reached the archive I’d come to terms with the idea that a historian’s critical faculties needed to be used for purposes other than sifting truth from falsehood: deciphering the meaning of Westray stories was a subtler affair altogether. I’d met a dark-haired man who claimed to be descended from ‘dons’ of the Armada stranded here in the sixteenth century. I’d heard tales of Westray ‘whale shepherds’ herding pods of 300 cetaceans into local bays to take their teeth, and I’d heard the strange story of Archie Angel. This young boy had been discovered on the Westray shore after the wrecking of a Russian ship. He was named when the name plate of the ship, The Archangel, was discovered in the sea. Archie was integrated into Westray society so that generations of islanders had the surname ‘Angel’. A host of things make this story unlikely (how did the islanders read a Cyrillic name plate?), but they are all beside the point. In a place where people washed ashore have so often played roles in the community, and where many houses have timber from wrecked ships built into their structures, sea stories shape island identity: the Just So stories of Westray life. In these tales, facts that can neither be verified nor falsified, yet have a certain pedigree, are the most powerful ingredients of all. The way in which history shapes Orcadian identities through stories and everyday artefacts feels somehow more immediate and pervasive than in anywhere else I’ve travelled.
Every month of my journey introduced new aspects of the Atlantic. The most immediate difference between kayaking Shetland and Orkney was the sea crossings. The main island chain of Shetland is packed tightly together. Although deep and treacherous, the drowned valleys that bisect the ancient mountains are narrow. In most places, crossing as the tide turns means there’s little to worry about: each tricky stretch can be traversed in the time it takes the tide to reassert itself. Not so in Orkney. Although the islands are smaller, the distances between them are greater and the behaviour of the sea is more complex as it fills and vacates the inter-island gaps. Whether in ebb or flood, tidal flows coil back upon themselves. These eddies draw beguiling patterns on the water. Shimmering silver discs like pools of mercury pass through zones of dark ruffles. Bubbles, as if from the snout of a giant sea beast, rise where eddies meet. Veins, ridges, crests and watery fins drift slowly across the surface. The forces of swell, chop, tide and eddy sometimes work in concert, amassing as great heaps of sea. At other times they work in counterpoint, becoming complex cross-rhythms in an oceanic fugue.
Centuries of Orkney seamen have each spent years learning the major ‘tide sets’ of their area because – contrary to popular belief – tides aren’t regular or predictable. As one seasoned Orcadian, Gary Miller, puts it:
You get a tidal prediction book but that’s all it is … they could be a lot stronger, if you’ve got a higher or low air pressure it can alter the tides, or the temperature of the water or the weather or if it’s been windy … there’s that many variables.
Learning tides meant learning which movements arrive early if a headwind is blowing, and in which regions water might run against prevailing flows. Local seafarers can explain everything of the tides around them. But for a kayaker passing through, these performances are yet more Orkney mysteries: tidal events defy logic like the acts of some inscrutable and wayward will. It’s hard to believe this pulsing, breathing sea isn’t alive. It feels far more superstitious to think that the interplay of cosmic orbs is weaving localised motions that – in this very moment – force your bow to buck and twitch.
Leaving Westray to cross to the island of Rousay was my first tidal challenge. From Westray’s western cliffs I headed east between the headland at Langskail and the rocks called Skea Skerries. From here I could see the skerry of Rusk Holm, where the ‘holmie’ sheep graze seaweed, and a nineteenth-century tower was built for them to climb to safety when seas submerge their ‘pasture’. I continued until almost at the south-easterly extremity of the island, then turned my bow south into the firth and steeled myself to paddle hard for Rousay’s north-east headland. The golden sun was low, casting dazzling light across close and foamy ridges of sea, and with wind entering the firth from the east, a messy chop moved against swell that came in from the west. Small waves crossed large waves, merging and birthing pyramidal wavelets. These conditions conspired to make tidal movement impossible to read but easy to feel: the kayak’s bow and stern took on minds of their own and my energy was spent less in moving forwards than in keeping my course. But the crossing was quicker than I’d feared (just a taste of what was to come). The particular local threat was that reaching Rousay offered no respite, because this island is the fixed point in a vortex of tides. Its headlands are sticks thrust between the spokes of a turning tidal wheel. It was here, after landing for the night, that I was forced to retry the tricky headland at Rullard’s Roost.
The Rousay coast is famous among historians. Known as ‘the Egypt of the North’, its number of ruins is matched only by the volume of stories that arise from them. The sounds to Rousay’s east and south are its relic-lined Nile. The small isles in the tidal river are as historic as Elephantine or the cataracts south of Aswan. Prominent among them are Orkney’s two holy islands, Egilsay and Eynhallow. There is no landscape in Britain, besides perhaps the Wiltshire henges, which matches this few square miles for historic depth and diversity.
After a tidal battle at Rousay’s north-western corner I kayaked through freaks of deep time. Wherever the joins in the Devonian sandstone are weak, caves, arches and gloups have formed. The grey, cream and ochre bands of rock – perfectly horizontal – are deeply pitted, leaving narrow pillars of stone, striped like Neopolitan ice cream, to support the cliff face. An airy space, the galleries of a dark drowned Parthenon, stands behind. The gaps between pillars have old, dramatic names like the Kilns of Brin Novan. The largest such ‘kiln’ is thirty metres deep by fifteen wide: within it, swell churns until it bubbles as if boiling. This movement threatened to pull me in as I hung at its mouth to marvel at the fracturing, scarring and sagging that the sea inflicted. These geological creations felt like the imaginary future ruins of a civilisation lost to the rising seas of the Anthropocene.
But the most remarkable features of this landscape belong to the shorter span of time between prehistory and the Victorians. I soon had vistas across the parish of Quandale, where old abandoned townships are sandwiched between the Atlantic and the hilly moorland called the Brae of Moan. It was only here that the true tragedy of the survival of Rousay’s archaeological heritage struck me. This landscape survives in historic forms because it was once emptied by force. The region I was now kayaking was the only part of Orkney subjected to large-scale clearances in the nineteenth century. It was never transformed by subsequent development, because it was rendered barren by the design of lairds. After its emptying, this became a spacious sheep run offering a few pounds a year for little effort and less responsibility. What remains is a tapestry of overgrown dykes, runrig and small kale yards from which remnants of ruined crofts and silhouettes of prehistoric earthworks loom.
This was once an ancestral landscape and a world formed round burial mounds: it was a sacred place. In the Bronze Age, barrows were built to be visible from dwellings so that the dead continued to occupy the world of the living. Burned mounds also punctuate the hillsides. These are large piles of stones that were heated to boil water (although, since food remains are not found with them, their ultimate function remains obscure). The placement and scale of those in Quandale shows that, like the burial mounds, they were part of the social landscape, acting perhaps to display wealth or status. And the remains of millennia are intertwined. Views from the doorways of eighteenth-century farmsteads were dominated by some of the biggest burned mounds in the world. On Eynhallow, crofts were even built into the ruins of a twelfth-century chapel. This clustering of buildings – sacred, ceremonial, domestic – is not just due to centuries of similar uses of land and sea, but also to active relationships with the past among later inhabitants: folk beliefs, cosmologies and identities were shaped by life in a Norse and Neolithic landscape.8 Quandale never ceased to be sacred.
To occupants of Northern Isles farmsteads, relics and monuments belonged as much to the present as the past. Ancient things
