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) flew by too, but took no part in the larger choreography, plotting small straight lines across the expanding circle.
More perhaps than any other bird, gannets evoke the bleak world of seaweed, guano, gales, crags and mackerel that sweeps north and west of the British Isles. Spending summer in dense communities, they colonise the steepest and most isolated elements of the Atlantic edge, building a world that looks like an oddly geometrical metropolis. Their chicks are known as squabs or guga, and dozens of these black-faced balls of silver fluff were visible on Muckle Flugga as I passed. During July the guga turn slowly black and leap from their ledges into a journey south that begins with a swim: they jump before they can fly. The young birds then make vast foraging flights, gradually securing a place on the edge of a colony that might be hundreds of miles from their birthplace. Then, they’ll perch year after year in their tiny fiefdom, unmoved by everything the weather of Shetland, Faroe or Iceland can throw at them. I could feel no sense of identity with full-grown gannets, whose command of air and water transcends clumsy human seafaring; yet the guga’s hare-brained, ill-prepared flop into the sea made me imagine it as an emblem of this journey’s running jump into an alien ocean world. If I were ever to give my boat a name (and at least one Shetlander I met was taken aback, even offended, that I hadn’t) I thought an excellent choice would be Guga.
Despite the infrequency of their squawks, the noise the gannets made as they swirled above was extraordinary. The sound of millions of feathers scything the air was enough to drown the ocean. This was the first time I’d considered the importance of hearing to the kayaker: unable to listen for dangers over the sound of the gannets, such as breakers over barriers in the sea, I felt shorn of a tool critical to navigation. And the thousand shadows of these powerful creatures created just the slightest sense of threat. Indeed, besides a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to their sagacity and storge (the familial fondness they show towards their offspring), humans have rarely associated gannets with anything benign. Their appearances in art and literature are shaped by their most characteristic act: the fish-skewering dive from height into the depths. Wings folded back, the angelic, cruciform bird becomes a thrusting scalpel. This is, according to the leading naturalist’s guide to the species, ‘the heavyweight of the plunge-divers of the world’ (and the gannet’s evocative power is such that even this scientific monograph can’t resist noting the bird’s ‘icy blue’ stare).2 In the 1930s, an island joke held that plans were afoot for the canning of ‘fird’ (gannets tasting like a cross of fish and bird) but that no tin could hold ‘the internal violence from the northern isle’: the gannet had come to stand for the storms of its northern outposts as well as its own oceanic stink and sudden plummet.3 And the shift from soaring beauty to abrupt violence has long been a theme to build macabre visions on; as I moved beneath the avian storm cloud I couldn’t keep the most sinister of gannet poems, Robin Robertson’s ‘The Law of the Island’, from needling its way into my head. In this beautifully distilled poem, an island outlaw is lashed to a barely floating hunk of timber, with silver mackerel tied across his eyes and mouth. The islanders who have been his judge and jury push him into the tides:
They stood then,
smoking cigarettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.4
This captures something of the force with which these bright birds, wreathed in shining bubbles, pierce the gloomy depths. Yet real gannets are ocean survivors, not kamikaze warriors, so there was no need for empathy with the island outlaw, and never a Hitchcockian threat in this great wheeling.
In fact, the leisurely hour I spent in the sun at Muckle Flugga would be the last moment of safety for some time. As I began the journey south down the island of Unst I hit a wall of breakers and swell that beat against the most preposterous cliffs I’d ever looked up at. With astonishing precision, fulmars traced the profiles of complex waves that seemed entirely unpredictable to me. Crests soon hit the boat from both sides, forcing its narrow bow beneath pirling water until its buoyancy saw it surge up through the foam. The bow would then smack down – diving through air where there had just been wave – into a sucking surface of receding sea. Twice in the first half-hour an unforeseen peak forced me sideways and into the ocean and I had to flick my hips to roll back upright, wrenching the paddle round to twist my body out from underwater (I was desperately glad of the previous week, spent practising short journeys in surf off North Uist with the most foolhardy kayaker I’ve ever met, my partner, Llinos – figure 2.3). As the last of my gannet escort returned to their pungent white promontories, I felt my sense of distance from everyone and everything keenly. I wouldn’t see another human today, not even a silhouette on the cliffs that tower above. Even if someone was looking down, the roiling stretch of intervening ocean meant we might as well have been a world apart.
Passing down Unst was the hardest day’s travel I’d ever done. In the evening I pulled into the shelter of a small cove, Westing Bay, with the sensation that I’d walked repeatedly through a brine car wash. I set out my sleeping bag on an islet called Brough Holm which, like so many tiny Shetland skerries, has a ruin attesting to productive purpose long ago. Covered in golden lichen, the remnants of this böd (fishing store) stand among deep-yellow bird’s-foot trefoil which gives way suddenly to kelp and bladderwrack: a colourful world of greens, gold and brown that was made still richer by the evening light. The remnants of the Iron Age and Viking sites of Underhoull commanded the landward horizon, with a vantage along tomorrow’s path, which would take me across a major sea road of the Norse world: the sound that separates the island of Unst from its southern neighbour, Yell, was once the easiest route between Norway and conquest.
Safe from the sea, I shuddered at the thought
