IT WAS TWO in the morning before I boarded the Norrøna, the ferry that ploughs the seas between Denmark, Norway and Iceland. I had been warned not to expect an easy crossing. The forecast was for dead calm, but once a year the Faroese senior high school pupils take over the ferry and travel to Denmark and back for an alcoholic blow-out on a scale that only Scandinavian teenagers seem to contemplate. By the time the ferry arrived in Shetland they had been drinking for well over twelve hours, and looked like continuing on all night. From the gangway I stumbled into a maelstrøm of drunkenness. Blonde teenage girls falling out of their dresses vomited over the deck. Young spotty guys hung in packs, smoking, and bumping into the walls. Weaving between bleary-eyed young men holding cans of lager I found the information desk and noticed that as well as information, they provided bulk-buy quantities of hangover remedies and condoms.
I found my way down five decks below to the bunks in the depths of the ship, near the keel, where rooms without locks had nine bunks each. I picked my way between piles of rucksacks and discarded underwear, and found an empty space to unroll my sleeping bag.
The next morning I stood at the rail on deck and watched the islands climb gradually over the horizon into view. After the gentle curves of Shetland they looked fearsomely steep. I wondered if I was going to have trouble finding enough flat land to camp on. My plan was to explore the islands by hitch-hiking and camping, taking opportunities to talk to the islanders and find out what they knew of their history. I wanted to see the landscape for myself, climbing its mountains and walking its beaches, but also see what I could find out about the Irish monks who were supposed to have discovered, and named, the islands fifteen centuries before. The Faroes have a strong Viking history too, and they are still inhabited by a Scandinavian people. I hoped that the strength of that culture had not washed away all traces of its earlier inhabitants.
The Norrøna drew into a large south-facing bay and then into the harbour of Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. From the deck I could see the queues of cars waiting to board and be taken onto the next port of call, Iceland. In the midst of the cars there was a double-decker bus with ‘Jesus Loves You’ written in foot-high letters along the side. As soon as we were tied up alongside and the gangway was down, I made my way towards it.
Its driver was a reformed dipsomaniac, saved by the Salvation Army, who had dedicated his life to preaching the word of God. He was a slight man, with blue eyes that did not blink and a yellow tinge of cigarette smoke in his white hair. He had been preaching in the British Isles for over twenty years, he told me, and now went by the name of Brother Clifford. He was not ordained, or a member of a monastic order, but preached the word of God in the unique manner that the Lord had communicated to him many years ago after a particularly severe relapse of his alcoholism. It was a sort of pilgrimage, he said; preaching had saved him from his addiction, and he wanted to tell the world. The Faroe Islands had been his first foreign ministry. I asked him what he would like to do next and he paused before answering, ‘Go back to my Lord. As we all will.’ One of his assistants then explained in hushed tones that he was actually on his way to preach the ‘good news’ in Iceland. He had had a warm reception in the smaller isles of Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes. Now he was going to take on something a little bigger. In reaching out on a pilgrimage across the North Atlantic, he was in a way repeating what the Irish monks had done a millennium and a half earlier. I asked him what he thought of the North as a modern place to which to take a pilgrimage, but he replied obliquely. He looked away, ran his tar-stained fingers through his hair and then turned back to me. ‘You see, I don’t think about these things,’ he sighed. ‘The Lord leads and I follow.’ His assistant ushered me off the bus. The queue of cars had begun to move forwards. ‘I’m sorry, we’re in a bit of rush, about to get on the ferry. Do you have a Bible?’
I shook my head.
‘Here, take this.’ Into my hand he pressed a small cloth-bound edition of the New Testament and Psalms. ‘I’ve highlighted a few of my favourite passages. You should never travel in a foreign land without one.’
I thanked him and stood back from the bus. The door closed with a hiss, and Brother Clifford climbed into the driver’s seat. His expression as he drove off spoke of absolute conviction, and the knowledge that there were still an awful lot of souls out there to save.
Tórshavn feels like a village that has outgrown itself. Its streets and brightly coloured houses clamber up the hillsides from the harbour, spattered like paint on a landscape that seems barely to tolerate them. Near the centre of town sheep graze by the traffic lights and pizza parlours. The mountains rise sheer out of the sea around the bay, looking as if in an afternoon they could shrug off the evidence of a thousand years of human habitation. Caught in the middle of weather systems sweeping the Gulf Stream, the islands are soaked in a caliginous fog for much of the year. Though their winters are mild, Atlantic depressions spin around them in every season. Their storms are legendary.
I walked up from the ferry terminal towards a fortress, built by the Danes to protect their interests against Basque pirates over three hundred years ago. Old brass cannons now aim at Russian trawlers and passenger ferries steaming back and forth across the bay. By the side of the fort a group of boys had found a starling nest. Shooting an air pistol and squealing with laughter they threw the fledgling at one another. It cried and tried to flap away from them, but it was not fully fledged, and soon fell silent. Once they were sure it was dead they ran off shrieking into the town.
I lay on my back in the grass overlooking the bay, and opened a translation of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis or ‘The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbott’, first written in Latin in the eighth century but describing events that took place two hundred years earlier. It is often known by scholars as simply, the Navigatio. The story is one of the most extraordinary examples both of early mediaeval literature and of the exploration of the North Atlantic. It also includes the first written descriptions of the Faroe Islands. It follows on from the Celtic tradition of the Immram, or magical journey, but it is also rich in factual and geographical detail. It seems that Brendan did sail across the North Atlantic sometime in the early sixth century AD. Some believe that he made it to North America, and the descriptions in the Navigatio point to his reaching at least as far as Iceland. I knew that travelling around the Faroe Islands it would be difficult to link exactly the places mentioned in the Navigatio with places today, but I was optimistic I would be able to find some connections. Among other leads there is a description in the book of an island that was almost certainly Mykines, one of the smallest and westernmost of the Faroes, and I wanted to try and reach it. There were two islands, the Dímuns, whose names are related etymologically to Old Irish, not Norse. There was also a valley in the north where traces of the same type of oats used by the Irish in the Middle Ages have been found, farmed there centuries before the Vikings arrived. But as much as the places to visit, there were modern themes that I had started to pick up on in Shetland and wanted to explore in the Faroes, of a people rooted in an unforgiving landscape, of the threat of depopulation, of the North as a place that people still seek out as part of a search for peace, as Brendan did.
His journey was not unique, it is just that sadly most accounts of sea-pilgrimages undertaken by his contemporaries are lost. We know that throughout the early mediaeval period the monks spread out from Ireland both south and north in boats of tanned ox-hide. They often left their destination to the wind and the waves, and many must have drowned. Some settled on the west coast of Scotland (such as Columba who settled on the small island of Iona). Brendan himself was reputed to have founded a monastery on the Hebridean island of Tiree. From there they reached the Orkney Islands and beyond. Through their name of Papar or ‘Fathers’ they left their legacy scattered throughout the islands they visited. Often it is the smallest and most barren of them that still bear their name: in Orkney Papa Westray and Papa Stronsay, in Shetland Papa Stour, in Iceland Papos and Papey. Even on the thin soils of the North Atlantic the layers of history lie thickly on the land.
