Sixty Degrees North (2 page)

SHETLAND

between the hill and the sea

Driving through the hamlets of Bigton and Ireland at the south end of the Shetland Mainland, the sun was icy bright and the sky a polished blue, barely troubled by clouds. Half a mile away the Atlantic lay like a desert, and beyond, the horizon, a soft, blunt edge interrupting a view that might otherwise stretch all the way around the world. On days like this it is hard to think of leaving. Days like this extinguish all other days.

The narrow road I was on stooped towards the coast, then faded to an unsurfaced track. A mile or so beyond the last house I stopped, parked the car and got out. The air was still and quiet, and warm enough to leave my jacket behind. It felt good to be there, to inhabit the day. Somewhere along this stretch of coast, the sixtieth parallel tied the ocean to the island, passing unmarked between land and water. A few miles or so to the east, it would meet the sea again, connecting Shetland to Norway. As I reached the cliff top, I pulled the map from my bag and unfolded it, exploring the space between where I was and where I wanted to be. The lines on the map were solid and stark, dividing the blue water from the white land. Everything on the page was certain of itself, but the world in front of me was nothing like that. It took a moment to pull these two images together, to merge them, and imagine how they might be reconciled.

I was standing at the top of a steep-sided cove, a
geo
, perhaps thirty metres above the water. From there the land
fell sharply towards a bouldered beach, and then the sea, where a thick mat of kelp was tousled by the ebbing tide. Half a dozen seals, alert to my silhouette, abandoned their positions on the rocks and heaved themselves back into the waves. Once safe, they turned to look more carefully at this figure above them, unable to restrain their curiosity. Just offshore, three skerries lay littered with cormorants, black wings outstretched, as the sea around them shivered and shook in the sunlight. Far beyond, to the northwest, the island of Foula lay like a great wave on the horizon. If my map-reading skills were to be trusted, these skerries were the Billia Cletts, which would place me just a few hundred metres south of where I wanted to be. As I walked carefully along the cliff edge the seals were still visible below, their thick bodies dark in the clear water. I stepped slowly, on grey rocks glorious with colour; each stone was splashed yellow-orange by lichen, every crack and crevice was speckled with sea pinks.

The cliffs along this part of the coast are heavily pitted with caves, hollows and geos. In winter, this side of Shetland meets the full weight of the Atlantic and the southwesterly gales that thunder their way across the ocean. Waves that began life thousands of miles away find their way to these shores, growing larger and more powerful as they go. Water carves itself into the land, and throws giant boulders up the cliffs like marbles. Pondering the many battered coastlines of the world, in her book
The Sea around Us
, Rachel Carson concluded: ‘it seems unlikely that any coast is visited more wrathfully by the sea's waves than the Shetlands and the Orkneys'. Summer visitors may imagine these islands to be only a timid north, a place protected from the climatic severities of other northern lands. But bring that visitor back in the middle of a winter storm and they would feel differently. This is one of the windiest places in Europe, and recounting stories of storms past is a favourite occupation for islanders.
There is, for instance, the ‘Hogmanay Hurricane' of New Year's Eve, 1991, in which gusts of over 173 miles per hour were recorded before the anemometer was torn from the ground. Then there is the month of January 1993, which brought a record twenty-five days of gales, and saw the oil tanker
Braer
wrecked on the coast, just south of the parallel. Wind is the dominant and most extreme element of Shetland's climate. It can, at times, seem so utterly unremitting that the air itself becomes a physical presence, as solid as a clenched fist. And on those rare calm days its absence can be shocking and wonderful.

