Authors: Amy Liptrot
On the thirteenth day of Christmas, I am the only passenger, alongside a backlog of post bags, on the Islander plane to Fair Isle from Tingwall airport on mainland Shetland. From above, I see Shetland sheep grazing on cliffs’ edges in precarious pairs. To the west looms the chunk of the island of Foula. We fly over miles of water before Fair Isle appears on the horizon, rising spectacularly from the sea. On a map it looks a similar area to
Papay, and official statistics give areas of 7.68 km² for Fair Isle and 9.18 km² for Papay but, now I’m here, the elevation of the island – rising to Ward Hill at 217 metres and edged with sheer cliffs and high slopes of grass and rubble – makes it seem bigger.
It is an unusually mild day for the time of year and I walk to the north of the island, to the North Lighthouse, where a narrow walkway stretches out across a dizzying drop to a disused foghorn. Fair Isle has the same size population as Papay, around seventy, all living in the south of the island, mainly in white croft houses owned by the National Trust for Scotland. The houses are nestled in against the harsh climate and ever-close sea. Whereas on Papay we can see other islands surrounding us, here there is simply ocean and it feels more remote and exposed to the weather. Fair Isle is not only the UK’s most remote inhabited island (although Foula also has claim to this) but the UK’s windiest place, alongside Tiree in the Hebrides.
Fair Isle is unlike anywhere I’ve been, apart perhaps from the valley of Rackwick on Hoy, where an isolated village lies on a bay between cliff-edged hills. Everywhere you turn there are dramatic views of the coastline, sweeping curves cut off by towering cliffs. The improbable ski slope of Sheep Rock gives the island a distinctive profile, and it seems preposterous that, until 1977, sheep were kept there, winched on and off one by one, using ropes, from and to boats far below.
A bird hide has been built straight up from a cliff and I edge inside. The cliffs are busy with fulmars so in the breeding season it must be teeming. A black-backed gull is perched on the peak of an iceberg-shaped skerry, like a pirate king.
Fair Isle is famous for its bird observatory, bringing ornithologists to see its breeding seabird colonies as well as to find migrating rarities in spring and autumn. As the only piece of land in a large area of sea, on the flight path between Scandinavia, Iceland, the Faroes and the rest of Europe, birds are drawn in, more common species and prized rarities. Valleys on the island are sprung with Heligoland traps – funnels to catch and study birds.
I lose my balance climbing over a stile and plunge onto the grass. When I pull myself up, a bit shaken, and look back over the dyke, I see a car stop. The driver gets out, slings a dead sheep out of the boot then kicks it over the edge of the geo, down the cliff, into the sea below. There is a lot of edge here.
I had slept only intermittently on the overnight ferry up from Orkney the night before and the spring-like weather makes me think I could have a snooze in a sheltered hollow, wrapped in my waterproofs, but the cold from my stone pillow reminds me it is January. I had been kept awake by the swelling North Sea churning the boat and my stomach, and by the Orkneyinga Saga. I was reading of tenth-century Norse earls sailing over the same waters that were rocking me, locating myself in space and history.
Fair Isle was of vital strategic importance in the times of the sagas. A beacon was built on the isle that could be lit to warn Earl Paul in Orkney if Earl Rognvald from Shetland was approaching by ship. However, Rognvald was one step ahead and sent out a dummy ship: ‘When the beacon on Fair Isle was seen to be alight, Thorstein Rognuson had the beacon lit on North Ronaldsay, and so one after another was lit throughout
the islands. All the farmers gathered around the Earl, making up a sizeable army.’
After this false alarm, Rognvald sent a spy to Fair Isle. ‘Uni chose three young Shetlanders to come with him in a six-oared boat with provisions and fishing tackle and rowed over to Fair Isle.’ Pretending that he was a Norwegian wronged by Earl Rognvald, Uni volunteered for the job of looking after the Fair Isle beacon. When Rognvald’s real ships approached, Uni was found to have disappeared and the beacon was soaked with water so it wouldn’t light. The warning would not reach Orkney that night and no army was raised.
As the captain ding-dongs over the intercom at six a.m. to tell the passengers we are approaching Lerwick, I imagine fires being lit one by one on the hilltops, like our modern lighthouses, points of light in the dark seas.