The so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were a time when Europe seemed to forget about the gains that had been made by Greek and Roman scholarship and looked in upon itself again. During the sixth and seventh centuries AD the Irish monks were some of the few literate Europeans who still tried to look outwards, and at a crucial point in history managed to keep some of the older knowledge traditions alive. They had read Pliny and Aristotle, knew Tacitus’ accounts of Agricola’s campaign, and that the earth was round like ‘a well-formed apple.’ Though they knew the sea and were skilled navigators, it seems that they lacked the desire to map the ocean and record the currents and winds to help those coming later. Like the Immrama before them they considered their journeys on a magical level, as pilgrimages of the soul, not voyages of exploration. As a result their stories are catalogues of wonders recalled after years at sea rather than ships logs. Reading them is an exercise in the imagination, and in faith.
Reading between the lines of the Navigatio it shines through that Brendan was a powerful man, loved by all who met him, whose soul knew no rest and whose eyes seemed to burn with the glory of God. Since becoming a Christian he had sailed the whole coast of Ireland and Wales, shared Holy Communion with Columba on Iona and tutored Malo, the Breton saint. Apparently Brendan was to be understood as a man of the sea as well as a warrior of Christ. He and his contemporaries believed with the ardour of the newly converted and were inspired by tales of the Desert Fathers that arrived muted and distorted by the long passage from the Holy Land. Ireland of the sixth and seventh centuries was apparently too comfortable, too fertile, too busy. But on their doorstep lay uncharted archipelagos of islands stretching out into the north, and in lieu of a drier desert to retreat to they called these islands ‘the desert in the Ocean’. Some of them made a profound impression on the places they ended up in. For example, one of Brendan’s contemporaries, Columbanus, is known to have set himself adrift from Ireland in an ox-hide boat before eventually washing up in Brittany. He wandered through what is now France, Switzerland and Italy for decades before setting up a monastery at Bobbio, south of Milan. His monastic rule survives and his town is thriving today (and he has recently been declared the patron saint of motorbikers).
But Brendan’s story begins rather differently. He did not fall upon his voyage by chance, he planned for it as meticulously as modern explorers make preparations. The Navigatio explains how.
Barinthus, the abbott of the monastery of Drumcullen, and a relative of Brendan, came to see him as he was ‘engaged in spiritual warfare’ on a meadow near his home at Clonfert. He brought news of a land he had found over the seas, a land he called ‘the Promise of the Saints’. Brendan listened carefully to Barinthus’ tale of how he had sailed westwards until he came to great fog banks on the sea. Beyond the fog banks he had found a land where precious stones were strewn on the ground, every tree was a fruit tree, night never fell and in fifteen days of walking he could not find the farther shore.
Brendan meditated and prayed on Barinthus’ words all through the night before he reached a decision. The next day he gathered together fourteen of his most faithful monks and addressed them: ‘My most beloved co-warriors in spiritual conflict. I beg you to help me with your advice, for I am consumed with a desire so ardent that it casts every other thought and desire out of my heart. I have resolved, if it be God’s will, to seek out that Land of the Promise of the Saints which our father Barinthus described. What do you think of my plan? Have you any advice to offer?’’
They replied, ‘Father, your will is ours too. Have we not left our parents and set aside our earthly inheritance in order to put ourselves completely in your hands? We are prepared to come with you, no matter what the consequences may be. We seek to do one thing alone – the will of God.’
He and his monks then observed a series of fasts for forty days in preparation for the dangers of their voyage. Only then did they set to work on their boat.
Brendan and his companions made a coracle, using iron tools. The ribs and frame were of wood, as is the custom in those parts, and the covering was tanned ox-hide stretched over oak bark. They greased all the seams on the outer surface of the skin with fat and stored away spare skins inside the coracle, together with forty days’ supplies, fat for waterproofing the skins, tools and utensils. A mast, a sail and various pieces of equipment for steering were fitted into the vessel; then Brendan commanded his brethren in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to go aboard.
This account in the Navigatio of how Brendan built his boat was so detailed that in 1976 it inspired the writer and explorer Tim Severin to try to replicate their journey. Severin’s career reads like a Boy’s Own story. While still a student at Oxford he followed by motorcycle the route Marco Polo took to China. He has re-enacted Sinbad’s voyage from Arabia to China, floated a bamboo raft across the Pacific, followed Jason and his Argonauts in rowing a galley across the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, and ridden Crusader routes from Europe to Jerusalem on horseback. He has received medals from the Scottish and the British Royal Geographical Societies and has become a successful novelist, setting a trilogy in the Viking Age. One of his more dangerous projects was what he called ‘The Brendan Voyage’.
He found that even the smallest details described in the Navigatio were necessary to make a boat of hide successfully. As an example, the text specifies that the ox-hide must be stretched over oak bark. Severin experimented with the properties of ox-hide and found that tanned in this way it became two to three times more resilient to seawater than hide tanned in any other way. He heard that in the west coast of Ireland boats similar in shape and design to these curraghs, or coracles, were still used (though made of modern materials), and he went there to learn how to sail them. In Cornwall he found a tannery that was still able to tan ox-hide to his specifications – and he needed 49 hides to make a sea-worthy boat. The frame needed to be strong and light, and in Ireland he searched out ash trees growing in shaded, rocky soil which grew slowly enough to given the wood the supple strength it needed. The frame was lashed together with leather thongs. Though the Navigatio mentions only one sail, Severin found that without two it was impossible to handle, and so he altered the design. With a crew of only three, as opposed to Brendan’s fifteen, he set sail in spring from Brandon’s Creek on the Dingle peninsula of Ireland’s west coast.
Severin sailed directly from Ireland to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, and from there crossed over to the Faroe Islands, missing out Orkney and Shetland. This may well have followed Brendan’s route, as it is not clear whether some of the earlier islands he visited were in the Hebrides or in the Northern Isles. He found that the coracle handled beautifully in most weather conditions. The leather seemed to muffle the slap of the waves against the hull, and flexing itself at the joints, it seemed to mould itself to the sea. He found that whales seemed to be fascinated by the boat, perhaps by its unusual acoustic properties, and he was visited regularly by schools of dolphins. The Navigatio too mentioned numerous encounters with whales and ‘great fishes’.