It is this violence, of wind and sea, combined with its glacial past, that makes Shetland's coastline what it is: a ragged, fractal form. ‘Hardly anything can be imagined,' wrote John Shirreff in 1814, ‘more irregular than the shape of this island.' According to the Ordnance Survey, the coastline of Shetland amounts to almost 1,700 miles – sixteen per cent of Scotland's total – and a glance at the map shows why. The largest of the islands, known as ‘the Mainland', is fifty miles long, north to south, and just twenty at its widest point. But nowhere is more than three miles from the sea. This southern end is a peninsula, almost thirty miles in length and rarely three wide, which extends like a finger from the fist of the central Mainland. Further north, the coast is a panoply of beaches, coves, steep sea cliffs and narrow inlets, known as
voes
. These voes, like mini-fjords, are deep valleys, flooded by the rising sea after the last ice age. They bite into the land, creating distance, and making the ocean always, everywhere, inescapable.

When Shetland emerged from beneath the ice, 12,000 years ago, it was an empty place. There was no vegetation, no birds, no mammals, no life at all. It was a blank space, waiting to be filled. And as the climate steadily improved, that process of filling began. Lichens, mosses and low shrubs were the first colonisers, followed by sea birds, exploiting
the abundant food resources of the North Atlantic. As more birds arrived, they carried with them the seeds of other plants, on their feet and in their stomachs.

The first land mammals in Shetland were people, who arrived around 6,000 years ago. The islands that met these original immigrants would have looked very different from the islands of today. Low woodland dominated – birch, juniper, alder, oak, willow – as well as tall herbs and ferns, particularly around the coast. It was a lush, green and mild place, and the lack of land prey, of deer in particular, was more than compensated for by the lack of predators and of competition. There were none of the wolves and bears the settlers had left behind in Scotland. Here they found an abundance of birds, providing meat and eggs, as well as seals, walrus, whales and fish.

This early settlement of Shetland coincided with the latter stages of a major change in lifestyle in northern Europe. Agriculture, which began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, had gradually spread west and north across the continent as the climate improved and stabilised. Land that had once been scoured and scarred by ice was being transformed by the hands of people. Forests were cut down and burned, and the space given over to domestic animals. The early Shetlanders were also early farmers, and it is hard not to be impressed by their achievements. That they managed to cross the dangerous waters between Britain and the islands in their fragile, skin-covered boats, and in sufficient numbers to build extensive communities, is astonishing enough. But that they also managed to take considerable quantities of livestock with them – pigs, sheep, goats and cattle – is doubly so. These animals, and the people that brought them, were to prove the greatest factor in altering and reshaping the landscape once the ice retreated.

Shetland was at the very far edge of the world for these settlers. Beyond the edge, in fact. It was as far north as it
was possible to go through Britain, and the people that came took huge risks. So why did they bother? What pulled them northwards? Could it be that the spirit of adventure was enough – that the cliffs of Shetland, just visible on the horizon from Orkney, taunted people until they could resist no longer? Was it simply human beings exploring the limits of what was possible?

It is tempting to suspect this might be so. But there are other alternatives. There is, in particular, the possibility that the development of agriculture itself may have pushed the settlers onwards. Changes in land use in northern Britain were placing pressure on the available space, and creating tension and conflict between neighbouring peoples. A society without walls or borders was evolving into one in which they were essential. Perhaps it was precisely this tension that drove people north to Shetland.

There was a light breeze now, spilling up and over the cliff top, and fulmars were clinging to it, riding like fairground horses up and down on the shimmering air. One bird lifted higher, close to my head, and hung for a moment against the wind. He seemed almost to float there, and as I watched him I was sure he was looking straight back. For those few seconds we eyed each other, fascinated: me by his sublime disregard for gravity, and he by my clumsy bulk and strange attachment to the earth. Fulmars must be the most inquisitive of seabirds. They seem unable to ignore cliff walkers, pestering them with nosy flybys and showing off their aerobatic skills. They are graceful, but with an air of menace too. Something about them – their blazing, black eyes perhaps, shadowed in front, with a comma flick behind, or their bulbous, petrel beaks – gives them a sinister expression. It is an appearance that is only reinforced by the sharp, clattering cackles of those birds ensconced on their nests, and their habit of throwing up a vile, oily substance on those unfortunate enough to step too close.

Further along the cliff top I reached the Burn of Burgistacks, where wheatears scattered at my approach, each clacking like pebbles in a cloth bag. As I walked they kept their distance ahead of me, hopping a little further with every few steps I took. The burn here clambers hastily towards the sea, down a rocky slope and then a brief waterfall, lined with sopping green moss. Beyond the burn were the Burgi Stacks themselves. And then, according to the map, I was almost at the parallel.

I stopped, and looked carefully at the contours of the land. It was harder than I'd expected it to be to distinguish one point from another, and to be sure exactly where I was. The map showed a cave, over which my line appeared to cross, but from where I stood the cave was entirely hidden. I walked north until I was sure I had crossed the parallel, then retraced my steps. As I peered over the edge of a steep scree slope, the map's clean lines were shattered into stones and grass and waves. The angle of the cliff and the jutting rocks prevented any kind of certainty.

I was tempted then to climb down the slope towards the water, where things might be clearer. There was, it seemed, an almost navigable route down. But it would take me alongside two fat, fluffy fulmar chicks, who would no doubt relish the opportunity to practise their vomiting skills. It was a stupid idea, and I thought better of it. I sat instead on the cool grass, the map open in front of me, tracing the lines with my fingers.

I was hot and thirsty, and annoyed at myself for not bringing a GPS to make things clearer. For a moment it all seemed arbitrary and pointless; there could be no real certainty like this. But still I wanted a fixed point, a starting block from which to begin. So I looked again at the paper, read again every word of the surrounding area: to the south, the Burgi Stacks, the cave, then the Seat of Mandrup and Sheep Pund to the north. Just east was the Green of Mandrup, the field behind me.

And then I saw it. Almost completely hidden by those words – ‘Green of Mandrup' – but just protruding from behind the letters on either side, was a solid, straight line: a fence. And as it reached the cliff, it corresponded with the parallel. I stood and faced east, following the posts that ran through the field and up the hill, and then looked back to where the fence ended in a muddle of wire and wood hanging over the cliff edge. So this was it: sixty degrees north of the equator. This was my starting line.

Geography begins at the only point of which we can be certain. It begins inside. And from there, from inside, rises a single question: where am I?

Imagine yourself stood upon a hill. Or better, imagine yourself stood on a tall hill on a small island, the horizon visible in every direction – a perfect, unbroken line. From early morning until late in the night you stand there. You watch the sun rise from one side of the island and arc its way above, moving slowly and predictably through the sky until it reaches the opposite horizon, where it gradually disappears. As the light fades, stars freckle against the mounting darkness. They too turn about you, on an axis rooted at the North Star, Polaris. This great arena of night and day seems to roll over the stationary world and surround you with its movement. And that question rises: where am I?

The universe that we can see is a place of mirrors and illusions, tricks of the eye and the mind, and it takes a great leap of scientific faith to come to terms with the facts as we now know them to be: that nothing is still; that both our universe and our planet are in ceaseless motion. To look upwards and to acknowledge this is to take a nauseating lurch of the imagination. It is to be overwhelmed not just by a feeling of insignificance, but of fear, vulnerability and exhilaration. Amid all this movement, this unfathomable
distance, it seems somehow impossible that we could be anywhere at all.

But our understanding of where we are on the Earth has not been built with this celestial motion in mind. Since people first began to use the sun and stars as navigational aids, they have done so by being ignorant of, or by ignoring such disorientating facts. That the North Star is not a stable point within the universe does not matter so long as it seems to be a stable point. That the sun does not turn around the Earth makes no difference if it continues to appear to do so, and that its appearance is predictable. For the roots of that question – where am I? – are not so much philosophical, nor exactly scientific; they are practical. Where we are only truly makes sense in so far as it relates to where we have been and where we want to be. In order to move in a purposeful way, to avoid wasting our time and endangering our lives, we must build an image of our location, and where we stand in our surroundings. We must make maps.