The Frayed Atlantic Edge. David Gange

water I headed for the mouth of St Magnus Bay, but before I could round the lower lip a large island blocked my route. For any sea kayaker, Papa Stour is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Shetland: a mile-wide rock with a twenty-two-mile coastline, pocked with some of the deepest and most complex caves and arches in Europe. It is stranded in the ocean amid speeding tides, and I decided to break the journey through them with a night high on the island’s cliffs. I watched a trawler pass the remote Ve Skerries (another ancient knuckle of bedrock) as a group of Arctic skuas clucked and quarrelled like the drunk family at a seaside caravan park.

      Papa Stour also appealed to Shetland’s first geologists. In 1819, Samuel Hibbert described his arrival across transparent water, which made the boat appear ‘suspended in mid-air over meadows of yellow, green, or red tangle, glistening with the white shells that clung to their fibres’. He observed ‘red barren stacks of porphyry’ that shot up from the water, ‘scooped by the attrition of the sea into a hundred shapes’. Hibbert described many customs, including the Papa residents’ tradition of trapping seals in the famous caves to club them until ‘the walls of these gloomy recesses are stained with their blood’; but he gives a more picturesque vision of his own journey underground:

      The boat … entered a vault involved in gloom, when, turning an angle, the water began to glitter as if it contained in it different gems, and suddenly a burst of day-light broke in upon us, through an irregular opening at the top of the cave. This perforation, not more than twenty yards in its greatest dimensions, served to light up the entrance to a dark and vaulted den, through which the ripples of the swelling tide were, in their passage, converted by Echo, into low and distant murmurs.¹³

      Hibbert was a polymath prone to taking long excursions in corduroy breeches and leather gaiters, accompanied by his dog (delightfully named Silly). It was one of these excursions that took him to Shetland in 1817, but his relationship with the islands was transformed when he happened across commercial quantities of chromite on Unst. In 1818 he began a geological survey covering all the archipelago. In the evening or during storms, he would appear at the doors of crofters, seeking bed or food. Then, according to his daughter-in-law, he would ‘retire to rest lying down in his clothes, dry or wet, on a bed of heather or straw, but not always sleeping, for swarms of fleas might lay an interdict on sleep’. On Papa Stour his hosts treated him to tusk fish and ‘cropping moggies’ (spiced cod liver mixed with flour and boiled in the fish’s stomach). Such dainties, he writes, should make Shetland a place of pilgrimages for discerning gourmands. He adds one caveat: for variety the poor islanders sometimes resort to coarse foodstuffs like lobster.

      In the morning, I explored the caves, though I couldn’t pass far into their depths, lacking the conditions that Hibbert recommends ‘when the ocean shows no sterner wrinkles than are to be found on the surface of some sheltered lake’. I then swung round the headland beneath St Magnus Bay. Passing under yet more rugged cliffs, I called in on the memory of Vagaland at Westerwick, before embarking on the final stages of my Shetland voyage.

      Once I was beyond the geological spectacles of the north, I made my way towards a world of small, fertile islands that were long smattered with settlements but are now home only to sheep. The day I set out through these islands was my first experience of the infamous Shetland haa and so the first time I really had to navigate. After ten minutes on the water, I tore my new compass from its plastic packaging and checked I could read it as I rocked. The conditions were haunting. Sometimes the haa sat flat against the gentle, three-feet swell. At others, it hung just inches from the water and tendrils of grey-white cloud seemed to stroke the surface of the waves. I had intended to spend the night on the island of Havera. But this, I’d since heard, was a place without streams: its community had been sustained by two wells that, a century later, I couldn’t afford to rely on. So I aimed first to find my way between the Peerie Isles (peerie being Shetland dialect for small) to the outside tap at the local Outdoor Centre.

      Mist is an excellent ally in wildlife watching. Today, not much after 4 a.m., an otter stood and watched as I drifted quietly by, while several red-throated divers, known here as rain geese, left it late to sidle off. Conditions, landscape, wildlife and atmosphere had all changed dramatically since St Magnus Bay. After landing and stocking up on water I set off for Havera, a place I’d long been intrigued to see. Slowly, the mist rose, wisps clinging to the moors east of the island, so that Havera gradually brightened from the west. Soon, it was stranded in a wedge of weak light beneath dark and silent skies. Clouds still licked the feet of the rough pewter cliffs long after their brows were clear. As I entered the mile of open water between mainland and the island, the swell was slow and gentle. On this day more than any other, the strange sensation of movement in multiple dimensions was something my body would retain: when I slept, many hours later, the cliffs seemed to undulate beneath me.

      Havera is surrounded by richness. Nories and tysties surfaced laden with sand eels; forests of green-brown kelp seemed to grasp towards the surface. I’d planned this day and the next to give me time on the island. Here, if anywhere, I could begin to comprehend the lost communities of Shetland and the ruins that line the shores. The Havera folk left behind an archive, including recordings describing life on the island. A collaborative project of photography, research and writing used these to build a beautiful book, Havera: The Story of an Island (2013). I’d saved this to read in situ, where I could follow up each reference to a hill, promontory (taing) or rocky inlet (geo) by exploring it myself. Later, I’d spend a day on the Shetland mainland listening to recordings of the people of Havera and contextualising the extracts in the book. This was my best chance so far to explore the ‘archive of the feet’.

      Travelling south, I reached the island at the deep clefts of Stourli Geo and Brei Geo on its north side, and used a dialect poem, Christina de Luca’s ‘Mappin Havera’, to guide me towards a landing. This poem begins with a warning:

      Havera’s aa namit fae da sea.

      We could box da compass

      o wir isle; hits names markin

      ivery sklent da sea is med,

      da taings an stacks an gyos.

      If on your wye ta Havera

      an mist rowled in,

      ivery steekit bicht spelt danger;

      you had ta ken dem, ivery een.¹⁴

      The poem then provides the necessary ‘kenning’, tracing the aids and obstacles encountered by fishermen at the island’s edge, until spying safety at ‘Nort Ham,/wir peerie haven/Mak for dere if you can’.

      Having followed these directions, I pulled into Nort Ham at the island’s south-east corner (figure 2.6) and was met with an onshore sea of wildflowers and grasses. I pulled my boat up among the buttercups, where I found the egg of a wheatear (sten-shakker), plundered by a neater and more precise predator than the bonxies who might ordinarily be culprits. But there were also sten-shakker fledglings, less cautious and more curious than their chattering parents. Without this pretty sheltered inlet at Nort Ham, Havera might never have been inhabited. Over centuries, the people and goods that entered or left the island came through this tiny gap: the community’s single link to the world beyond.

      I packed myself a bag of food and warm clothes, since new weather seemed to blow in by the hour. Havera has several landmarks I wanted to investigate. The most substantial is the abandoned village packed tightly into the corner known as Da Yard, which was the last place in Shetland’s small isles to sustain a population. In 1911 it boasted twenty-nine occupants from five families. Inland, there are two outlying buildings. One is an old schoolhouse, the other the imposing trunk of a huge ruined windmill: a meed (sea mark) visible from many miles away. I decided to take my bearings according to the landscape before investigating the ruins. This proved trickier than expected since most headlands were colonies of terns: to disturb them is not just harmful to a threatened species, but also draws a volley of intense and committed dive-bombing far more likely to cause injury than the infamous attacks of great skuas (a bonxie attack is never conducted in