Not strictly for the birds
David Crane
SEA ROOM: LIFE ON ONE MAN'S ISLAND by Adam Nicolson HarperCollins,114.99, pp. 385, ISBN 00025 71641 Ihave never been to the Shiants, but for a fair bit of this last summer I have sat on the mainland coast of Wester Ross and stared out across the water at them. On a clear day when the air has been washed by rain you can make out their distinctive rock forms with a pair of decent binoculars, but it is on the rare hot day, when the light up there produces strange optical illusions, and they seem to be suspended in mid-air — with an identical set of isles floating again above them — that the great basalt rocks in the middle of the Minch take on the air of magic that is the theme of Sea Room.
At a rough estimate the Shiants are the home to 15,000 or so guillemots, 10,000 razorbills, 5,000 fulmars, a couple of thousand kittiwakes, a variety of gulls, 1,500 shags, 26 great skuas, 240,000 puffins, a few well fed sheep, 3,000 rats, the odd itinerant basking shark and Adam Nicolson. On his 21st birthday he was given the islands by his father, and before he passes them on in turn to his son, Tom, this is Adam's account of his 20-year stewardship — an account that is part history, part memoir, part exploration, part apologia, but above all the story of one man's infatuation with a cluster of rocks and a rat-infested croft that on the open market could probably be traded in for a two-bedroom house in Fulham.
For most of this 20-year ownership Nicolson was content to take his inheritance as he found it, but this book represents a determination to get beneath its surface to the islands' lost history. At the height of their prosperity it is unlikely that the Shiants could ever boast more than 40 or so inhabitants, but as Nicolson points out, that adds up to a fair number over the centuries and however fugitive their lives or elusive their relics, their histories — pagan, hermit, shepherd are as much a part of the place as the visiting geese or columnar cliffs or the enveloping threat of the sea.
There is more than a touch of Leigh Fermor about Nicolson's narrative, with the same feel for the ways in which man modifies even the harshest landscape, the same ear for oral tradition, the same love of language and sounds, the same love of lists, and the same engaging topographical or historical pedantry. If there is a difference it is that Leigh Fermor is more astringent in his scholarship; but if Nicolson is hell-bent on giving the most romantic interpretation to everything to do with his islands, tracing a golden tore to its most exotic source, a torridon sandstone pillow to the holiest reaches of the Celtic Christian world, a pile of rocks (whatever Mary MacLeod, the visiting archaeologist from Stornoway, might tell him to the contrary) to some improbable Viking origin, then that only adds to the charm of a generous, exuberant and vividly written narrative.
There is always a danger with this kind of writing, a danger of slipping into a merely egotistical self-indulgence, but, as Goethe says, you can only judge an egotist by the cut of his ego and Nicolson is a wonderful guide to his islands. There is scarcely a page where he isn't there in the story, arguing with experts or speculating on some aspect or other of Shiant mythology, but it is as hard to object to his presence in the narrative as it is to the ownership of the Shiants by a man prepared to give his email address and the key to his island house to anyone prepared to brave the rats. Not a book to give to 20-year-olds — it rather raises the stakes for 21st birthday presents — but otherwise, history, travelwriting and memoir of the best sort.
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