Sixty Degrees North (3 page)

I stared out at the calm ocean, at the tide lines laced like skeins of white hair. I looked towards the horizon – blue fastened to blue – and beyond, towards unseen places: to Greenland, to North America, to Russia, Finland, Scandinavia and back here again across the North Sea. I looked out for several minutes, then felt ready to go. I turned and walked up the hill, alongside the fence. From my starting line at the cliff I made my way back along the parallel, glad to be moving again.

Soon, the lavish green that had fringed the shore gave way to low heather and dark, peaty ground. The land flattened into a plateau of purple and olive, trenched and terraced where the turf had been cut. White tufts of bog cotton lay strewn about the hill. Shallow pools of black water crouched below the banks of peat and in the narrow channels that lolled between. I hopped from island to island of solid ground, trying to keep my feet dry, as a skylark
hung frantically above, held aloft by the lightness of his song.

After only ten minutes or so I was walking downhill again, into the lush valley that folds around the loch of Vatsetter and the Burn of Maywick, flanked by bright yellow irises. The thick heather faded back into a lighter, leaner green, and on the opposite slope was a field, striped by cut silage. A gust of golden plovers sprang suddenly from the ground ahead, and curled its way over the valley. Two lapwings crossed their path above the loch, guttering towards the sea with a clumsy kind of grace. I watched the birds until they tumbled out of view, and then continued to the burn below.

The steep descent into the valley meant an equally steep climb out again, on a gravel track that, according to the map, crossed back and forth over the parallel several times before waning into nothing. I carried on, and was soon back amid the peat. The hill rose sharply to 200 metres, and I was hot from the walking, but it was worth it. As I reached the higher ground, the air opened up without warning, and I could see from one side of Shetland to the other: the Atlantic behind and the North Sea in front. Above, wisps of cirrus cloud were combed across a bold sky, as wide as any sky I had ever seen before.

Human beings have always moved from here to there, from one place to another, with a combination of memory, acquired knowledge and curiosity. We have made use, most commonly, of internal maps – remembered routes from one point of significance to another: a place of food, a place of shelter, a place of danger. Elements of these maps would have been passed from generation to generation, in songs and in stories. They were embellished, updated and, if necessary, discarded. These are living maps, where space and direction are sealed off and separated from the world outside. They can be as intricate and mysterious as the songlines of the
Australian Aborigines, or as straightforward as remembering how to reach the shop from your front door.

To build a more concrete image of where we are it has been necessary to externalise our maps: to make pictures of the world. The very first visual maps were of the stars, such as those on the walls of the Lascaux caves in France, drawn more than 16,000 years ago. But looking up at the sky is easy. To draw a picture that could encompass a particular space on the Earth, or encompass the whole planet even, is a far greater challenge. The mapmaker is forced to become other than himself, to imagine the view of the birds. The mapmaker must look down from above and become godlike, re-creating his own world.

Unlike internal or ‘story' maps, early world maps were intended as scientific or philosophical exercises rather than navigational guides. Their practicality was limited by two significant factors. Firstly, the ancient Greeks who pioneered cartography had limited geographical knowledge. Centred on the Mediterranean, their maps extended eastward only as far as India, with their westward edge at the Strait of Gibraltar. Beyond these boundaries the world was more or less unknown, though speculation about the grotesque barbarians dwelling in northern Europe and Africa was widespread. The other major problem for the Greek mapmakers was their lack of a practical means of representing distance and shape accurately. What was required to do this was some kind of scale or grid, which could be applied both to the spherical surface of the Earth and, potentially, to a globe or a flat map. That grid was provided in the second century BC, when Hipparchus of Nicaea devised the system that we still use today: measuring the Earth in degrees of arc. Although similar methods had been proposed previously by the Babylonians, Hipparchus' achievement was to divide a circle into 360 degrees of arc, and so provide the foundation stone for trigonometry.

A degree was a measurement of the angle at the centre of a circle, between one radius and another, like the hands on a clock. If the time is three o'clock, the angle between the two hands is 90°: one quarter of a full circle. On the outside of the circle, the points where the two radii, or hands, touch the edge can also be said to be 90° apart. This measurement could further be applied to spheres, like the Earth, with the north-south angle denoted by one measurement – latitude – and the east-west angle by another – longitude. It was then possible, at least theoretically, to give co-ordinates for any place on the planet, and that information could further be used to represent geographical space accurately on a map. This was a revolutionary step for navigation and for cartography.

Whereas longitudinal lines, or meridians, are of equal length, running through both poles, and dividing the planet like the segments of an orange, circles of latitude are parallel lines, progressively decreasing in size, from the planet's full circumference at the equator to a single point at the Poles. They are represented as an angle up to 90° north or south of the equator. At 60° north, where I was standing, the parallel was half the length of the equator, and two thirds of the way to the Pole.

For the Greeks, the pinnacle of their cartographic tradition came in the mid-second century AD, in Roman Alexandria. It was here that Claudius Ptolemy created his
Geographia
, a work that gathered together the geographical knowledge of both the Greeks and the Romans. Ptolemy gave co-ordinates for around 8,000 places, stretching between his Prime Meridian at the Fortunate Isles (Cape Verde) in the west, China in the east, central Africa in the south and Shetland, which he called Thule, in the north. This was the known world, reaching 180 degrees in longitude and eighty in latitude, and Shetland then was at its very edge. Despite all but disappearing for more than 1,000 years, the influence of this book, eventually, was immense.

