The Frayed Atlantic Edge - David Gange

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I finally found a spot to sit and read, I was gazing out onto Havera’s satellite, West Skerry. Each spring, island sheep and cattle were swum here, across the hundred-yard sound, to protect the Havera crops. This ridge of rough pasture, completely separate from Havera’s arable land, was key to the success of the island community. But it is arable richness that was Havera’s greatest asset. The island is less than a square mile in size, yet its interior is not the rock- and wrack-strewn waste found on many islets of similar area. It’s an unlikely idyll of well-drained, fertile earth, perpetually replenished by soft limestone that intrudes in veins through the region’s granite bones. From the era of Neolithic field boundaries (still sometimes traceable), to the moment when the crofters left, this limestone made Havera a fine place to grow grain. Indeed, its name is probably derived from hafr, the Old Norse for ‘oats’.

      The island was generally presented by its last inhabitants as a plentiful and perfect home. Gideon Williamson died in 1999, seventy-six years after he left Havera; he remembered his birthplace as unique in Shetland because its fertile land was not ‘just bits a patches here an dere’ but one great expanse of rock-less, weed-less loam: ‘you could tak a ploo an ploo da whole lot up … Hit wis entirely clean.’ Shetland tradition accords to tilled Havera earth pest-repelling tendencies that verge on the magical.

      Yet the topography did have drawbacks. Wells were no substitute for streams because running water had uses beyond cleaning and quenching thirst. The most common ruins I’d passed along other Shetland coasts were small, simple watermills built where rivers met the sea. But the people of Havera had to row their grain to Scalloway (a five-mile crossing) or Weisdale (eight miles) and pay for its grinding. This added labour, cost and risk to the challenges of island life. In the 1860s, a solution was dreamed up: the only windmill ever built in this storm-ravaged archipelago. The innovator might have been Gifford Laurenson, a skilled mason who was entrusted by the Society of Antiquaries with repairing the Iron Age Broch of Mousa (then ‘mouldering into dust’). Between 1848–52, the Laurensons married into Havera families twice, and Gifford’s sister and father (also a mason) moved to the island.

      The significance of Gifford Laurenson’s link to the Broch of Mousa is that the Havera mill evokes ancient Shetland more than modern. It stands like a round Iron Age edifice in a region where circular buildings are rare. It is a landmark that, like an ancient fort, puts Havera on the map: the most instantly recognisable of the small islands and, according to one local seafarer, ‘a kinda lodestar for whaar you wir’. That incidental function is all well and good. But so many compromises were made with the mill’s design, in order that it might withstand the Shetland weather, that it was useless for grinding grain: Havera folk quickly quit and resumed their mainland journeys.

      The large, ill-fitting stones make the mill easy to climb, so I edged my way carefully up the green and golden lichen to an exceptional vantage on its walls. From here the world of which Havera was the centre could be surveyed. The rough low hills of the southern mainland, with their scattering of small white houses, occupied the eastern horizon, the shores becoming ever sandier as the hills sank and stretched south. These were the coastlines that Havera folk traversed on calm summer days. But beyond the southern extremities of the mainland, thirty miles distant, Fair Isle stood out on the horizon. From there, sweeping west, a long stretch of ocean was punctured only by the mad cliffs of Foula, frequently referred to as the wildest inhabited spot in the British Isles. These two islands signalled a remoter world to which, in certain weathers, Havera most certainly belonged.

      I wandered downhill to the village, where small buildings are packed into a narrow isthmus with surprising neatness. This order is a product of the history of habitation. Although Havera had long been lived on (this is probably its first period of abandonment in millennia), the population was increased, and several new crofts built, during a sudden enforced settlement in the eighteenth century when landlords aimed to increase rents from every part of their domain. When the island was abandoned, it wasn’t because of clearance, but was an after-effect of the overpopulation engineered by the lairds. A few Gaelic place names round the coast suggest that some incomers might have been Scots, not Shetlanders; two very different cultures forced together.

      The overwhelming impression amid the ruins was of how communal life must have been. Doors and windows of the small neat houses look onto one another, while amenities such as the single village kiln suggest prominent shared spaces (in most of Scotland at this time each croft had a kiln of its own). Inside houses, outlines of two rooms, the but and ben (living room and bedroom), are often clear, although the interiors of some have been converted into well-crafted winter sheep pens. A single habitable house stands on the inland edge of the village. It is used by those who tend the island’s sheep but its occupation seems irregular: a faded chess set and 1990s magazines accompany a toy animal that stares incongruously from a window.

      This building shows that the village is not entirely abandoned. But nor is it entirely uninhabited. As I walked around its eastern edge I realised that the honking of fulmars was not just coming from the precipice below, but also from the ruins of crofts: the birds use the village walls as crags. Despite the healthy human population shown in the 1911 census, the last residents left the island in 1923. Jessie Goodlad, born on Havera in 1903, explained why:

      Dey left becaas dey wir naeboady left ta geeng back an fore wi da boat … becaas da young menwis aa laevin … weel, dey wirna laevin exactly, dey wir aa gyaain tae da fishin … dey wir naeboady to steer dis boat, dis saily-boat, back an fore.15

      Fulmars spread across Britain’s Atlantic coasts in the early decades of the twentieth century. The first of these birds may well have begun to nest here after the Havera folk had left (there are still retired Shetland fishermen who recall the time they were told, as children, to come and see this strange bird, the maalie). There is as much social change in nature, and as little permanence, as there is among people. Few events demonstrate this more fully than the sudden and unforeseen expansion of the fulmar across the North Atlantic world; this might even be called the most dramatic conquest of Britain since 1066.

      Fulmars are the most characterful of seabirds. They seem to be constantly at play, especially in high winds, and appear to demonstrate an inexhaustible curiosity in humans, quietly approaching any boat at sea. Many photos from the kayak can be filed under ‘Photobombed by Fulmar’. These birds are often written about as though they possess an unflappable mastery of the winds, but much of their personality comes from clumsiness. As they misjudge a gust and lose their poise, a huge webbed foot is thrust into the air; after a split second of feather-ruffling slapstick they’ll be balanced on the breeze again.

      The arrival of thousands of fulmars has transformed the experience of Havera from anything its crofters would have recognised. But fulmars are not the only change to the island’s avifauna: the hilltop rigs where crops were grown have also been conquered. These thin strips of rich land were known and named in detail: responsibility for rigs called things like Da Peerie Wirlds, Da Hoolaplanks and Da Kokkiloori was circulated round crofters every season. Now, the space where kale, oats and bere (the traditional four-rowed barley of the Northern Isles) were grown is barely traceable beneath the same foliage that would be there had the island not been farmed. Ruling this feral domain is another victor in the struggles between species: the bonxie. Every rocky vantage, whether a corner of the old schoolhouse or a chunk detached from a long-flattened dyke, is now a watchtower for a bulky skua.

      This two-century legacy of change is a profound demonstration of the entanglement of human and natural worlds. The Havera way of life was transformed – ended – not only by the ill-judged whims of distant landlords but by the movement of fish offshore, while many differences between Havera today and in the past are a result of the changing social lives – the histories – of birds. At the end of my Shetland journey, I spent a night in the shadow of the Havera windmill’s twin, the fourth-century Broch of Mousa. This is a domineering monument to human belligerence, yet now its walls reverberate with the gentlest purring. Storm petrels nest in the cracks between stones, and as I settled down to sleep, hundreds of tiny stormies fluttered across my sight line. Masons making ready for war had unwittingly built the perfect hive for these sparrow-sized seafarers.

      It is tragic to see abandoned places that were once filled with people,

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