these islands – in his own words, ‘rowing about on lonely waters; lying brooding on uninhabited islands’ – he was actually in the company of a geologist (Thomas Robertson) and a fisherman (John Irvine of Saltness). It seems hard to imagine a group better suited to exploring Shetland than these experts in boats, rocks and words. One result of this alliance, MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘On a Raised Beach’, is perhaps the finest evocation of the entanglement of Shetland’s geology, sea and culture ever written. It becomes a kind of metamorphic metaphysical, with a famous opening – ‘All is lithogenesis’ – that rang true as I weaved my way through dramatic features formed from vertical layers of differentially eroded stone. This is a poem that demands to be read aloud, and deliberately snares the reader in thickets of dialect and science: words piled together like stones on the beach.
I dug my MacDiarmid from my dry bag and savoured his insistence that seeing is not enough when we confront Shetland rock:
from optic to haptic and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveloes
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear
An angle-titch to all you corrugations and coigns.10
When I reached Ronas Voe, one of the most dramatic sections of this coast, I took a kind of risk I never had before, sleeping at the bottom of tall red cliffs, where a tiny beach of silver-white stones seemed to stretch two yards behind the tide line: just enough space to keep me and my kayak out of ocean. From here, I looked up to Ronas Hill, the highest point in Shetland: a frozen former magma chamber from a huge Caledonian volcano.
Although the days were still fine, this was my first really wet night. Each day so far, I’d stopped kayaking a couple of hours before sleep in the hope of drying out. While at sea, I wear wetsuit boots, neoprene trousers and a thin rash vest that starts out black but after two or three days is mottled silver with salt. Each evening I’d change into warm and comfy land-wear. Sitting back in the sun, with a book by a Shetland author, I’d eat bread and cheese while watching the tides and seabirds pass. But tonight a thin drizzle set in, making the stones of my little beach shiny and slippery.
Rain makes decisions that would otherwise be of little consequence, such as when to change clothes or how to pack the sleeping bag, into significant moments when mistakes can lead to days of discomfort. I had just one set of land clothes (and nothing has ever dried in the hold of a kayak). So tonight, I rushed straight from my kayak gear into the sleeping bag and went to sleep early. Dampness increased as the rain thickened. True to form, my waterproof sleeping bag let nothing in for hours until I was woken by a thin trickle of water rolling down my neck and pooling above my collarbone. I was glad to be sheltered from the wind that had picked up, but decided that the best chance of comfort was to make a very early start.
This was the day I’d reach St Magnus Bay: a bowl in the side of Shetland, fifteen miles across, 140 metres deep and forty miles along the involuted edge I’d paddle. Many of the most dramatic remnants of Shetland’s tumultuous geological past line its circumference. I decided to take my time over the first stage of this journey, passing down the stupendous Eshaness cliffs before landing in a cove at a tiny settlement called Stenness and walking to spend the night on the precipice I’d kayaked beneath. But conditions were slowly changing. Where the sea until today had been a blue-vaulted expanse with perpetual views, the swell had risen overnight to become a series of narrow corridors whose silver walls could obscure even the tallest cliffs. I’d wondered whether I might see basking sharks round Eshaness, but today they could have passed within feet without me knowing. For most of the day, this swell was immensely peaceful, its phases gentle and unthreatening as I moved through four dimensions with every stroke. But at the bottom of the Eshaness cliffs, the swell seemed to come from all directions at once: unpredictable and disorienting. The way to deal with this in a kayak is less about the arms than the hips and thighs. At leisure, I sit straight-ish, but the means of responding to complex seas is to lean forward, lower the centre of gravity and grip the kayak tightly with the knees, creating a sense of connection with the boat. After a damp night and in cold wind, I was deeply reluctant to roll this morning and relieved once I reached the simpler water near Stenness Island. Here I stopped on the swell to take pictures back along the cliffs, as best I could, and to observe the place I found myself: the bowl of another volcano. It felt strangely appropriate that in a spot where I was separated from writhing magma only by time, I should be plunging and leaping with violent swell, head rhythmically plunging beneath where my feet had been.
I landed at Stenness in time for lunch, left my kayak beside an old haaf-fishing station, and began the walk towards the lighthouse to learn these cliffs by watching the setting sunlight shift across them. Before I’d got beyond the bay, the local crofter approached and we discussed the caves along this coast. He insisted I explore the hollow interior of the island known as Dore Holm, rather than just looking up at its huge arch, and told me about a small entrance just north of the Eshaness lighthouse that had been found only a few years ago. It leads, he said, to a huge chamber inside the cliffs. This was my first reminder that apparently timeless and knowable cliffs are mysterious and shifting. There’d soon be many more.
Next day, I continued along the sweep of St Magnus Bay, spending a night that was close to perfection on the cliff-bound island of Muckle Roe. The cove I pulled into through a small gap in the island’s towering crags was as rich in grasses, bog cotton and small flowering plants as anywhere I’d seen. Unsurprisingly, the products of the slow dissolution of contrasting rocks – a wildly varied sward of grasses and flowering plants – appear in Shetland culture almost as much as fish and boats. The star among young poets writing from Shetland today, Jen Hadfield, is particularly attentive to plants of bog and cliff such as the butterwort:
I’ve fallen
to my knees again not five
minutes from home: first,
the boss of Venusian leaves
that look more like they docked
than grew; a sappy nub;
violet bell; the minaret
of purpled bronze.11
In ‘The Ambition’ she even dreams of becoming butterwort, lugworm and trilobite, though her ultimate ambition is to be ocean, ‘trussed on the rack of the swell’:
The tide being out, I traipsed through dehydrated eelgrass and the chopped warm salad of the shallows, and then the Atlantic breached me part by part.12
I sat in this immersive scene and watched Arctic skuas (skootie alan) chase Arctic terns (tirricks) as, in displays of balletic brutality, they forced them to drop their catch or vomit recent meals. And as the air cooled, moths began to clamber up the grasses: after sleepily fumbling upwards they’d shift abruptly, as though at the flick of a switch, into a manic spiral through the evening air.
After Muckle Roe, a long voe leads far inland, ending in the town of Aith. Following the coast now meant plunging into the heart of mainland. Here, I visited Sally Huband – ecologist, nature writer and Shetland-bird surveyor – who made me soup and pizza, as well as providing valuable local knowledge for the next stages of my journey. Sally explained several of the characteristics of Shetland’s wildlife that had struck me as I travelled. She told me, for instance, that the absence of peregrine falcons is partially explained by the dominance of fulmars in their favoured nest sites: when threatened, fulmars spit a thick oil that’s enough to debilitate a peregrine chick or compromise an adult’s flight. Sally had just flown back from the outlying island of Foula where she’d been collecting great-skua pellets as a favour for a friend who needed them before going to Greenland. Her descriptions of Foula’s geological and biological distinctiveness convinced me that once I’d finished my month’s journey south I would have to make my way there: without reaching Foula I couldn’t claim to have travelled Atlantic Shetland.
Back on the water I headed for the mouth of St Magnus Bay, but before I could round the lower lip a large island blocked my route. For any sea kayaker, Papa Stour is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of