to abandon a place with so many surfaces to scratch, and it was chastening to think I’d been tempted to kayak straight past. As a parting gift, Jim gave me an oyster shell. This was one of the many extravagantly ancient relics unearthed by the Knap of Howar’s rabbits. Or else, perhaps, the oyster was alive and well until last year, when a black-backed gull had torn it from the seabed.
Orkney is often celebrated for the balance its people have sustained between the industries of land and sea. In comparison with Shetland, the more fertile earth shifts, slightly, the balance of subsistence onto the land and away from the ocean. To the islands’ great bard, George Mackay Brown, Orcadians are ‘fishermen with ploughs’ although others suggest they’re better described as crofters with lines and nets. The most celebrated Orkney historian, Willie Thomson, addressed the same theme with reference to the Orkneyinga Saga. He introduced Orcadian trade by evoking an ally of Earl Rognvald – Sweyn Asleifson – who is sometimes labelled ‘the ultimate Viking’.3 Like centuries of later Orkney folk, Thomson insists, Sweyn whiled away the year on his home island attending to agriculture; he only set out on ocean voyages in the interstices of the farming calendar. As I paddled from Papay to Westray, a tiny fishing boat motored back to Pierowall over flat blue sea; soon I saw a Westray woman herding cattle from a sea cliff to a gentle field a hundred yards inland. A huge bull bellowed its resistance. Never on this island was I out of earshot of either cattle or the chug of inshore vessels. Never did I find a coastal spot to sleep where I was certain cattle wouldn’t appear around me.
Yet as I kayaked I became increasingly uncomfortable with the tradition of emphasising the contrasts and complements of land and sea. These coasts were thickly marked with remnants of industries at the margins. For centuries, every job at sea was matched by a dozen people working not the land, but the shore. If boats were constant protagonists in Shetland story and history, then the intertidal zone plays that role in Orkney: it runs through island literature in ways that are entirely unique. Memoir after memoir of Orkney life makes the shore a major character when boats are only incidental presences. A striking example was published by the poet Robert Rendall in 1963. This memoir, Orkney Shore, sold well on the islands, yet is almost unreadable today because of the knowledge it demands of Latin and dialect names for coastal species. Rendall compares his memoir to old-fashioned sugar candy held together by a central piece of string; his life, he says, is the uninteresting string, his depictions of the Orkney shore the delicious candy. A far more palatable, if emotionally challenging, memoir of coastal life, Amy Liptrot’s account of recovery from addiction in The Outrun, brings the tradition of identifying Orkney with its shoreline up to date.
It’s tempting to trace the origins of this theme back centuries. Whereas in most of Britain land ownership ended at the high-water mark, a different custom prevailed in Orkney: Udal Law, imported from Norway in the ninth century, extended kindred land rights to the lowest tidelines. Where in Scotland the intertidal zone was sea, in Orkney it was land. According to Ruth Little, director of a 2013 arts project called Sea Change, ‘Orcadians are thresholders’ whose access to the margins has defined their identities.4 Even today, the conventions of Udal Law are sometimes successfully evoked against commercial threats to coastlines.
Many shoreline activities that families undertook related to fishing. Limpets were knocked off rocks for bait, nets were mended and lines prepared. Island women carried home the catch in heather creels before cleaning, splitting and drying fish. In a community where men were often offshore, Westray women performed many tasks that were elsewhere gendered male. 1920s photographs show women waist-deep in water hauling boats up Orkney beaches. They cut and carried peats, brought in hay and collected seabird eggs. Groups of neighbours in this deeply social community would go down to the shore and collect seaweed, whelks and spoots (razor clams) or lay nets across the fields to dry.5
Many coastal tasks were distinct from both fishing and farming. My hope as I kayaked Westray’s coasts was that I might teach myself to see the shores as resources. That leap of imagination into the perspectives of Orkney’s past involved putting aside modern attitudes to eating puffins, bludgeoning seals, or spending the evening in a room lit and fragranced by blubber or fish-oil lamps.
As I reached Westray from Papay I passed a tiny skerry called Aikerness Holm (figure 3.2). This is nothing more than a flat pile of shattered flagstones in the ocean, yet a crudely built structure, like a misplaced garden shed, is perched upon it. I landed and looked round. Today, this would be unpleasant, cramped conditions for one; but here, in the nineteenth century, four or five men would spend their summer collecting seaweed with rakes and barrows, returning to Westray only at weekends. They’d burn heaps of seaweed, sending huge palls of blue-beige smoke floating to the island and obscuring sights and smells behind the infamous ‘kelp reek’. The result of their burning was an alkali used in distant cities to make soap and glass.
Yet this tiny skerry is more famous for another major industry of the shoreline. On this spot, countless ships were wrecked. Later, in the archive, I’d listen to recordings of Westray folk describing aspects of island life.6 The windfall of goods from Aikerness was prominent among their recollections: the most infectious guffaw to issue from an islander came from Tommy Rendall when asked the question ‘Did any pilfering go on?’ He told of errors made with things washed up from wrecks, such as the time when half the stoves of Westray were ruined because anthracite was mistaken for domestic coal. He told of customs men, whose task – to prevent the contents of wrecks from ‘disappearing’ – made them the most hated people in the islands (besides perhaps the lairds). Customs men were the butt of endless plots, tricks and jokes. Known locally as ‘gadgers’, these snooping officials are still recalled in Orkney descriptions of unruly children ‘running round the hoose like a gadger’. But Westray’s ‘bounty of the sea’ was in fact hard-earned. The people of the islands saved countless lives, rowing small boats out in all conditions to extricate crews from stranded vessels. Like much of island life, this was an improvised affair. Even in the early twentieth century the region’s only sea rescue equipment was on Papay, because of the coincidence that the City of Lincoln, a ship large enough to carry such gear, had been wrecked there.
The first sea creatures I saw as I rounded Westray’s northern headlands were seals. Whiskered snouts protruded from surf in almost every inlet. I’d soon discover Orcadian seals to be the friendliest and most playful I’d ever crossed paths with, but that’s not because their relations with humans have been peaceable. Two days later I suddenly realised how many small structures I’d been paddling past were placed with sight lines to intertidal rocks where seals lounge. They were shooting stations (figure 3.3). Seal killing was once an enticing pursuit for Orcadian crofters: a single sealskin sometimes had the monetary value of a week’s farm labour. And a seal served many other purposes, providing food, warmth, light from oil lamps and even protection for harvest machinery: anything vulnerable to rust was coated in seal fat for the winter. There is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to see use of these marine-life fats and oils as ‘traditional’ or even ‘barbaric’ rather than ‘modern’: it was oil from north-east Atlantic basking sharks that lubricated moving parts in the Apollo moon missions.
It was not so much the import of cheap oils as new passions for wild animals that put an end to the seal trade. But recordings in the archive suggest the economic benefits of the seal to have changed rather than died out. One Westray resident, Alex Costie, recalled the end of seal hunting:
All the greenies, the likes of Greenpeace, were protesting so much … that totally destroyed the markets, but I have discovered nowadays how easy it is to get money for showing a tourist a seal that I am now the most reformed seal hunter you would ever come across.
By the time I reached the end of my first day’s travel I was at the end of Westray’s western peninsula, Noup Head. I climbed the cliffs of this dramatic promontory and slept beneath an imposing Victorian lighthouse. I was back among gannets. Shortly before I came in to land, one eccentric