In the Faroe Islands Severin arrived at the island of Mykines, which Brendan called ‘the Paradise of Birds’ because of the gulls and auks that he found nesting there. He describes guiding the coracle through clouds of birds feeding in the waters around its cliffs. In the Faroes too he picked up another crew member, Tronđur Patursson, whose skills at navigating through the storms and tidal rips of the Faroes proved invaluable later on (Tronđur was also to prove himself as an Argonaut on Severin’s later ‘Jason Voyage’.) They reached Iceland by late summer, and after wintering the boat there, returned in spring to complete the journey past Greenland and through the ice-fields of the Davis Strait to make landfall in Newfoundland.
Before Severin proved it could be done, it had been doubted that Brendan’s ‘Land of the Promise of the Saints’ could really represent North America. It was assumed that such a fragile boat would be destroyed by the months at sea, or the pack ice that flows down out of the Arctic. At one point Severin’s craft was actually holed by ice, but with simple materials he and Tron đur managed to patch the hole almost immediately; the Navigatio specifies that Brendan packed spare hides to make repairs. His success provoked a reappraisal of the legend, and won him a famous reputation. His book of the Brendan Voyage inspired a music album (one track is dedicated entirely to the sound impressions of the birds on approaching Mykines) and the journey is something that as a lecturer he is still asked to comment on, more than thirty years later.
Up the hill behind the town was the Faroese National Museum. It was an uninspiring grey rectangle on an industrial estate. The receptionist told me that it had been converted hurriedly from a furniture warehouse after rising Faroese nationalism had demanded the return of national treasures from the museums of Copenhagen. The Danish seemed to have acquiesced unexpectedly quickly and caught the museum organisers on the back foot. The warehouse was the only available building which could take the air-conditioning required to preserve the delicate cloths and wood carvings that were to be exhibited there. One day, she told me, they would build something a little more impressive.
I was the only visitor. Much was made of the Viking heritage of the islands; jokingly it was said to have been settled by Norsemen on their way to Iceland who had found themselves too seasick to complete the journey. In sequence around its walls, crudely carved runestones of the first settlers gave way to the artefacts of mediaeval Catholicism, which in turn led on to the history of the islands as a protectorate under the Danish Empire. There were elaborate friezes depicting the severity of life in the nineteenth century, with mannequins dressed in coarse woollen cloth mending nets or hunched over fireplaces. Sepia photographs of workers and fishwives showed a strong community of lively faces, weatherworn and prematurely aged.
Displayed in the subdued lighting of the basement were treasure hoards hidden and never recovered by Norsemen that suggested trade networks stretching from Greenland to the Islamic Caliphate. There was a remarkable sequence of carved wooden pews that had been preserved from the fires of the Reformation, and a display of traditional fishing boats. But there was no sign of Brendan. The only hint of Irish influence I could find was a display showing three stuffed sheep, and a notice explaining that the Faroe Islands may have originally meant ‘the Islands of Sheep’ in Old Irish. These three, it explained, had been shot on Lítla Dímun in 1860, and it was thought that they were the last of a very primitive breed that was first brought to the islands from Ireland well over a thousand years before. Analysis of their bones has shown they were related to other primitive breeds such as the loaghtan of Shetland and Man, the wild short-tailed sheep of St Kilda, and even show similarities with the sheep bones that have been found at the Bronze Age settlement of Skara Brae in Orkney. Across Europe these primitive sheep have now been interbred with fatter, woollier cousins, but on Orkney I had once visited a flock of about a thousand still living on the remote island of North Ronaldsay. They survived because rather than be killed off and replaced during the agricultural ‘improvements’ of the nineteenth century they were instead forced off the green pasture onto the beach. They survived by eating seaweed, and remarkably evolved to cope with the poor mineral content of their diet. I was told that one of these primitive sheep cannot now survive a normal pasture because they extract so many minerals from the grass that they poison themselves. They are also unnaturally long-lived, prompting a Japanese firm to investigate the properties of alginates in Atlantic seaweeds as an elixir of youth.
I turned back to study the stuffed ones. They were wiry and goat-like, with thick black wool and powerful legs for springing up and down the cliffs. Looking into their glass eyes I felt closer to the lives of Brendan and his monks, imagining the hillsides around grazed by flocks of these animals that survived here almost to the present day. There was sadness, too, that with the death of the last one something of those Irishmen was gone forever.
The receptionist could not give me any more information about Brendan or whether there were any more traces left in the islands of the passage of the first Irish settlers. ‘But there is someone who might be able to help you,’ she said, taking out a map of the town. ‘You need to go down to the other museum.’
I stepped out of the warehouse into the sunlight and followed the path she had sketched on the map. It skirted over a couple of fields and across the main road out of town before dropping down to the shore.
A collection of traditional wooden houses stood near the beach. Chickens and geese scratched in the yard, protesting noisily as I walked through the middle of them. I knocked on one of the doors and went in. The house had been restored to show a traditional Faroese home of about a century ago. It was dark inside, and smelled of pine and smoke. The curator sat at what would have once been the kitchen table, scored with decades of knife-cuts. He nodded and gestured to my boots and I saw that I should take them off and leave them at the door. Light fell in from the window casting the lines of his face in relief, and adding a silver edge to his white hair.
‘I’m wondering if you can help me,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that there were Irish monks here in the Faroe Islands before the Vikings arrived, and I wondered if there are any traces of them left. Someone at the other museum told me you might know.’ There was a lengthy pause. A grandfather clock in the next room ticked loudly.
‘Yes yes, you’re quite right’ he said at last. ‘There were Irish here, maybe even still living alongside the Norwegians and marrying with them after they arrived.’
‘And the book, the Voyage of St Brendan, do you know it?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Is it known where he went here in the Faroes?’
‘Not so much, not so much, we have to guess a bit. Have you a map?’
I took out my map and laid it on the table. ‘So, you see this place?’ He pointed out a small bay marked as ‘Brandans vik’.
‘“Brendan’s Bay”; “vik” means bay, like “Vik-ings.” They called themselves that because they went robbing and stealing in bays.’ He sighed as if in mild disapproval of the violence of his ancestors. ‘Brendan’s Bay. So maybe he was there. I don’t know how many centuries ago it was given this name.’
I saw on the map that the bay was next to the oldest church in the islands, and the ruined cathedral. ‘Was there an old church there before the present one,’ I asked, ‘an old Irish chapel that the Norse would have built their own church on top of?’
‘Now, that I don’t know. Excuse me a moment.’ He took a mobile phone out of his pocket and with great deliberation punched in a number from a crumpled piece of paper. After a pause I heard the connection and he began to speak. Listening to a language of which you have no knowledge at all can be like following music in a style you’ve never heard. Faroese had none of the flat vowels of Danish; the consonants were soft and the vowels rounded, rising up suddenly through the words like bubbles. I recognised only a few words, ‘Brandan’, ‘Ireland’, ‘Vestmenn’. He hung up.
