever, felt truly remote: there were always well-provisioned communities relatively close. On mainland coasts such as Sutherland and Ardnamurchan, isolation and lack of investment feels more persistent, and the task of staying well stocked in the kayak loomed larger.
Winter departed as swiftly as it arrived. March brought fine, warm weather, the sudden eruption of flowers in cliff-face fissures and even the exceptionally early arrival of puffins. By the time this turn took place I was among islands that felt similar, yet exist in a different political order. The twenty-six counties of independent Ireland were only ever coerced into the political entity of Britain during an extended nineteenth century (1801–1919). This journey across national borders brought the best opportunity to consider the integrations and divisions of this archipelagic world.
It was neither the large island of Mull, nor long headlands like Ardnamurchan, that defined my perception of the bleak February weeks at sea. The list of small isles passed – from Canna to Cara – could fill a page. The smaller the isle the more it seemed to shape my sense of the history on my journey. Many were long depopulated, some were still home to communities in triple figures, a few to populations that have long been confined to tiny numbers only. The experience of these islands reprised and reinforced a host of the themes I’d witnessed in the Northern and Western Isles. As on islands further north every community here required extraordinary resilience to survive the years of rampant modernisation after 1780, triggered by the events of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.
I thought as I travelled about how that period demands rereading in the light of island stories. I thought of some of the wisest words ever spoken about history, said by Calvin, the child protagonist of the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes: ‘History is the fiction we create to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.’ In the 1970s concepts similar to the Enlightenment – labels that implied a direction in history – were revealed as little more than propaganda praising certain interest groups. Feminist historians such as Joan Kelly-Gadol, for instance, showed the ‘Renaissance’ to be a narrative that fits the experience of a cadre of wealthy upwardly mobile men, but not their contemporaries whose opportunities narrowed and wealth decreased.2 To sum up an era with the term Renaissance is thus to engage in an identity politics that values the rich alone.
The case of the Enlightenment is little different. Social distinctions of race, class, gender and sexuality were not undermined but consolidated: this was the era of scientific racism or ‘the century of the colour line’ as it was labelled by the philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois. Yet the case against the label ‘Enlightenment’ is also a geographic one: to deploy it is to be dazzled by cities and blind to rural sea coasts. As scholarship informed by environmental challenges increasingly encourages focus on place and geographical distinctiveness, the Enlightenment must surely fail as an explanatory narrative.
Every island’s story of negotiation with the centralising forces that would have stripped it of wealth, culture and people, was unique. A kayaker who lands on Easdale wanders into a realm that’s both post-industrial dystopia and unspoilt wilderness, every thistle a reminder of how rapidly and unpredictably nature’s domains are wrested free from human domination. Slate waste pits make deep blue pools near a bright modern community that resides in clean, whitewashed ex-miners’ cottages. Landing on the west coast of Rum is an entirely different prospect. Nestling beneath bleak mountains are a striking array of abandoned lazy-beds and a crassly urbane Graeco-Roman mausoleum. The similar forms of prostrate agricultural ridges and upright architectural pillars are the same histories refracted through poverty and wealth: a whole way of life is buried unceremoniously in the ridged earth, while one wealthy owner is immortalised with bizarre ostentation. Rum was bought and sold across the era of Enlightenment and its aftermath by families whose wealth came from Caribbean plantations and whose kinship groups half-included children born from the rape of slaves. Given the emotional calluses built over lifetimes of imperial exploitation it’s no surprise these landowners failed to see worth in ways of life they obliterated in island glens.
Such suffering was now familiar. But here, unlike on other coasts, I was treading the terrain of one of the great political campaigns that drew general attention to the plight of the islands. In the early twentieth century, the projects of state building that had defined previous decades continued, metropolitan visions of the nation gradually swamping regional or local patterns of organisation. But resistance also began to gather momentum. On coastlines around the Atlantic protests took the form of long sea journeys that were used by coastal communities to corral new media into publicising the plight of places and trades that the nation seemed to sideline. In Brazil, for instance, several voyages were made, between 1920 and 1950, protesting government failures to recognise fishing as an official trade.3 The only such journey to take place off British coasts was also the one such voyage to be conducted by kayak.
In 1934, Alastair Dunnett and Seumas Adam were young journalists, raised in the tenements of Glasgow, who’d lost every penny of their meagre savings in their creation of a boys’ adventure periodical, The Claymore, which ran for a year before its debts caught up with it. Dunnett and Adam had met through outdoors pursuits at the moment when, as Dunnett’s son, Ninian, put it,
The hordes who had flocked to industrial Glasgow to bend their shoulders for ‘the second city of the Empire’ were beginning to rub their eyes and discover the fabulous landscape on their doorstep.4
Unlike other industrial or clerical workers, who explored the Highlands by land alone, these two took frequently to the sea, heading to harbours at dawn and hitching rides on coastal cargo tugs or herring drifters bound for the Hebrides.
Those improvised journeys inspired the spirit of The Claymore. The burgeoning market of boys’ adventures, Alastair Dunnett noted, was almost entirely imperial in its content, featuring ‘South Sea planters sons’ and ‘pet gorillas which played cricket’. If working-class boys appeared in these stories they were ‘bad yins’: ‘coarse errand lads’ whose many ‘villainies were mere by-products of the major crime of working for a living’.5 The Claymore aimed to show Scots that children could have adventures without needing to attend an English public school or be posted to the colonies.
When The Claymore’s publisher at last grew tired of their accumulating debts, Dunnett and Adam sought a new venture through which to pursue their cause at little cost. Through The Claymore’s advertisement pages they had built relationships with outdoors industries of every kind and had discovered in Queensferry a man named John Marshall who’d begun to build canoes from canvas, rubber and teak which he insisted ‘would take a skilly man anywhere in the waters around our coasts in all but the most severe conditions’. These vessels gave the duo the idea of kayaking from Glasgow to the Western Isles as a voyage to explore their heritage (Dunnett’s mother was a Gaelic-speaker from Loch Fyne, and both men traced their heritage to the Highlands and Islands) and the latent potential of struggling islands economies. On the day they set off, the papers published their press release aimed at all the people of Scotland:
Our intensive industrialisation has lost us our contact with the sea. Steamers have made us forget the thrills of small-craft sailing. We want to test the zest of physical living that town life denies us. But there is something more … We want to see the Western Isles thoroughly, to complete our own picture of them. Not the Isles of the guidebooks, but the real isles – the isles of Opportunity, peopled by a vigorous race with an unrivalled climate for some types of products; islands capable of supporting more of our surplus population in large-sized holdings yielding an adequate return. Therein is our real adventure – exploring the possibilities for expansion and development in our own country.
Most importantly, as Dunnett put it later, ‘it was the land and the people, and not we, which would make up our story. They would take the foreground, and we would try to make ourselves a part of that scene and life.’
The Queensferry canoes (what Dunnett and Adam were up to would be referred to as kayaking today, but the terms canoe and kayak were used interchangeably until later) were rudimentary vessels, even involving an inflated car-tyre inner tube as a cockpit. Their other equipment was no more specialised, consisting of kilts, tweeds and long thick woollen socks. Their preparations were as improvised as their vessels. Although they claimed in their press releases that ‘both are, of course, expert canoeists’ neither had in reality ‘even seen canoes at close quarters until a few weeks previously, and our only experience of handling them had been on a recent Sunday afternoon on the Forth and Clyde Canal’. Most of their ocean-going knowhow came from a chance encounter, in the gym, with a master mariner.
