Sea Room. Adam Nicolson

       Sea Room

      AN ISLAND LIFE

      Adam Nicolson

       Copyright

      Published by William Collins

      an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2001

      Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780006532019

      Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007380718 Version: 2014-10-24

       Dedication

       For my father

       Maps

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

       Dedication

Maps

1

2

3

4

5

6

       7

       8

       9

       10

       11

       12

       13

       14

       15

       16

       Keep Reading

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       Note

       Praise

       About the Publisher

       1

      FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS I have owned some islands. They are called the Shiants: one definite, softened syllable, ‘the Shant Isles’, like a sea shanty but with the ‘y’ trimmed away. The rest of the world thinks there is nothing much to them. Even on a map of the Hebrides the tip of your little finger would blot them out, and if their five hundred and fifty acres of grass and rock were buried deep in the mainland of Scotland as some unconsidered slice of moor on which a few sheep grazed, no one would ever have noticed them. But the Shiants are not like that. They are not modest. They stand out high and undoubtable, four miles or so off the coast of Lewis, surrounded by tide-rips in the Minch, with black cliffs five hundred feet tall dropping into a cold, dark, peppermint sea, with seals lounging at their feet, the lobsters picking their way between the boulders and the kelp and thousands upon thousands of sea birds wheeling above the rocks.

      In summer, the grass on the cliff-tops is thick with flowers: bog asphodel and bog pimpernel; branched orchids, the stars of tormentil and milkwort. ‘Under such skies can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation,’ Dr Johnson wrote, but this miniature spangle of Hebridean flora, never protruding its yellows and deep purples more than an inch or two above the turf, is a great and scarcely regarded treasure. I think of it when in England I walk on expensive Persian rugs; the same points of dense, discreet colour, the same proportion of ground to decoration; a sudden flash of the Hebrides in a rich man’s rooms. It is a private signal to me, a bleeping underfoot, winking through the burr of conversation and offered drinks: Remember me.

      At times in the last two decades, these islands have been the most important thing in my life. They are a kind of heartland for me, a core place. My father bought them over sixty years ago for £1,400, he gave