‘We don’t think so. I don’t think traces of a chapel have been found there. But there is a town further up, see here,’ he indicated on the map, ‘called Vestmanna. That’s what we call Irishmen, the men of the West. It’s likely that they did go on living here. Someone did a study of the Faroese people and found that genetically we were all a mix-up of Irish and Norwegian.’
‘How did they manage to work that out?’ I asked.
‘There’s a way you can tell if the gene comes from the mother’s line or the father’s line, and they found a strange thing. That of the ones that come from your father 80 per cent were Norwegian and 20 per cent Irish, but the ones that came from your mother were the other way round, 80 per cent Irish and 20 per cent Norwegian. I think that’s what they found. And no one knows if it’s because of all the Irish that were living here, or because the Vikings brought slaves and wives back from Ireland, or because in the early days the Irish monks could have women with them. But it’s very interesting nonetheless.’
‘And where do you think I should go?’ I asked him. ‘To see the places that Brendan probably saw.’
‘Oh I don’t know for sure, but take your time and see the islands. We’ve got the highest cliff in Europe here you know, up in the north, and you could see a lot of the islands from up there.’ His finger traced over the map. ‘And this is Mykines and Vágar, where he probably went, and you should certainly go and see the church at Brandan’s vik.’
‘And where was it they found the pollen of the Irish oats?’ I asked, as I had read about traces of Dark Ages agriculture that had been discovered in the islands.
‘At Tjornuvik, here.’ He pointed at another small bay, up at the end of one of the long ridges that stretched like a finger out towards the Arctic Ocean. ‘But there’s not much special to see there at this time of the year, just another pretty little village. In the autumn you can go there on stakksdagur, the day that they start the slaughter of the rams that are left out all summer. But I don’t think there is a lot there for you to see right now.’
‘It’s a pity I won’t be here in the autumn,’ I said to him. ‘You’ve been a wonderful help,’ I added, going to the door and starting to put on my boots. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Don’t mention it. Just make sure you enjoy visiting our islands. There’s nowhere else quite like them.’
I went down to the harbour to look at the yachts. One had sailed all the way from Melbourne. Another that looked too small to brave the North Atlantic flew a Swedish flag. I reminded myself that Severin had proven just what was possible with a small boat, and on second thoughts it looked a lot more comfortable than a coracle.
It had just started to rain. A man standing nearby turned to me and pointed at the boat. ‘Do you want to buy it?’ he asked me. ‘It’s for sale. The Swedish girl who owns it has fallen in love with an American here. They’re selling it to get something bigger.’ For a moment I was tempted.
‘Do you know how much they are selling it for?’
‘Oh, 40,000 kroner I think,’ he said. It seemed like a bargain, but I decided against trying to sail from here to Iceland. I would never complete my journey in a season if I tried to find a crew and sail it. ‘Maybe one day,’ I said to him, ‘but I don’t think I would make it back home anytime soon and would probably get myself killed.’
He laughed. ‘Where is your home?’ he asked.
‘Scotland,’ I said.
‘A Scotsman! And why have you come to visit our rainy set of islands?’
‘Well…’ I wondered where to start explaining.
‘Why don’t you tell me over some dinner,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come and meet my wife?’
Peter Hjørleif was a Faroese patriot. He drove me to his house, and his wife Berlina spread out a feast of rye bread, cheese and Faroese jam for us to eat. Their daughter Elin joined us too, and together we talked about holidays we had taken both in Scotland and all over Europe. They preferred bus tours to flights and loved to travel, but they were always glad to get back to the Faroes. Peter told me his ancestry: his grandfather was from the small island of Hestur and his grandmother from the even smaller island Koltur but he himself had grown up on Sandoy, one of the main Faroese islands to the south. ‘You must go to visit all these places if you can!’ he said, his enthusiasm infectious. He remembered the men from Koltur coming over to his island to cut peats, and then he would help them carry the peat back as it had a community of only forty in those days. ‘And you know now it has only one,’ he shook his head. ‘But you know every Faroese has the right to electricity. So that one man is paid to maintain and run a generator. He is given free fuel, but then he has to pay his electricity bill like the rest of us! It’s a wonderful system we have here in the Faroes.’
He trained as a fitter, and at twenty years old started work as a stoker on trawlers in the North Atlantic and over in the Davis Strait. Later he joined the merchant navy as an engineer, based in Copenhagen, and told me a story about taking cargo from the American military airbase of Thule in Greenland to Virginia, and then taking on new cargo for the Americans down to the Panama Canal and on to Tierra del Fuego. ‘And we never did find out what we were carrying for them.’ One spring afternoon in Copenhagen a friend confided in him that it would break Berlina’s heart if they were never to return to the Faroes. He resigned the next day, and took a job teaching back in the college in Tórshavn. Berlina smiled at the memory and filled my teacup.
‘Living in Tórshavn is wonderful, it’s a perfect size, and everyone is friendly. We have a very strong community here,’ she said. ‘It was the right decision.’
I had heard that the Faroese still practised whale hunts as a community. These islanders who have embraced the modern world in so many ways had hung onto some of their oldest traditions, including the pilot whale hunts which are called grind. I asked Peter about them.
‘You want to ask about the grind. What can I say…’ He spread his hands out on the table and a slow grin stretched across his face. ‘I love to eat whale! And you must know that eating whale is good for you!’
Pilot whales move in schools, he explained, and sometimes they become confused and stray into the blind-ended fjords that slice like axe-wounds deep into the Faroes. When a school of grind are sighted (the whale and its hunt have the same name), a call goes out through the village and the men take to their boats. They form a fence behind the school, and cutting the backs of the whales from the boats with special knives designed for the purpose they drive them up onto the beach. The whales flail around in the shallows while the men run between them, trying to kill the whales humanely by quickly cutting through the neck of each one. In each community the whale meat is shared out fairly between all the members, with a little extra going to whoever first sighted them.
‘One of my ancestors came over from Denmark as a Lutheran minister in the eighteenth century,’ Peter went on. ‘The people still practised Catholicism in secret and because he had studied medicine before entering the ministry he was called on more as a doctor than a churchman.’ In those days, he explained, there was only one doctor walking and sailing around the islands slowly through the cycle of seasons, visiting each settlement on a rotation, and staying until he had seen each of the villagers. Scrupulous records of these visits were kept.
‘The records show that whenever a village was lucky enough to lure the grind into their fjord, the health of everyone improved,’ he said. ‘And we have a saying in the Faroes, “A knifeless man is a lifeless man!”’
In a beautiful photographic book about the Faroe Islands by Gunnie Moberg and Liv Schei I had read of a tradition that the hunt will be unsuccessful if women or clergymen watch from the shore, and of a song that the men sing while butchering the meat which translated goes something like, ‘Strong lads are we, to kill the grind that is our joy!’ Environmental activists have understandably taken a dim view of the grind, and the devolved Faroese government have been the target of quite a few campaigns to ban it. Their defence is admirably succinct: for centuries the islands have relied on the slaughter to supplement a poor diet, and foreign governments and liberal urbanites should mind their own business.
