The sky was draped with the weightless trails of evening clouds. They were the colours of the prayer flags which Buddhists leave on mountain passes and their brightness had been bleached by wind and sun. Below them, in the stillness of the evening, every inch of the horizon was rimmed with distant sunlit mountains. My eye travelled them like a fell runner. Even to name the hills is a roll-call of ancestors, the Shiants’ own king list. In Sutherland, eighty miles away to the north-east, Foinaven and Ben Stack. Going south, Quinag above Assynt, Suilven and Stac Polly. Above Loch Broom, Coigach matches the ragged notches of An Teallach on its southern side. Behind Gairloch is Beinn Eighe in Torridon, south of that, Beinn Bhan behind Applecross. Each mountain in what Martin Martin called ‘the opposite Continent’, is the bass note to the human settlement at its feet. The eye swings around to Rona, Raasay and northern Skye, each wrinkle in the rock picked out by the last of the light. In the distance, with only their upper reaches appearing over the foreground, are the Cuillins and the strange flat summits of Macleod’s Tables above Dunvegan. On the clearest days, Heaval, the mountain on Barra, is visible past the headlands of Waternish and Dunvegan. Hecla and Beinn Mhor follow in South Uist; a gap and then the shark fin of Eaval, the unmistakable signpost for anyone sailing south in the Minch, the islands in the Sound of Harris; then Roineabhal, the hill above Rodel, which for years was under threat of removal by the workings of a superquarry. If the catastrophe should happen and permission were ever granted, five hundred and fifty million tons of it would be dug out over a period of sixty years and this wrinkled horizon would have changed for the first time since the Ice Age. North of it come the mountains of North Harris, the round bull-seal head of The Clisham, the hills of Pairc and Eishken, before the eye swings up to the north-west, to the low mound of Muirneag, north of Stornoway, and the long flat headlands of Lewis beside it. Only then is there a gap in the list, an opening in the ring, and there you look out to the North Atlantic. Nothing till Spitsbergen.
Compton Mackenzie said when he stood here that he felt ‘swung between heaven and earth’. No place I know feels more like the centre of the universe
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SOMETIMES, EARLY IN THE SPRING, around the middle of April, before any true signs of summer arrive, when the grass on the islands is still dull and tawny from the rigours of winter, when the sheep are poor and thin and an air of exhaustion hangs over the place, a break can come in the weather which seems like a gift from Heaven. Stillness is wrapped around the Shiants for a day or two and the sun bathes their cold, bruised limbs. Once, ten or twelve years ago, I was there on my own when one of these openings came. I watched it in the sky, arriving from the south. The clouds folded back towards me, like the ravelling up of a screen, leaving behind them a sky as pale as an eighteenth-century ceiling, in which the colour went from blue to pale blue, and at the horizon scarcely blue at all.
I could feel the islands sighing in the light, their pores expanding, the vegetable life reaching out from its winter retreat. It seemed to me then – it is the only time I have ever witnessed it – that as the days went on, opening each morning to another new brightness, I could see the Shiants beginning to move towards their summer condition, like the pelt of an animal as it regains its health, the big flanks of Garbh Eilean greening between the ribs of rock, the tight winter-bitten surface of Eilean Mhuire softening under the millions of grass tips and sorrel shoots prodding up into the light, the body of Eilean an Tighe turning towards the vivid luxuriance of its summer life.
I only had a small dinghy with me then and the calm meant I could take it around to the north side of Garbh Eilean. For weeks at a time when the weather is bad you can’t visit that northern face, because in any kind of sea it is terrifying, thrashed at by the Minch and merciless in the way it would deal with any boat. When the calm descends, that is the place, more than any other, to which I am drawn. It is where you can sense the Shiants’ power, a place of turbulence only ever encountered in tranquillity.
I rowed the boat around, slipped easily through the natural arch at the corner of Garbh Eilean, where, every time you pass, a black guillemot drops out of the cracks in the ceiling on to the sea and then panics and flusters away to the north. The boat slides out across the liquid glass of the Minch. The seals asleep on the skerries wake, stare, shuffle seawards and plunge horrified into the water. The boat rounds the corner of those rocks and then the Shiants reveal their heroic heart. A curtain of columns half a mile long, five hundred feet high and each column up to eight or nine feet wide, drops into the Minch. The black lichen of the splash zone coats them to a height of a hundred feet or more. They bend slowly as they rise from the sea, a wonderful subtle elasticity in the mass. On calm days you can take a dinghy right up to the cliff foot, the boat just nosing and brushing at the giant forms. Afloat on the ink of the green sea, it is like being in the elephant house at the zoo, intimate with hugeness, pushed up next to a herd of still, alien, unembraceable bodies.
This was how William Daniell, the early nineteenth-century topographer of the British shore, portrayed the Shiants in his pair of 1819 aquatints: a vastness of form, a solidity and scale of presence, a tranquil sea passive at their feet.
I had this picture on the wall of my room at school and it remains a consoling image for me. Daniell does not attempt any heroics, any wild dynamism in the picture. He portrays the islands as a place of quiet, with a glow in the light and the huge, brooding stability of the cliffs behind them.
It never lasts. The Atlantic drives its next weather system on towards the islands and that sullen, lit beauty is taken up and twisted into a new and familiar frenzy. The Shiants’ temper is like a child’s: unbidden, unexplained rage; sudden quiet; a new paroxysm as total as the one before. Awake at night in the house, I lie listening to the weather. I see the Shiants as if from above, laid out beneath the storm. The cloud shadows beat across them. The swells cram themselves, one after another, through the natural arch, filling it, forty feet high and thirty wide, a tube of white water a hundred yards long, squeezed in there, until they burst out on the far side, released into huge, disintegrating flowerheads of surf. The cliffs and the islands are unmoved. Besieged by the Minch, they remain there, black, impassive and irreducible.
It is tempting to see the Shiants in that way. Perhaps any island owner would like to think of his property as a hedge against erosion but it couldn’t be more wrong. I once spent a few days on the Shiants with a pair of geologists and under their steady rational analysis all idea of the island fortress was soon whittled away. It was a highly enjoyable experience. Fergus Gibb, the Reader in Igneous Petrology at Sheffield University, and his friend Mike Henderson, now Research Professor of Petrology at Manchester University, both know more about the Shiant rocks than anyone on earth. They have been studying the islands since the 1960s and in a small dinghy they guided me around the cliffs and shore, pointing out to me where the story of the Shiants was to be found.
It was a charming, affectionate and mutually impatient double act. Fergus – Mike calls him Fergie – is the more bullish and macho of the two. He plays tennis for the Yorkshire Veterans, talks with fervour about ‘stonking great sledge-hammers’, likes to give things ‘welly’, wears dark glasses and short-sleeved tartan shirts, and looks after Mike, whose balance on the rocks is uncertain. Fergus’s big seamen’s stockings are always pulled up over his trousers to his knees. He takes charge and one falls into line. Mike – knitted wool tie, glasses, green V-neck, baseball cap well down on the brow – plays the complementary role. He and his wife Joan are keen on organic food, a certain kind of witty late nineteenth-century novel and the finer of the performing arts. Mike must be the only geologist in the world who has had a ballet dedicated to him and the
