A Book of Silence (27 page)

That cold Boxing Day the beach was nearly empty. A few other walkers in the distance looked like extra statues. It was huge, monotone and silent. Then my son got out his kite. He had flown a kite as a child and he had told me that he was flying one again, but I had not really paid very much attention. That day he flew a smallish double-stringed stunt kite. It seemed as though he could make it do
anything
– dance, swoop, soar, dive, drift, loop, hover. It was
flight like flight was dreamed of – both under his control and entirely free; silent in the bigger silence; like a bird but tamed to his hand; graceful but leaning on the wind. ‘My heart like a bird had escaped from the hand of the fowler.’
⁶
We flew the kite for hours in that vast silent space; it was too cold and windy to talk, and so for both awe and ease we were quiet and joyful though our hands were numbed with cold and the statues did not turn to watch us; they stood still, staring silently out across the flat grey sea.

I bought a kite myself, although I cannot fly it with the grace and skill that he does. It represented for me a child’s joyful dream of flying and I like playing with it, but it never really took over from the birds themselves and their true free flight.

Looking at birds led me into another sort of landscape traditionally associated with silence – islands. Islands feed a romantic dream; from coral atoll to storm-wracked cliff, they represent something deep in the human psyche – aloneness, adventure, silence and, perhaps more subtly, a boundary, a sense of self separate and complete.
Robinson Crusoe
and BBC Radio 4’s
Desert Islands
Discs
, which has been running since 1942, endure so well because they touch this fantasy. But islands are real too – from Out Stack in the north to the Scillies in the south, from St Kilda far out in the west to the Outer Farnes in the east, Britain, itself an island off Europe, is fringed with smaller islands, ranging from uninhabitable rocks that barely break the surface of the sea to substantial land masses, like the Isles of Wight and Man, and Ireland itself beyond that.

A great many of these islands have distinct ecological profiles of their own and, especially in summer, are homes to colonies of seabirds, who come ashore to mate and breed. Although several of these species are intensely sociable, gathering in their nesting places so densely that one would be hard put to walk between them (on St Kilda there are over 100,100 gannets alone), for obvious reasons they prefer to do this in places least inhabited by humans. Looking for seabirds, ducks, geese and waders took me to some of the most isolated places in the country.

One summer I went to Unst, the most northerly of the inhabited Shetland Isles, the most northerly inhabited place in Britain. This time I went with a friend at midsummer to see, as nearly as one can within the UK, the midnight sun. Even this far north is not far enough to have the sun never set at all – it dipped below the horizon for about twenty minutes. It never grew dark, but the light was very strange and green, and in the magically calm weather we had that week the faded glow of the night gave the still water a ghostly sheen. We rented a tiny cottage right on a pebbled beach, and in the long light evenings Simon would walk up and down the stones singing to the seals, who would pop their heads above the water to hear him and follow him, parallel to the shore about twenty yards out. One evening we watched a school of porpoises running down the bay, arching smooth black backs above the pearly surface. And indeed there were birds, thousands and thousands of birds – delightful and somehow witty puffins, huge powerful gannets diving vertically into the water, slightly sinister-looking skuas, guillemots, and what we came to call the ‘diverse divers’.

One reason I had gone was to see golden plover. There were said to be golden plover on the Durham moor but I had never been able to see them. At Hermaness, the bird sanctuary at the northern tip of Unst, they were flaunting themselves on the close-cropped sea-grass; the least attentive ornithologist in the world could not have failed to remark on and identify them. And when I got home I could suddenly see them on the moor too; knowing what I was looking for, looking at, I could see. It was a clear reward for careful searching and attentive looking.

But actually it was not, in the end, the birds that moved me most. It was the islands themselves. Immediately north of Unst, and clinging closely to it, is Muckle Flugga – a deserted rock now, but the lighthouse, fully automated in 1995, still stands as a memorial to the most northerly inhabitant in Britain. And also as a memorial to the dangerous and isolated lives of the lighthouse keepers, whose solitary lifestyle performed rather literally the metaphorical task the hermits had set themselves a millennium
earlier – to tend the light in silence and keep the world safe from lethal storms. Muckle Flugga is by no means the only island that used to be inhabited and no longer is – of the 790-odd Scottish offshore islands fewer than a hundred are populated now and that number continues to fall. Islands are full of sadness, haunted by the ruins of communities that once flourished there. Their silences are new, a consequence of modernity. The most famous abandonment was St Kilda, whose thirty-six islanders were evacuated at their own request in 1930, after two millennia of occupation. In 1697 the inhabitants had seemed ‘happier than the generality of mankind as being almost the only people in the world who feel the sweetness of true liberty’. They had a culture, an ecosystem, even a diet that was unique. Now St Kilda has a small population again, of military personnel, but the overwhelming sense there is of beauty and loss and silence, and the brutal ferocity of the wild seas.

Apart from these embattled communities many of the smaller islands have another history and one that appealed to me strongly if romantically. On island after island, the more isolated and far-flung the better – on St Kilda, on the Farnes, on the Shiants, throughout the Hebrides and the northern islands, off the coast of Ireland, around Iceland and possibly even in North America – the traces of hermits can be found. This history is confused and uncertain, but originating in Ireland in the fifth century, there was a well-developed form of Christian spirituality which valued the silent eremitical vocation extremely highly. In Britain the most famous such voluntary exile was Columba, who left Ireland in the mid sixth century and crossed the Irish Sea to become first a hermit and later a missionary and founding father based on the tiny island of Iona, which is just to the west of Mull. His community later spread out across Scotland and converted north-east England as well, but he was by no means unique: over the next several centuries hermits settled alone or in tiny communities all over western Scotland and further afield too.