The conversation moved on, and I told them that I was interested in finding out more about St Brendan. They knew of Tim Severin’s Brendan Voyage, and told me they were related to Tronđur Patursson, who is father-in-law to their son Pauli. ‘You must have a look at his latest book,’ Peter said, and brought out a recently published coffee-table volume of Tronđur’s paintings. Thirty years since the Brendan and Jason Voyages he was now an established artist. There were several photographs of the artist in various stages of his career. In one he was standing on Severin’s ox-hide coracle beset by ice off Canada, caught by the camera in the act of throwing a harpoon at a whale. He looked like a man who would be as happy to move backwards in time as forwards. His paintings and sculpture were varied in style, often abstract in form, and seemed to speak more of his character and that of the elements around him than of the subject of each work. His approach is diverse; I heard about the light installations he placed deep in the tunnels of the Faroes, and looked through photographs of his paintings and sculpture. They were untamed, like the weather of his islands and the hair and beard that he wore. It was difficult to imagine his work without considering the context of the islands that had formed him.
‘But you should meet him!’ Berlina said. ‘He would like the idea of your journey very much.’
‘No, he’s off the island at the moment,’ said Elin. ‘He’s in Denmark.’ I was disappointed to have missed meeting one of only three men who have sailed the North Atlantic as Brendan did, in a little leather boat.
Outside the rain was easing. Peter and Berlina showed me out, past framed prints of more of Tronđur’s paintings. I gave them my address in Edinburgh, and told them they were welcome to come and visit me any time. ‘I will hold you to that,’ Peter smiled. ‘You know we are like cousins, the Scots and the Faroese. Together we are a mix up of Vikings and Irishmen!’
I slept at the campsite and next morning shouldered my rucksack again and wandered through the town. Tiny alleyways sloped off from the streets at improbable angles. Many of the houses were turf-roofed and built of wood, a precious commodity in those islands. Peter had told me that nothing beats turf for cutting out the sound of an Arctic storm. In many of the restaurants I saw Lunda, or puffin, on the menu. I asked if I could try some but was told that it was not the season. I’d need to wait until their chicks had fledged and then the islanders would maybe start catching them. No one knew if the sandeels would be scarce this year and the puffin numbers would suffer. It had been noticed that when they had a bad breeding year the lack of guano fertilising the hillsides had a knock-on effect on the sheep, which might weigh as much as ten pounds less when the time for slaughter arrived. The balance of nature in the North Atlantic seemed so delicate.
From the hill over the headland I made my way across a bare scree and rubble plateau. To the north, fog was rolling in over the islands, cloaking the hillsides in a net of gossamer that slipped gently towards Tórshavn. To the south the sky was much clearer. When I reached the crest of the hill I saw the sun shining down on the sheer slopes of the southern islands, their cliff faces soaring over a calm ocean. Hestur and Koltur were the first islands across the sound, their names meaning ‘horse’ and ‘colt’, and I saw at once how they seemed to trot along together, heading west out of the sound. Koltur looked more of an improbable fantasy than a real island of rock and grass, a pillar of stone towering over the waves. Before me a path fell steeply down towards Brendan’s Bay, and the old church of Kirkjubøer.
The church was built in the eleventh century, and from a distance it seemed to lie against the shore like a beached ship, its hull overturned, bleached by the centuries. Beside it, to the south-east, I could make out the grey, ruined cathedral which was a couple of centuries younger, and to the north-west a small harbour.
Once down at the shoreside I saw that the old church’s immensely thick walls were whitewashed and interrupted by only four plain windows angled out over the sound to the south. Inside there was a deep silence, broken only by the distant and occasional beats of a hammer coming from one of the fishing boats tied up in the harbour outside. An old crozier from the cathedral’s days as a bishop’s seat lay in a glass cabinet beneath the altar. It had been found buried beneath the cathedral. Above it hung an abstract painting of Christ calming the waters. It was difficult to imagine the generations of people who had worshipped there; from the mediaeval monks through all the ages of European history, this building supporting a community that depended on the sea and had reason to pray for it to be merciful. I stood between the intricately carved wooden pews and looked out across the waters, where so many had anxiously watched, and prayed, for the return of loved ones. If there was an Irish chapel on Faroe in Brendan’s day I thought, it may well have stood here.
The few surnames in the graveyard told of a small, tight community, rooted in this earth. Many of them bore the surname of Patursson, and Peter had told me that Tronđur’s family had been living in the turf-roofed house overlooking the graveyard for seventeen generations. He himself had designed and made the churchyard gate. He had built a cross modelled on an early Norse symbol found etched on a stone nearby, framing it in steel and inlaying it with blue glass. With the sun high in the sky it channelled and filtered the sunlight, sprinkling an ocean’s iridescence on the dry earth.
The Patursson family still used part of the old house, known as the Roykstovan or ‘smoke room,’ but most of it was made into a museum. After paying into the honesty box I wandered in rooms made of ancient driftwood, and caught a glimpse of a life that had lain unchanged by the passing storms of history, its rhythms instead governed only by the winds, seas and tides of the North Atlantic. It is the oldest inhabited wooden house in Europe, having been built nine hundred years before as the bishop’s residence. Now its corners were stacked with whaling harpoons and fishing gear, an old stove and a display of knives that must have seen the deaths of hundreds of grind. The smoke-stained beams were low and dark, but a column of light fell from a modern window that had been cut into the roof.
Outside the main room a series of models showed the cathedral as it evolved over the centuries, never being finished, before falling into ruin following the Reformation. An avalanche in 1772 from the cliffs above had destroyed the western wall. There were plans to restore it, and a gantry had been constructed over the whole structure to preserve it from the wind and rain. Afterwards I walked in it but it felt only cold and empty. It had none of the strength or the simplicity of the old church by the bay.
I hitched a lift north with Bjorn, a Faroese lawyer who worked for the World Trade Organisation in Geneva. While his work took him to Japan, Latin America, Greenland, and China, he returned to the Faroes with his son once a year. He wanted his son’s Swiss-French sophistication grounded in the earth and seas of his ancestors.
‘His name is Hugin,’ he told me. ‘One of the old god Óđin’s ravens.’ The teenage boy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Óđin and Hugin travelled the whole world together.’ He looked down at the boy and smiled. ‘I hope his name will inspire him to travel far.’
We drove through green valleys hemmed in by grey cliffs, past more small homesteads with turfed roofs. But for the occasional bus shelter the landscape looked as if it had been unaltered for centuries. Bjorn told me he had studied in Copenhagen.
‘Is it normal to leave the islands to study?’ I asked him.
