Michael's Reviews > Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

This was a surprising pleasure to read by the author of “Why Homer Matters”. I readily enjoyed its core as a sustained poetic reverie during his extended stays on a trio of remote islands in the Hebrides off northwest Scotland, the Shiants. These he received as an early inheritance from his father at age 18. Though only 500 acres of cliffs, meadows, and hardy vegetation devoid of trees, the islands are also a major nesting site of many seabirds, including puffins, skuas, gannets, kittiwakes, and geese. For a number of years Nicholson was content to visit alone during summers via a sailboat trip from a Harris Island port 5 miles across the treacherous tidal channel called the Minch. He retreated to a 19th-century two-room rock homestead without electricity and mediated on the vistas and on the violence of waves meeting cliffs. We experience him pursuing amateur naturalist observations in his explorations, reaping treasures and indelible visions.





For example, I love his contrasting experience of puffins and the cormorant-like shags:
Ludicrous and loveable puffins! Their sociability is as stiff and predictable as an evening in Edwardian London. Gestures of deference are required of any newcomer, and a little accepting dance of acceptability is made by those already settled with cigars around the fender. …the are more capable of looking embarrassed than any bird I have seen. So polite is this world, in fact, that most of its members seem struck dumb by their sense of propriety.

…If puffins and gannets are from different worlds, the shags are from another universe. Nothing can really prepare you for the reality of the shag experience. It is an all-power meeting with an extraordinary, ancient, corrupt, imperial, angry, dirty, green-eyed, yellow-gaped, oil-skinned, iridescent, rancid, rock-hole glory that is Phalacrocorax aristotlelis. They are scandal and poetry, chaos and individual rage, archaic, ancient beyond any sense of ancientness that other birds might convey. …There’s a fluster of rage, resentment, and clumsiness as the big, black webbed feet stomp around the sticky, white, guanoed mayhem of kelp stalks and wrack branches that is its nest, in the back of which, creeping for the shadows, you see the couple of young, half-formed embryonic creatures, shag chicks, rat-birds, serpentine, leathery, hideous.

Nicholson has a facility of slipping about the timescales as his perception of the here and now reveals how small we are in the life of this realm. For example, the oldest fossils of shags are pegged at 60 million years, which was not long after the dinosaurs met their cataclysmic extinction and ichthyosaurs still swam the seas. Eventually the strange architecture of headlands of soaring dolomite columns sets him to pursuing knowledge of the geological history of the islands and shares his delights in how the frozen conformation is rendered into dynamic flux of magma flows and foldings in the minds of geologists who visit him there. The mysteries of old foundations and walls on his tours of his land sets him to dwelling on the human communities who dwelled like him back into in the mists of historical time and the vast pre-historical periods. Nicholson give up his precious isolation to invite some archeologists to come do some digs, and their discoveries at Stone Age, Iron Age, and Medieval sites helps him with a more informed imagining of what life was like there.

The middens (i.e. garbage piles) dug up at different sites on the Shiants reveal evidence of times of famine, as indicated by concentrations of limpet shells, a meal of last resort. Some modeling of available land resources for gardening versus grazing of sheep and cattle suggests that only a handful of families could ever be sustained on the island and that overpopulation with occupation by as few as 40 humans could tip the balance toward disaster and starvation. I got the same sense of human adaptability and risks of life on the edge from Jared Diamond’s inquiries into the Viking settlement of Greenland for three centuries in his “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.”

A particularly old artefact pulled off the bottom of the sea off the Shiants is a Bronze Age necklace or armband known as a torc, which is elegant in the simplicity of twisted and fluted dual bands. He imagines it cast into the sea as a tribute to the unknown forces at the edge of the known world. Nicholson also tracks references to a visit of a prominent Roman to a resident in the Shiants Other records indicate mystics hung out there, including early Christians. The Vikings in their sojourns gifted their names to many headland and inlets. The Hebrideans harbored a large population of Catholics, much oppressed over long time periods. Nicholson finds in his house a Medieval gravestone with a carved cross within a circle being used as a hearthstone by the later house builder. But the cross was hidden on flip side, suggesting resolute defiance of persecution. Over the centuries, political rebels sometimes hid out on the Shiants, as apparently did pirates. Murderous clans vied for territory in the Hebrides, occasionally wiping out a whole family. Gaelic names of various geographical sites on the island appear to reflect historical events of tragedy and mystery later blown up in oral tradition to mythical or miraculous proportions. The name Shiants means hallowed or blessed from one angle, haunted from another. Consistent with that he finds in history excursions much evidence of priests and reclusive saints who found spiritual refuge on remote Hebridean outposts like this, as well as records of myths about magical or evil presences. Despite these extremes, the archeological evidence points to residence in the Shiants mostly by ordinary farmers for many generations into the 16th century.

By the 17th century, feudal lords and aristocratic landowners cleared off most of their peasant tenants from many properties in the Hebrides and used their estates for summer leisure activities. Island like the Shiants changed from being places that were “empty and difficult for the Hebrideans” into sites that “became beautiful and empty for outsiders.” One exception was one landowner of the Campbell clan who resided on the Shiants with his family in the 1860s, commuting as needed to Harris or the mainland by boat and receiving suitors to his fair daughters by boat. Through most the 18th and 19th centuries, the Shiants largely became a site for temporary sheep grazing and fishing stations. Nicholson kept the tradition of his father and predecessors of allowing sheep herders access to grazing on the island. In a particularly fun section, he details his participation with the shepherds in the fascinating and exhausting work of driving the sheep form many a rough spot to a beach and loading them on a barge to move them from one island to another.

One reason Nicholson’s account of this rocky place on the Atlantic appeals to me is because I feel the northeast coast of Maine where I live is like its mirror image, split from the British islands by ancient shifts of the tectonic plates. I am especially fond of hiking high cliffs facing the stormy sea, and I marvel at the endurance of fishermen and admire a man a few miles down the peninsula who tends a flock of sheep. Not so long ago, sheep were similarly transported to small uninhabited islands for grazing. We have one island offshore of my town where puffins thrive, though nothing like the hundreds of thousands that nest in the Shiants. We have a lot of eagles and ospreys, yet I had to go north into New Brunswick to experience soaring gannets and their plummeting and deep dives into the sea for mackerel. Nicholson’s account of sea eagles, collosal and majestic, nesting on the Shiants in earlier centuries and signs of their return in recent years was uplifting for me.

At times it can seem he is making mountains out of molehills, at others on the trail of wisdom expressed in the Leonard Cohen line, “We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.” In the following example I find a useful outlook, while others may see purple patch:

Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. the element which might reduce them. … has the opposite effect. The sea elevates a few acres into something that could never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant …they are not-sea within the sea, standing against the sea’s chaos and massive power, but framed by it, enlightened by it. In that way every island is an assertion in an ocean of denials, the one positive gesture against an almost overwhelming bleakness. …The state of siege and an island, in short, is life set against death, a life defined by the death that surrounds it.

This combination of lyrical immersion in an austere but rich environment, explorations of a special ecology, and speculation on human affinities for remote island life conforms a subgenre of non-fiction I admire which could be called “Biography of Place.” Among the couple of dozen books I voted for on the Listopia list for this category, are two I loved by Tim Robinson which are the most similar in scope and style to this one (“Connemara” and “The Stones of Arran”). I look forward to reading Nicholson’s recent book on sea birds, as well as his book on Homer.