Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides
Adam Nicolson
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0061238821
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1937, Adam Nicolson's father answered a newspaper ad—"Uninhabited islands for sale. Outer Hebrides, 600 acres. . . . Puffins and seals. Apply."—and thus found the Shiants. With a name meaning "holy or enchanted islands," the Shiants for millennia were a haven for those seeking solitude, but their rich, sometimes violent history of human habitation includes much more. When he was twenty-one, Nicolson inherited this almost indescribably beautiful property: a landscape, soaked in centuries-old tales of restless ghosts and Bronze Age gold, that cradles the heritage of a once-vibrant world of farmers and fishermen.
In Sea Room, Nicolson describes and relives his love affair with the three tiny islands and their strange and colorful history in passionate, keenly precise prose—sharing with us the greatest gift an island bestows on its inhabitants: a deep engagement with the natural world.
own. He nearly drowned, when a collapsible canoe did indeed collapse halfway between Eilean Mhuire and Garbh Eilean but that wasn’t the only catastrophe. His supplies had been sent up by train from Fortnum & Mason – it was a different world – in smart, waxed cardboard boxes. They were delivered to the quayside in Tarbert. From there they were loaded onto the fishing boat and on arrival at the Shiants offloaded on to the beach. My father waved goodbye to the fishermen, who said they would return
stories, and ways of looking at the world, as well as goods. He plunged on into dangerous territory. A ditty had been recorded in the early twentieth century that was still being said or muttered among the fishermen of Mallaig: Ickle Ockle, Blue Bockle Little youthful Blue God Fishes in the Sea. or Of the fishes of the sea If you’re looking for a lover If you’re looking for devotion Please choose me. Please choose me. It is a charm-cum-game-cum-riddle for Poseidon, of whom the Blue Men
towards understanding the man who lived in the Shiants a millennium ago and who made the stone. The hermit is no primitive. He may be primitivist – in his engagement with essentials, in his exposure to extreme honesty – but primitivism is one of the more sophisticated forms which civilisation can take. One needs to leave behind a great deal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking about these early churchmen. Gibbon thought monks as a whole a ‘race of filthy animals, to whom [one] is
often have crossed these waters with their implements and their stock on board. Imagine cattle in those ancient boats, how impossible that must have been! At least you can cross the Minch or the Sea of the Hebrides in a day, and you can see your destination as you begin. What amazes me more is the idea of the Vikings bringing their herds of cattle with them in open boats across the North Sea, plunging for days across that hostile grey territory, navigating by instinct as much as anything, with
pollack, the saithe steely blue, the occasional small, fat mackerel, and sometimes a little red gurnard slipping out of the mouth of the bigger fish, caught just as the prey was in its gullet. It was, in that way, an ordinary late-summer day, a taking of the fish which the Shiants have always provided. I baited some creels with the heads of some of them, a fleet of six, no more, and set them – or ‘shot’ them, as the word goes, but that is too dynamic a term for the gentle lowering of these