‘There is a small college here where you can study agriculture and fisheries, they are teaching more and more here as years go by. But yes, for most university subjects you have to leave.’
‘And do many people stay away?’ I wanted to find out if the Faroese were facing the same problems as the Shetland Islanders.
‘Sadly yes, like me, many people stay away. But there is a scheme now, all students who leave to study are given a return ticket home by the government, from anywhere in the world! It’s a way to try and keep people connected with the Faroes.’
We moved on to talk about the education system, and he told me that traditionally they have always had to study Danish at school, but there is more and more of a move towards studying English as a second language and making Danish optional. It was part of a growing trend towards independence from Denmark. They were keen to have closer ties with the UK too. For many years the Faroese shipping line, Smyril, had connected them to Denmark, Norway, Shetland and Iceland but never mainland Scotland. In Shetland I had heard rumours that Smyril were going to stop calling in Lerwick altogether and call only on the Scottish mainland instead. Shetlanders were outraged because their council had recently invested several million pounds in the link, and the Shetland Development Trust are themselves the biggest shareholders in the Faroese shipping line. Despite having just arrived from Geneva, Bjorn knew all about the dispute, and told me it was a hot topic in Tórshavn too.
‘Every time they call in Shetland they lose money, they spend more in harbour fees than they ever get in passengers or freight. It’s just bad business. Calling in Scotland would change that. We could build stronger trade links with them, and they’re our closest neighbours after all.’ (On getting back to the UK a few months later I read in the newspaper that a compromise had been reached. The Norrøna would call in first at Thurso in the Scottish Highlands and then at Lerwick after all. For a few years at least.)
‘But about a quarter of the money here comes as direct funding from Denmark,’ he added. ‘Too much independence from them could be a dangerous thing for the economy here.’ He gave an example of a recent crash in the North Atlantic fisheries. With no fish, the Faroese had almost nothing to export, and had depended on handouts from Denmark to survive. Recently the whole saithe fleet had been asked to stop fishing altogether. But oil fields were being explored in Faroese waters since then. As they were deep and under areas prone to storms, it would be difficult oil to extract and would be unlikely to turn the Faroe Islands into another Gulf State. But it might be enough to safeguard their economy for a few decades.
‘I think we’ll be alright, here in the Faroes,’ Bjorn said. ‘We’ve survived out here in the ocean for a thousand years, not bothering others, and nobody has bothered too much about us.’ He crinkled his eyes in a smile. ‘I think we’ve got another thousand or so.’
The next day I reached the northernmost point of the Faroe Islands, which also happen to be the highest sea cliffs in Europe that the curator in Tórshavn had told me about. The cliffs are called Enniberg, great bulwarks of basalt nearly three thousand feet high, torn into needles by the winter storms which come shrieking out of the Arctic. I had struggled up the slope, ducking skuas which swooped down on me, but was rewarded with a magnificent view from the top. I sucked icicles broken off the cliff face and swung my legs over the edge. Far below my feet the waves frothed on the rocks, a distant smudge of cream on the slate-grey stone. Near the water’s surface, seven hundred metres below, fulmars circled on the up-draughts of air like motes of dust in a column of light. The cliffs faced onto the Norwegian Sea, fanning out into the Arctic Ocean where the sea, sky and horizon were merged together in layers of soft blue.
Behind me to the south were the eighteen islands of the Faroes; separated by narrow and broad sounds, joined by innumerable tunnels, bridges and ferries, fracturing the sea around them like a broken mirror. An old Norse legend said that they had been formed from the fingernails of a god who had dropped them out of the skies into the ocean. The truth was only a little less striking – they were the peaks of an underwater mountain range called the Wyville-Thomson Ridge. Despite being unheard of in most geography classrooms this ridge deserves a renown to match the Andes, Himalayas and the Alps: it forms the biggest underwater barrier between bodies of water anywhere in the globe. To the north of it lies the Arctic basin all the way to the Bering Straits, and to the south the Atlantic which joins and mingles freely with the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. The Wyville-Thomson has divided them for millions of years so successfully that the types of deepwater fish on either side have evolved quite independently. The channels between the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic had been coming under ever greater scrutiny in recent years not only for the different types of fish they divide but for the clues they might give to the future climate of the whole of the North Atlantic. Flow through the Faroe Bank Channel that divides the Faroes from Shetland has been found to be in decline. Not only that, but the water that is flowing down into the Atlantic has been found to be becoming steadily less salty due to meltwater from the gradually warming Arctic. Senior oceanographers and climatologists, such as Bogi Hansen of the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory, have published warnings that these changes could soon tip the delicate balance of the ocean’s currents and divert the Gulf Stream itself. They believe that the lighter, fresher water from the Arctic may soon start to form a thin cold layer, floating on top of the warm, dense, saltier water that arrives from the Tropics with the Gulf Stream. This could have catastrophic cooling consequences for both western Europe and the north-east of the United States and Canada. Some predict that within a few years of the breakdown of these currents (collectively known as the Oceanic Conveyor) the warming of the Arctic could suddenly reverse, like a switch turning, and average temperatures of the North Atlantic could plummet (although the rest of the planet will continue to heat up). The loss of the circulation of water, and the gases and nutrients that it carries, could also have unpredictable effects on marine life and commercial fisheries. It was difficult to imagine how changes in the movements of water below my feet could have global repercussions on our climate and our future.
I started to think about Brendan again, and how he saw these islands when he arrived in the sixth century. He came at a time when climatologists have told us the North Atlantic was experiencing one of its warmer phases. It is likely that the islands were populated with small communities of monks back then, monks that had set off from Ireland decades earlier and had been scraping a life with their sheep and oats, fishing in the rivers and fjords. The Navigatio is filled with short vignettes of the anchorites that he encountered, either living alone on tiny islands or in scattered small communities across the North Atlantic, much as the Greek Orthodox skiti still do in the Aegean today. I opened it to the page that describes their arrival on the Faroe Islands.
The coracle of Brendan and his disciples was well provisioned. If they were struck by adverse winds or beset by fogs they could sail back and forwards for weeks without sight of land. Brendan himself had taken a vow of vegetarianism and gathered only fruit, shoots and roots for these voyages. The others were not so abstemious, and after weeks of being, ‘borne hither and thither over the face of the deep,’ eating and drinking only once every two days, it was with great joy that they sighted the Faroes, or ‘the Islands of Sheep’ as Brendan called them. The streams seemed to be stocked with fish, and great flocks of docile and fattened sheep ‘big as bulls’ grazed on the hillsides. This first landing could well have been at Brendan’s Bay, facing as it does out towards Scotland.
It was Maundy Thursday. Like any self-respecting mediaeval monks they began to prepare their Easter feast. The islands had at first seemed deserted of people, but on Easter Saturday a man approached their camp and hailed them in Irish. He introduced himself as their ‘Procurator’, prostrated himself before Brendan and presented gifts of fresh bread baked in ashes. ‘What have I done, you pearl of God,’ he addressed Brendan, ‘to deserve the honour of providing meat and drink for you by the sweat of my brow during this holy season?’ Brendan raised him and kissed him, then reassured him; ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ himself has indicated the place in which we are to celebrate His holy Resurrection.’
The Procurator showed signs of remarkable clairvoyance; telling Brendan that they would sail to a small island close by, and then west to another island known as ‘the Paradise of Birds’ where they would remain until the octave of Pentecost – nearly two months away. He went on to tell them that they would have to wait there until he arrived to resupply them for the next stage of their voyage.
After an adventure on an island that turned out to be the back of a whale, they climbed one of the islands’ summits facing westwards over the sea. From the top they saw another island close at hand across a narrow strait. The island was carpeted in grass and wild flowers, and its slopes hinted at an interior of luscious glades. I had studied the map and it seems most likely that the peak they climbed was ‘Arnafjall’, one of the westernmost summits on the island of Vágar. It fits the description of overlooking Mykines, which Brendan identified as the Paradise of Birds.
They climbed back down the mountain again and took to their boat. They sailed around this new island, and Brendan noted that it had a stream running from its interior down to its southern shore, as Mykines does. The monks pulled him up the stream while he remained sitting in the coracle, and he declared that the water of the island was so pure that they would scarcely need any other nourishment during their stay there.
Brendan was a driven man, holy and piously devoted to his God but possessed of a fervour to understand God’s wonders that was unusual among his contemporaries. His faith was not meek and accepting, it was allied to a fiercely incisive intellect. His behaviour on the Paradise of Birds offers a glimpse of this side of his personality. On a tree ‘with a trunk of colossal girth’ near the stream were settled thousands of white birds; so many that its branches and leaves were obscured. The monks were enchanted, mystified by why so many pure white birds could have flocked to one place. Brendan dropped to his knees, and tears flowed down his face as he prayed: ‘O God, to whom nothing is unknown and who can bring to light every hidden fact, you see how anxious I am. I beseech your infinite majesty to deign to make known to me, a sinner, this secret design of yours which I see before me.’
His emotion passed. God would provide the answer. He sat back in the boat and marvelled at the sight, until one of the birds flew down towards him. The sound of its wings was like the ringing of bells. It alighted on the prow of the coracle and began to speak to him.
‘We are fallen angels,’ the bird said to Brendan in a human voice, ‘like the other messengers of God, we wander through the air, over the bowl of Heaven, and upon the earth, but on Sundays and holy days we take on this physical form and tarry here to sing the praises of our Creator.’
The bird told the monks that they had now been at sea for one year, and six more years of their journey remained until they would find the Land of the Promise of the Saints. After it had spoken the bird flew away, and the air was filled with antiphonal choruses as the whole flock began to sing vespers: ‘Thou, O God, art praised in Sion: and unto thee shall the vow be performed in Jerusalem.’ The plangent beating of their wings harmonised with their voices in an elegy so beautiful it made the monks weep.
Throughout the week following Easter the birds continued to sing for them. At the end of the first week when the monks’ feasting was near an end the Procurator arrived by sea with a boat full of supplies as promised, and after being blessed by Brendan went away again. The monks remained listening to the birds until the octave of Pentecost, sometime in June, when their servant returned again. This time he came with supplies for the voyage ahead, including dry bread which he told them would keep for a year. It seemed they had a long trial ahead of them.
The history of the transcription of mediaeval manuscripts is a catalogue of misinformation and misinterpretation. It is difficult to be sure of any details recounted in texts such as these, now nearly 1,500 years old. At some point in Brendan’s travels he may well have encountered a colossal tree filled with white birds, but with the context of this island lying so close to the well-known ‘Islands of Sheep’ it seems much more likely that he is describing a great cliff covered by birds nesting on its ledges so thickly, ‘that there was hardly a branch, or even a leaf, to be seen.’ The volcanic columns and fissured ridges of the basalt can look surprisingly like the corrugations of bark, and over time the simile may have become metaphor. Alternatively, the story may have been exaggerated in order to impress its listeners in what was for its first couple of centuries part of an oral tradition. Holy trees were immersed in the Irish cults of fertility as part a tradition much older and stronger than the new Christian one.
The great Celtic scholar Kenneth Hurlestone Jackson translated many ancient Celtic manuscripts into English. The similarities between the more magical details of Brendan’s voyage and these older pagan traditions are striking. Some of the following passages that Jackson translated from the ancient texts suggest that the monks were building on this much older tradition of the magical journey when they finally wrote down the account of Brendan’s voyage.
There is an island far away, around which the sea-horses glisten, flowing on their white course against its shining shore; four pillars support it.
There is a huge tree there with blossom, on which the birds call at the hours; it is their custom that they all call together in concert every hour.
There are three times fifty distant islands in the ocean to the west of us; each of them is twice or three times larger than Ireland.
Do not sink upon a bed of sloth, do not let your bewilderment overwhelm you; begin a voyage across the clear sea, to find if you may reach the Land of Women.
All along the southern coast of Vágar there are great colonies of kittiwakes. In Brendan’s day they may easily have been tens of thousands of birds strong. They are gentle birds, with brilliant white plumage and dove-grey wings. The noise of a few thousand of them in the Easter breeding season may not resemble a sung mass, but can be beautiful nonetheless. Their harsh cries of ‘kitti-wake kitti-wake’ as they call to their mates and fend off others from their nests may well have impressed the monks, who would have been at a loss to explain such numbers of them. Given that they interpreted everything they encountered as a gift from God, and in the light of their holy pilgrimage, it is not surprising that the birds were held to represent fallen angels.
Brendan filled the coracle with provisions, and pushed it down the stream towards the shore. The monks now knew that they had six years ahead of them of continuously voyaging on the ocean. One of their number had already died and two more were to leave their company: one to join another monastic community with which he fell in love, and another to be dragged into the pit of hell in front of the helpless monks’ eyes.
But that was ahead of them now, and they put to sail to the sound of the birds chorus: ‘Hear us, O Lord, thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that remain in the broad sea…’
The Faroese were kind to me, picking me up in the rain that beat across the islands, driving me far out of their way. I never had to wait long by the road, and was given lifts by sheep farmers, fishermen, businesswomen, and mothers on school runs. One day a Member of the Faroese parliament gave me a lift up to the town of Eiđi. He had been a schoolteacher before entering politics and had lived for many years in a remote community in Greenland. He loved it there and would have stayed but when his sons reached adolescence he wanted them to have a good secondary education. ‘Sadly,’ he said, ‘that’s not yet possible in Greenland.’ He told me that many Faroese people go to Greenland. The Danish administration there ensured there was not too much red tape to cut through if you wanted to make the move, and they had a need for educated professionals. That the Greenlanders were obliged to learn Danish as a second language helped too. It was fascinating to me that just as Brendan had sailed west from the Faroes, trying to reach the North American continent, many local people here were still making the same journey. It was a natural progression, following the winds and currents that had also made Severin’s crossing achievable.