As well as being Fair Isle’s weatherman, Dave Wheeler is the airport manager, a crofter and the registrar, keeping the official records of the island’s births, deaths and marriages. He is also a professional photographer and teaches an IT class at the school (roll: six, the same as Papay). When Dave, a Yorkshireman, arrived in the early seventies, he was able to convince the Met Office that they needed a Fair Isle recording station, plugging a gap in the weather recording network. ‘You have to find a niche,’ he explains of island life, and describes how he and his wife Jane brought over cows, a rarity on the island, and sell their milk. I
think of my own parents, coming to Orkney in the seventies, the photos of them in woolly jumpers with different hairstyles.
Although some of his weather-recording equipment has now been automated, each day Dave sends regular reports to the Met Office, starting at six a.m. and carrying on into the night. He shows me the meteorological enclosure on his croft, ‘Field’, in the shadow of Sheep Rock. Thermometers measure air, grass and underground temperature; an anemometer on a post at ten metres height, the Met standard, measures winds; a beautiful device that looks like a crystal ball records sunshine. The glass sphere is a burning lens, Dave explains, focusing the sun’s rays onto a strip of card marked off in hours, so length of burn – sunshine – can be measured. The card is changed daily after sunset.
I look through a collection of shots taken by Dave’s fixed webcam over just a few months with the same field of vision and shutter speed. It takes a picture every hour and the huge changes in weather and light, in seasons and over days, are shown in the changes in the pictures. I see the colours transform from green grass and blue skies to washed-out fields at the end of winter. In the mornings, sunlit from behind, Sheep Rock appears in shadow but in the evening the details of the cliff are sharply revealed. A sunset casts everything – sky, cliffs, hillside – in pink. There are grey skies and whiteouts. Sometimes Sheep Rock is obscured by fog and at others the lens of the camera is splashed with rain. On very bright days, the sun appears as a black dot, the camera unable to process its light.
* * *
The wind means I will not get off the island the next day as I planned. As others predicted, the planes are cancelled. I start to think about the difference between choosing to come to an island and being stuck there, stranded. As a teenager I’d shouted, ‘I didn’t ask to be born here,’ and hated having to get lifts from my parents to go anywhere, weather howling every time I stepped outside the door.
I spend an extra night in the old lighthouse keeper’s accommodation at the South Lighthouse, built in 1890 and automated in 1998. The foghorn at the front, which could be heard forty kilometres away, was turned off in 2005. The lawns around the lighthouse look as if they are maintained by a groundskeeper but in fact they are kept short by the whipping wind and sea salt.
I walk the coastline listening to BBC foreign correspondents, feeling like a dot in the ocean. I decide I want to walk to the top of Malcolm’s Head, which some say was the site of the saga’s beacons – a foolhardy plan in this gale. I ascend the hill in a crouched position, probably watched by amused islanders in the houses below. I lie forward into the wind, like a mattress of air: it takes my breath and exhausts me – a full-body experience. It’s loud enough to hide in. Chunks of sea foam are being blown over the cliff into my face. I think it’s calmed, then a powerful gust blows up again.
As well as birders, visitors to the lighthouse include ‘island-baggers’, who want to visit as many Scottish islands as possible. The 1861 census defined an island as ‘any piece of solid land surrounded by water which affords sufficient vegetation to
support one or two sheep, or is inhabited by man’. Haswell-Smith’s guide snootily denies island status to Skye, joined by a bridge, and Orkney’s Burray and South Ronaldsay, joined to the Mainland in the Second World War by the Churchill Barriers, built to stop German U-boats. There are also ‘lighthouse-baggers’, and ‘Marilyn-baggers’, who have perhaps finished the challenge of climbing all the Munros, hills in Scotland of more than 3,000 feet (915 metres) and are moving on to the Marilyns, more than 490 feet (150 metres), of which Fair Isle’s Ward Hill is one.
Another reason that people come to Fair Isle is to trace family history. There are thousands of descendants of Fair Isle people, with surnames like Stout and Irvine, all over Canada and the USA. When I mention my trip, several Orcadian friends tell me their great-grandparents originally came from the isle. My friend Rognvald Leslie shows me a photograph of his great-grandfather, George Leslie, striking both for his dapper handsomeness and his slightly exotic features, which almost look Mongolian, Inuit or Sami. This may be coincidental but Fair Islers may like to feel kinship with edge-landers, tough people from the far north. Rognvald says that George lived at a croft called Pund, which Dave tells me is one of the only two derelict houses on the island – when most places are abandoned the stones are quickly claimed for another building – and points me in its direction. In the mist, I pick around the broken-down remains of the house, now used for storing animal feed, and outbuildings. I discover that Pund is where the Duchess of Bedford stayed when she came on bird-watching trips in the early twentieth century and am excited to tell Rognvald of his aristocratic links.