I went to Islay, a beautiful complex journey itself, more for the hermits than for the birds. The ferry to Islay leaves from
Kennacraig on West Loch Tarbert, halfway down the Mull of Kintyre. It chugs its way down the long narrow sea loch, then out to sea north of Gigha. Just before it begins the complicated manoeuvres that will bring it into Port Ellen on Islay it passes a spine of rock, a pretty little island, low-lying, barely over a hundred acres, tucked into the bay where Laphroaig, the wonderful peaty malt whisky, is now made; it is called Tecsa (or Texa). It is inhabited only by wild goats and seabirds, and seems to have little to offer except a good fresh-water source and a number of dry caves. In the seventeenth century Tecsa had over a hundred people living on it (oddly enough all except seven of them were Roman Catholics). Earlier than that, there was a fourteenth-century chapel, which archaeologists claim is built on an older structure. Even earlier than that, although it is hard to tell from the physical evidence, the old chronicles and the place names enable us to be reasonably certain there were hermits here at least in the seventh and eighth centuries. There is a legend that St Kenneth, after visiting Columba on Iona, about eighty miles north over dangerous waters, stopped on Tecsa on his way back to Ireland. He had absent-mindedly left his pastoral cross on Iona and Columba had thrown it into the sea to follow him; it was cast up on the beach at Tecsa where Kenneth recovered it. Meanwhile at the other, the northern, end of Islay there are the remains of a hermitage chapel on Eilean ArdNeimh (Ardnave) and Islay itself is dotted with yet more tiny chapels and possibly hermit-inhabited caves.

It is hard to imagine their lives. At the beginning of
Sea Room
, Adam Nicolson describes the first time he sailed alone from Harris, itself an island in the Outer Hebrides, to the Shiants, his group of tiny islands in the middle of the Minch. He had a new boat, designed and built for this crossing on these waters, he had maps, a hand-held GPS, radio contact with the coastguard and good advice – and he was frightened:

Yet these monks, in far smaller boats – tradition says in coracles, stretched leather on light wooden frames, designed to be portable – without maps, without even knowing where they were going and with very little hope of ever returning home, set out to make hermitages in clochans (sometimes called ‘beehive huts’) and caves on the remotest islands. Nicholson tells us there were hermits on the Shiants. These adventures were known in Ireland as ‘green martyrdoms’ – to distinguish them from the ‘red martyrdom’ of being slain, shedding blood for the faith. To leave home and travel out beyond civilisation was a martyrdom (the word means ‘witness’), a death of the ego, a self-giving that seems absolute.

We have very little idea now what they thought they were doing, or why islands were deemed so particularly suitable. Given the mysterious links between the iconography and probably the practice of eremitical spirituality in Ireland and the Christianity of the Egyptian desert hermits, I like to imagine that they saw islands in the barren salt seas as parallel to oases and wells; fresh water in the desert.

Of course they were seeking silence, but it was from social, human sounds rather than the pure physical silence of the desert because, as I learned, British coastal islands are not silent in any literal sense of the word. Along with the other islands I was visiting I went, too, on a day trip to the Farne Isles, a small group of islands off the north-east coast, and also now a famous bird reserve. Inner Farne, beyond but within reach of the monastery at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, was where St Cuthbert had his hermitage; he is
the patron saint of Durham Cathedral and an icon of the northeast. As well as wanting to learn how to distinguish between different gulls, fulmars and kittiwakes, I wanted to feel Cuthbert’s silence on the eastern rim of his world. There is a connection between these two interests. Cuthbert, who had resigned as both bishop and abbot to return to being a hermit, issued regulations to his monks for the special protection of eider ducks, which is why these birds are still called ‘Cuddy Ducks’ (‘Cuthbert’s ducks’) in the north-east of England. However, although it was a clear calm day, I’ve seldom heard such a racket in my life. The volume of cacophonous din set up by the thronging bird life on the islands was stupefying. The terns were nesting – and were both restless and turbulent. Moreover, terns dive-bomb people who they think may be threatening their nests aggressively enough to draw blood. Gulls were shrieking and there was a constant mewling, squawking and screaming. And under and through all that there was the never-ending sound of waves breaking in different rhythms and patterns. I realised I could never find my own silence on an island.

Yet this was Cuthbert’s silent paradise. It seemed so inappropriate for a hermitage that later I rang up the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to see if anyone knew whether the terns had nested on Inner Farne in the seventh century. I could not believe that anyone could have found it a place of silent retreat and wondered if the terns had arrived later. The information officer did not know the answer, though he was very helpful. But thinking about it now, they cannot have been there in Cuthbert’s time because terns (whether miraculously silenced or failing to disturb Cuthbert’s prayer) are exactly the sort of detail that Bede would have included in his
Life of St Cuthbert
had there been any. He does mention eider duck and ravens, so it seems unlikely he could have resisted a blood-drawing tern if he could have got away with it.

We do not know very much about the spiritual theology of these early hermits. Their lives are lost in legend and story, their physical markers faded or wiped out by the wildness of the places where they dwelt. We know more about Cuthbert than about many of
them because Bede knew and loved him personally, and wrote about him at length, but what interested Bede is somewhat different from what interests me. So, for example, Bede records that Cuthbert would pray all night standing up to his neck in the frigid waters of the North Sea and, indeed, that when he emerged otters would come and warm him with their tongues and fur. This combination of the ferociously ascetic and the miraculous engages Bede, for what he is writing about is an ultimate form of something so obvious to him that he never says anything about what Cuthbert thought he was trying to achieve, nor about the content of those prayers.

It is not until rather later, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, that we begin to get accounts that attempt to explain what the island hermits were seeking, in the beguiling poetry of the Irish monks: