Mianish, I walked the mile back to the beach where the dinghy was tied up, launched it, rowed the mile across the bay to the landing place on Eilean Mhuire, hauled the dinghy up the beach there, climbed the two hundred feet up to the top of that island, walked the half mile down to its eastern tip, the promontory called Seann Chaisteal, the Old Castle, only to see the flock which had been grazing happily there for an hour since I had last disturbed them, lift with that wonder grace, a slow-motion departure, back across the tide-rippled sea to the headland where I had first encountered them.
Sometimes looking up from digging the garden, or sorting out the boat, or collecting firewood from the beach, I will see the flock of Shiant geese strung out against the sky, or wheeling in the gusts that ripple and billow off the back of Garbh Eilean. It is only a question of time before they leave, at some time in April. This is the gateway to summer and I have never witnessed it. All that I have ever noticed is a sudden absence. The paddled turf, the ubiquitous droppings, even the weather, all seem the same, but the geese have gone. It is like a death, or the descent of Proserpina into Hell, a removal of that life-presence which animates a place. The Shiants, then, are like an island from which the inhabitants have been cleared. Nothing has changed except the thing that changes everything.
Not until the nineteenth century did anyone understand this disappearance of the goose and its sudden re-emergence at the end of the year. There was a general belief that the birds hibernated somewhere or other, an idea that went back to Pliny and Aristotle before him. The barnacle goose was thought, but only by the credulous, to retreat into and later emerge from the goose barnacle, a crustacean which attaches itself like a mollusc to the rocks and has a shell which resembles the beak of goose. There is no need to be too condescending about this: still no one has any idea, for example, of what happens to the basking shark in winter. They disappear every autumn only to reappear the following spring. Whether they go out into the mid-Atlantic, or swim south to warm waters or hibernate on the sea floor, it remains invisible to us, and unknown.
There is a strange connection between the Shiants and the question of disappearing birds. According to the late-nineteenth-century Roman Catholic priest and folklorist, Father Allan McDonald of Eriskay, ‘the corncraik and stonechat are called eoin shianta on account of their disappearance in winter. The opinion is that they are dormant all winter, and that they should be so and not die makes people consider them eerie or uncanny or sianta.’
Certainly, that word runs true to the experience of a bird that departs without warning. The emptiness it leaves is haunted by the retinal image of its presence. You feel for a few days that the geese must still be there and that you are simply failing to see them. It is then that the Shiants come to feel like eerie islands.
The Gaelic word probably lies behind the Shiants. ‘Si’ in Gaelic is pronounced ‘sh’ and ‘sianta’ transliterates as ‘shanta’. The ‘i’ in the modern spelling of the word, which is a phonetic transcription of the Gaelic, is a mistake. Either ‘Siant’ or ‘Shant’, not ‘Shiant’, is the way it should be spelled and pronounced. Only those reading from maps ever say ‘Sheeant’. The Old Irish word sén, meaning ‘a blessing’ or ‘a charm’, derives eventually from the Latin signum, meaning a sign of any sort, especially the sign of the cross. From that comes the verb sénaim: ‘to bless’, ‘to make holy’. Its passive participle in Old Irish is sénta, a word which evolved in modern Irish Gaelic into séanta, meaning ‘consecrated’, ‘hallowed’ or ‘charmed’, with a haze of meanings hovering around its outer edges meaning ‘haunted’, ‘spooky’, ‘otherworldly’. This is the word which is often spelled in Scottish Gaelic sianta.
Examples of the name are scattered across Gaelic Scotland. There are sacred mountains in Jura, near Callander and in Ardnamurchan, all called Beinn Sheunta. There is a Loch Seunta, ‘Holy Loch’, in Cowal, and a cave, an Uaimh Shianta, ‘the hallowed’ or ‘the sacred’, in Applecross. There is a Shian Wood north of Oban and a stone circle at Shian Bank in Perthshire. In Skye, Martin Martin described a Loch Siant in the seventeenth century, of which the water was thought to cure diseases. There is a brackish Loch Shient in North Rona, although the derivation of that may be different, describing the sea spray with which the pool is filled. Most curiously of all, there is a record, in one of the Irish Chronicles for the second half of the fifth century, of the Isle of Man having its name changed ‘from Inis Falga to “Ellan Shiant”, that is “The Holy Isle”’.
The Shiant Islands, full of magnificence and strangeness, protected by the Stream of the Blue Men, standing out in the Minch tall, mysterious and beautiful, a challenge and an invitation to any man with a boat and a modicum of courage along hundreds of miles of coastline from Sutherland to Skye and from Ness to Barra, said, as so many of these islands are, to have been the hermitage of a Celtic saint in the Dark Ages: these are the Holy Islands of the Minch.
Most of the names of places on the Shiants are Gaelic and not particularly rich in association or significance. They describe parts of the islands in the way a Crusoe would, by looking at them, by saying what they are, rather than by associating them with anything that might have happened there in the distant past. So there is a Big Beach, a Beach with Boulders, a Washing Place, a Cormorant Head, some Rocks of the Bay, a Seal Point, the Kittiwake Rocks, the Hole of the Seals – the natural arch at the north-east corner of Garbh Eilean – and the Point of the Fank (the gathering place for sheep on Eilean Mhuire). Most of these still have the attributes by which they are named. Sheep are still gathered on Eilean Mhuire at the Bid na Faing. The seals do indeed lounge and wail on the point that is named after them. There is a kittiwake colony not far from their rocks, and there are shags (the Gaelic word sgarbh does not distinguish between a cormorant and a shag) forever standing with their arms outstretched, drying their feathers on the point named after them.
Almost certainly, most of these names are quite recent and do not embody a long tradition. They may well have been given by the shepherds who came here seasonally in the early nineteenth century, after the old Shiant population had left. The Ordnance Survey officers, when recording these names in the 1850s, used as their authority a Neil Nicolson or Nicholson (he couldn’t spell) from the village of Stemreway in Lewis. He may not have known the place very well. The surveyors could speak no Gaelic, and so in this way, here as elsewhere in the Gaelic world, much of the information that might have been gathered was lost. The Shiants must once have had a rich suite of names in which the lives of its inhabitants were folded into the landscape and recorded there, but they will never be recovered. A Harris woman, Christina Shaw, when interviewed a few years ago by the ethnographer Morag MacLeod, told her: ‘There wasn’t the length of between here and the gate that we didn’t have a name for, which is not the case nowadays. Every ben and every mound and every hill … I could name them all.’ All of that has been lost from the Shiants.
Here and there, something older can be traced. The islands are set in a Viking sea. Every prominent headland and inlet around them, every stretch of water, and village after village, township after township on Lewis, were named by the Norse. There are three identifiably Norse place names on the Shiants themselves: Stocanish on Garbh Eilean (‘the Headland near the Sea Stacks’), the mile-long line of the Galtas offshore (perhaps ‘the Sea Gables’) and Mianish on Eilean an Tighe, meaning either ‘the Narrow Headland’ (which it is) or, more intriguingly, ‘the Middle Headland’, which it also is when approaching the islands by sea from the south. A Dublin Viking, making his way back north, would see Mianish stretching out towards him in the haze, the Middle Head, around which the flood tide rips. All three of these Norse places on the Shiants are precisely those which any sailor would need to mark and remember. Other than that, apart from one glowing exception which I shall come to in later chapters, the place-names of the Shiants record not memories but forgetfulness, the washing away of human lives, the fragility and tissue-thin vulnerability of human culture to the erosion of time.
When I realised that the geese had finally gone, I went to stand on the heights of Garbh Eilean, nearly six hundred feet above