I am a rare January visitor so people on the island know I am there before I meet them. The woman in the shop knows where I’m staying. But what am I doing here on Fair Isle in January, a single woman with no easy explanation? I’m not a birder or someone tracing my family history. I’m not sure. It’s just that I’ve been scrolling over Google Maps and reading Wikis for ages and now I’m here. My leisure time is no longer filled with drinking and nights out, and I don’t have children or many responsibilities, so this is what I’m doing instead, visiting increasingly remote northern places, following the map to the edge. This is the story of what happens after you stop drinking. This is the freedom of sobriety.
I didn’t know what would happen when I got sober, when I launched myself into the unknown future. I didn’t know I would return to Orkney. I didn’t know my strongest desire would be to hear the rasping call of the corncrake. I didn’t know I’d start swimming in the sea and taking my writing more seriously. I didn’t know I’d find myself alone climbing a steep hill on the country’s most remote island during a gale in early January, buffeted by spindrift. But I had to give myself the chance to find out.
There are disputes over the origin of the name ‘Fair Isle’. It could be from the same root as ‘fairway’ or ‘thoroughfare’, a place to navigate by, halfway between Orkney and Shetland. I find it weirdly prescient that Fair Isle is located such that the
nearest places – North Ronaldsay in Orkney and Sumburgh Head in Shetland – are both just on the horizon, around twenty-six miles away. It is almost completely isolated, but not quite. North Ronaldsay lighthouse is the tallest land lighthouse in Britain so its light can be seen from Fair Isle. Another idea is that it is simply called ‘Fair’ because it’s bonny.
A notorious site of numerous shipwrecks, Fair Isle has had different methods for warning of its rocky dangers. As well as the two lighthouses and foghorns, there is a rocket station, built in 1885 and used only for a year, as an alternative to the foghorn, to warn passing ships about the presence of the isle. During thick fog or snow it fired rockets at ten-minute intervals, exploding 800 feet above sea level. Next to the site of the Viking beacons, at the top of Malcolm’s Head, is a nineteenth-century watchtower, erected during the Napoleonic Wars to look out for enemy ships. On Ward Hill are the remains of a Second World War radar station and coastguards’ huts used to scan the ocean by eye for seafarers in distress.
Fair Isle is no longer important for military defence but its location, as an outlier miles from anywhere, is important strategically for meteorological and ornithological records.
On my last night on Fair Isle, about an hour after I fall asleep, an asteroid passes relatively close to earth. Asteroid 99942 Apophis once caused fears when it was calculated to have a 2.9 per cent chance of hitting the earth in 2029 but, with each year, astronomers refine their model of its trajectory and tonight it passes more than eight million miles away. There are ten asteroids out there with a higher risk rating than Apophis,
monitored from an office in California using information from powerful telescopes.
From my bedroom window in the lighthouse, in the haar, four beams pass every thirty seconds as the light rotates, its characteristic pattern. (Out to sea these beams are seen as flashes and I recognise them a couple of nights later, out on deck around nine o’clock on the ferry returning to Orkney.) Back inside the lighthouse, I fall asleep under the beams and dream of warning systems: beacons, rockets, lighthouses, satellites and telescopes. I dream of the dangers and curiosities we try to predict, measure and bag, coming towards us on this small isle, over the sea, through the sky and across outer space.
25
BONFIRE
ON THE WALL OF THE
treatment centre, among the peers’ work from the art-therapy classes – rainbows, inspirational slogans – there was a felt-tip drawing of a dog with its tail on fire. I used to look at it during the interminable group-therapy sessions. It spoke to me somehow.
In my last week on the programme, a new lad joined. It was, as is often the case, his second time through and I found out, to my joy, that he was the artist. Pleased that someone liked his work, he was happy to give me the drawing as a leaving gift and I have it with me now, a dog with its tail on fire, hanging on the wall of Rose Cottage, as a reminder of those twelve weeks and that this was my last chance: I don’t want to go through the system again and be trapped in the cycle. It’s also a reminder that if I smell something burning it’s probably myself.