worlds of real human beings exceeded (as any historian will say they always do) the hazy types of myth. So I knew, when I set out, what I wanted from this journey. But if journeys always turned out how we planned, and provided answers only to the questions we knew to ask, there’d be little point in taking them at all.
Let my fingers find
flaws and fissures in the face
of cliff and crag,
allowing feet to edge
along crack and ledge
storm and spume have scarred
for centuries
across the countenance of stacks.
Let me avoid
the gaze of guillemots,
the black-white judgements
of their wings;
foul mouths of fulmars;
cut and slash of razorbills;
gibes of gulls;
and let me keep my balance till
puffins pulse around me
and the glory of gannets
surrounding me like snow-clouds
ascendant in the air
gives me pause for wonder,
grants further cause for prayer.
Donald S. Murray, ‘The Cragsman’s Prayer’ (2008)
JULY IS THE TURN of Britain’s year: counterintuitively, perhaps, it’s the true peak of spring. At the month’s onset, auks and waders throng the coastline. Gulls and skuas feast on the eggs and fledglings of smaller birds, while lumbering monsters like the basking shark rise from the ocean’s depths to predate the algal bloom. In this month of frenzy, travellers by kayak can’t be sure of an onshore place to sleep, however much they scrutinise the map: when a landing is met by chittering terns the only option is to slide back onto the sea. But by July’s end, seabirds slip the leash that briefly tethered them to the land: wax becomes wane in the glut of coastal life. Winds rise, then temperatures fall, as species after species leaves, till every crag that was once a thick white fudge of feathers and excrement is flayed clean by gales.
I spent my first night on Shetland high on some of Britain’s most dramatic cliffs and north of every road and home in the British Isles (figure 2.1). All night, seabirds returned to ledges below, gradually ceasing their daytime cackle; I watched the last light of a sun that barely set gleam on the backs of fulmars and puffins as they wheeled in to roost. When I woke (a mere three hours after closing my eyes) a fat skua sat feet away on the storm-stunted grass. It stared as though keeping watch, with feathers only occasionally ruffled by a hint of breeze. This morning could barely be a better one to begin my journey: in this most wind-lashed extremity of Britain all was sunshine and stillness.
Shetland felt like a fitting place to start. It embodies July’s double nature more fully than anywhere else in the British Isles. In the early summer, ‘the aald rock’, as these islands are affectionately known, is a cauldron of life as rich and distinctive as any of the world’s celebrated archipelagos, from the Galapagos to the Seychelles; its species – whether wrens, voles, moths or mosses – have evolved along unique trajectories. This month’s journey will bid farewell to the fecundity of spring with a carnival of screeching, mewling life of which this morning’s seabirds are just the start. The descent into winter in the Scottish mountains, when every plant or creature seems miraculous, will be dramatic.
Within an hour, early on the last day of June, I’ll have paddled to Out Stack: a small rock that is the northernmost scrap of Britain. I’ll turn. When I shift the sun from my right shoulder to my left, a journey that has filled my mind for months will begin. I wonder whether I should have some ritual ready: it’ll feel odd for the act that begins this venture to be a paddle stroke like all the others. But I can’t think of a ceremony that wouldn’t seem ridiculous performed, alone, at sea. So I paddle north to my starting point, passing up a long, fjord-like voe called Burra Firth. This is lined to the east with Shetland’s characteristic rich-red granite crags and stacks. To the west, a contorted, steely gneiss is shot through with quartz that, like the water, glints with silvery light. All the cliffs are swathed in a fleeting green: grass, moss and sea pinks cling to fissures in the rock through the short Shetland summer.
Reaching the mouth of Burra Firth was a decisive moment. If I turned right, around the red headland of Saxa Vord, I’d travel coasts sheltered from raw westerlies by the land mass of Britain. I’d write a book about the North Sea. But turning left is to choose the more austere Atlantic, its swell built through 2,000 miles of open ocean, and its coasts ravaged by some of the most powerful and unpredictable forces on the earth’s surface. In her unparalleled trilogy of books on seashores, the Pennsylvanian Rachel Carson makes this coast a case study precisely because of the violence of waves which sometimes break, she says, with a force of two tons per square foot.1 For now I was still shielded from swell by a long line of rocks, some with ominous names like ‘Rumblings’. These outcrops are usually known simply by the name of the largest, Muckle Flugga, which is topped by a large, precarious Victorian lighthouse. Out Stack is the last and least imposing of the group.
Only later would I learn the need to ignore names like Rumblings and Out Stack, as late impositions on the landscape. It’s a signal of Shetland’s long separateness that the islands as their people know them are named differently from how they appear on maps: Out Stack, for instance, is merely a garbling of ‘Otsta’, a name still used by Shetland fishermen. These historic names of Shetland were collected and mapped for the first time in the 1970s, and those who undertook the task referred to the lived tradition they recorded as ‘100,000 echoes of our Viking past’. Muckle Flugga is among the names that reveal the resilience of local terms most clearly: for a century, officialdom imposed the bland ‘North Unst’ on this rock, but in 1964 gave in to the Shetlandic name which – derived from the Norse for large, steep island – speaks more eloquently of geography, history and Shetland’s singularity.
Despite the shelter of the skerries, I proceeded south from Otsta with caution: as the sea spills round Britain’s apex, strong tides can change a boat’s course and sweep it into offshore waters. Just as the Atlantic breaks against these cliffs with unusual force, the tides round Shetland and Orkney are some of the most treacherous in the world. These forces, because they draw in floods of nutrients and prevent disturbance, are the skerries’ greatest asset: they permit whales to feed and seabirds to breed.
On this still day, at the height of spring, this fecundity was spectacular. It felt like a stronghold: a vision, perhaps, of how all these shores might have been before human action ravaged them. By the time I left the firth, I was no longer alone but surrounded by life, and the new entourage that whirled around me provided the sense of occasion I’d thought impossible. A moment that could have been anticlimactic became entirely magical. A long string of gannets, slowly thickening, had begun to issue from the southernmost skerry of Muckle Flugga. Within minutes, hundreds of these huge birds – with wingspans of almost two metres – formed like a cyclone overhead. They circled clockwise, from ten to a hundred feet high, tracing a circuit perhaps a quarter-mile wide, each individual moving quickly from a speck in the distance to loom overhead (figure 2.2). Moments later, dozens of great skuas (known to Shetlanders as bonxies) joined the fray, pestering the gannets (solans) and drawing the only squawks from this otherwise voiceless flock. Black guillemots (tysties) and puffins (nories)