Today, we need only consult a map to learn of our location, or just press a button on our handheld GPS or phone, which can tell us our longitude and latitude in degrees, minutes and seconds of arc. But still somehow that question feels unanswered, still it gnaws at our certainty. Where am I?

This is a strange place up here, this landscape of peat and heather. Often called generically ‘the hill', it forms the core of Shetland, covering more than fifty per cent of the land. From that spot I could have walked to the north of the Mainland, forty miles away, and hardly stepped off it at all. It is a place separate from the places of people, a semi-wild moorland, divided by fence and dyke from the croft land below. It has also been, and in many parts of Shetland remains, a shared place – a common ground – with grazing and peat-cutting rights held collectively by crofters in adjacent communities.

In descriptions of the hill by travellers, certain words recur frequently: barren, desolate, featureless. The land is considered to be missing something, lacking in both aesthetic appeal and agricultural worth. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1911 proclaimed Shetland's interior to be ‘bleak and dreary, consisting of treeless and barren tracts of peat and boulders'. It is a heaving, undulating terrain, without the drama of a mountainscape or the quietude of a valley. It is a place neither tame enough nor wild enough to be considered valuable. It is, in many senses, an in-between land. On the map, there is little to see here but contour lines, and the serpentine scrawl of the burns, where black water chuckles seaward from the inertia of the bog. Looking around, the eye seeks places on which to settle, to focus, but nothing breaks the heavy swell of the land. The hill presents an expanse of sameness that draws the walker in and creates a sense of separation from the world below. There is a kind of space, a vastness, which is somehow surprising in
such a limited land. The peatscape opens out and unfolds in what Robert Macfarlane calls ‘active expansiveness'. The horizon, the cupola of the sky and the clarity of the air, all become part of the land's measure and its bulk. Together in this arena they uphold an illusion of distance, and make Shetland seem a larger place, a place in which it is possible to become lost. Here you can feel yourself entirely remote from other people, and sit alone, amid an unfamiliar quiet.

Like those who dwell in the shadow of mountains, Shetlanders live with the constant presence of the moor and the hill. It is a presence that is, I think, as central to the character of the islanders as it is to the islands. For just as we inhabit the landscape, the landscape inhabits us, in thought, in myth and in memory; and somehow the openness of the land invites us to become attached, or else attaches itself to us. Our understanding of space and our relationship to that space are affected, and so too is our understanding of time.

We are used to imagining time as a fixed dimension, through which we are moved, steadily and unfalteringly. But there are places where this image seems inadequate, where time itself seems to move at another pace altogether. There are places where we sense the moments rush by, unhindered, so close and so quick that we feel the breath of them as they pass. And then there are other places, such as here on the hill, where time seems to gather itself, to coil and unravel simultaneously. Here the past is closer. We find its memory embedded within the earth, like the eerily preserved bodies, centuries old, drawn out of peat bogs across Europe, with clothes, skin and hair intact. Or like the peat itself, a biological journal of the islands' history. Things move slowly here. Change is stubbornly, solemnly recorded. To examine the land closely, and to take into account its own life and the lives upon and within it, is to be faced with a multitude of other times and other worlds. Here on the hill, where land and sky open out, past and present do the opposite; they
wrap themselves tightly together. There is, here, a native timelessness.

It is hardly surprising therefore that the hill has played such a significant role in the mythology of these islands. In particular, it has long been, and remains, the home of Shetland's resident ‘hillfolk', the    . Nocturnal, troll-like creatures, sometimes benign and sometimes taking the role of trickster, the best known trow stories tell of musicians, bribed or lured down into the earth beneath the heather. There they must perform in a world where the human measurement of time no longer applies. The fiddle player will entertain his hosts for the evening, and be offered food and drink, even a place to sleep; but he may emerge from his night's performance to find that his children are grown, his wife remarried or long dead. One unfortunate fiddler, Sigurd o' Gord, lost an entire century beneath the hill. He returned home with a tune he had learned, ‘Da Trows' Spring', but discovered that everything had changed in his absence: his home belonged to someone else; his family were long gone.

The popularity of these tales refuses to fade. The stories are endlessly repeated, recorded and published, overshadowing virtually all other native folklore, and I'm sure there are still some Shetlanders who claim to have met one of these creatures while out wandering on the hill. The trow may appear suddenly out of the mist, or from behind a rock, or it may even emerge from the rock itself. They are integral, it seems, to the landscape in which they live, and their stubborn persistence, as a subject and as a species, must at least in part be down to the equally stubborn persistence of this, their habitat. It should also be seen, I think, as a manifestation of the ongoing ambivalence in our relationship with that habitat, an ambivalence expressed most clearly in the debates that have raged for years over the building of windfarms in the central Mainland.

The uneasiness that the peatscapes can invoke has deep cultural roots. Human society in Shetland developed together with, rather than simply alongside, the hill, and that development is reflected in the relationship between them. When people first arrived in the islands, peat had not yet begun to form over large areas. It existed in isolated, poorly-drained patches, but the blanket bog that now stretches across much of the land would simply not have been there. The arrival of humans in Shetland, though, coincided with a downturn in the climate. Temperatures dropped and rainfall increased, and in waterlogged, acidic ground, where vegetable matter cannot properly decompose, it instead begins to accumulate as peat. The process would have been a natural one, determined by both soil and climate, but sustained deforestation and agricultural development also played an important role. Further climatic deterioration speeded up the peat growth, and spread the bog across new areas. More and more, Shetlanders were forced to abandon previously useful land that had become saturated, acidic and infertile, and were squeezed into a thin, habitable wedge between the hill and the sea. By 2,000 years ago, the land would have looked much as it does today.