In Eiđi I looked across at Tjornuvik, the bay where traces of the Irishmen’s oats had been found, grown 1,500 years before, and I met another man who had gone west to seek his fortune.
He was a self-made man, a parvenu of conservative Faroese society. As a boy of fourteen he had gone to work the shrimp boats off the coast of Greenland. Working the nets for years in temperatures as low as minus forty degrees had gnarled and cracked his hands. He told me chilling stories of the brutality of the weather and the terrors of working through the Greenlandic winter. But he had made money.
In the summers he had sailed the swift running channels and braved the tidal rips of the Faroes. He fished locally as well, but all the time he was out in his boat he was dreaming of escaping the cycle of the seasons that he saw destroying other men. With a couple of years’ wages he bought a small plot of land overlooking the Sundini, the fjord which divides the Faroe Islands in two main groups, and ignoring the jeers of the villagers he started to build.
‘This place has the best view in all the Faroes,’ he said.
The winters on the shrimp boats came and went, and each time he saved enough money to build more. He borrowed books from the library in Tórshavn on masonry, plumbing, wiring. He attended summer school in Denmark in catering and accountancy. Over ten years his hotel took shape. But it was not enough – he needed to advertise abroad. He taught himself French, English, German, and learned the ways in which Norwegian and Swedish differed from his native Danish and Faroese. His business grew.
Every winter now instead of sailing across the Denmark Strait for shrimp, he and his wife flew across the waves and ice-fields to reach the Caribbean. While the worst of the Atlantic storms raged over his hotel the two of them meandered among the archipelagos of the New World. One day, he said, they would stay there. He had great love for the Faroes but his love for sunshine was still greater. Over an imported Danish lager I sat in the bar he had built himself listening to his plans for selling the hotel and becoming established as the owner and manager of a Caribbean cruise ship. His eyes shone as he showed me the size of the fish he had caught there. Brendan had been enticed by tales of shores littered with jewels, where every tree was a fruit tree. In the Caribbean, he told me, the sand sparkled like diamonds and a man could live like a king and eat mangos in the sunshine all year round.
He let me set up my tent in the garden of his hotel. I awoke to a clear morning where the sunlight bleached the grasses and cut the islands into sharp relief, and made my way to the top of the Faroes’ highest mountain, Slættaratindur, which towered over the village. Slættar means ‘flat’. It isn’t. Billowing clouds of Arctic terns mobbed me when I strayed by accident into their nesting area. When I finally got past them great skuas fell from the sky as they had at Enniberg, swooping at my head and plucking at my hat, their wings tearing the air around my ears. I fell onto my belly and scrabbled along the ground looking for a stick to wave at them. They were defending their nests among the tussock grasses of the lower slopes, and left me alone when I had made it to the frost-shattered ice-fields of rubble nearer the summit.
The Faroe Islands looked small from up there; a few folds of leaden rock, carved by the last ice age, dusted with green. The ocean stretched to the northern horizon, glittering in the tinselled light. I dropped down over a mountain path and into a wide and serene valley of rich pasture, then on over a ridge to the settlement of Gjógv. A few houses dressed in primary colours were clumped together in a narrow ravine, hemmed in by cliffs and the sea. Dead gulls swung in the breeze on garden posts, as grim totems of warning and a deterrent to gull raids on the chickens that scraped over scraps of earth nearby. I asked at the youth hostel if there was any space for the night, but was told that it had been hired out for a week. A large party from a private art college in Denmark had taken over the whole building. I carried on down the hill to the beach, where I set up my stove and began to make some dinner.
‘Where are you from?’
The speaker had climbed down the path behind me. She waited for a response; a broad-boned expectant face, sun-burnished skin, blonde hair caught in the wind.
‘Scotland,’ I said.
‘Sorry you were told we were all full up, that was very rude. Would you like to come and have dinner with us?’
Low smoke-stained beams were draped in drying clothes. Their sour smell mingled with that of fresh bread; dough was proving by the fireplace. Light filtered through skylights in the turf roof, cutlery clinked as tables were set for dinner, and around the room lay men and women of all ages stretched out over contact sheets, canvases and manuscripts.
Paula, my new friend, showed me to the table and we sat down together. She was explaining her art: ‘I want to show how the clouds change the lighting here, how the uniform greys and greens are cast into so many hues by the patchiness of the sunlight.’ She paused, wondering perhaps if she was boring me. ‘I think I’m going to concentrate on monochrome photography, using blocks of water-colour next to the prints.’ Her accent in English was meticulous, groomed by summers spent caring for privileged children in the Home Counties of England. Her eyes were hooded and looked half-asleep, dozing beneath a nest of yellow hair. A Swede from Gothenburg, she had travelled the world working and saving money to pay the fees for the art school. This was a brief college trip as part of a six-month course based in a mansion in the Danish countryside, with tutors in abundance and eccentricity and freedom of expression encouraged. ‘One day,’ she confided, ‘I’ll become a theatre scenographer. This is just the first step’.
During a lull in the conversation one of the Danish tutors expounded her views on Faroese nationalism. ‘They can never leave us,’ she declared, ‘they love their Queen too much. The Queen of Denmark comes here every year and is in love with the Faroes. The people of the Faroes love her.’
‘But surely it’s more complicated than that,’ I said. ‘Some of the people I’ve met seem to think that they would love their independence more.’
‘But they can never survive on their own, economically they would never make it,’ she said.
‘I don’t know, but surely it’s up to them if they want to try,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, “It’s up to them”. You British can’t talk, look at what you did in India, South Africa, Australia, the “Great British Empire”.’ Her voice was curt with sarcasm.
She had a point. The British did not have much of a history of allowing peoples to make their own choices. And nationalism in all its guises had a nasty habit of leading to bigotry and violence. I did not want to antagonise her, and fell silent. I wondered if the Faroese people would ever become violent in the cause of their nationalism. From the little that I had seen of them so far it seemed unlikely, they seemed much too sensible. Around the table the chatter went on and I listened, catching the odd Danish phrase. The freshly baked bread was delicious.
After dinner I picked my way through rooms that had been converted into studios, looking at half-completed canvases and stepping over grey bundles of wrapped clay and rolls of cardboard. On one of the floors, surrounded by cassettes and contact prints of portraits, crouched a young woman with a kind face, diffidently beautiful, who blushed when I asked about her project.
Over a decade ago she had left the mountains of Norwegian Lapland for the lush fields of Jutland and her art was inspired by a conflict that ran deep within her. ‘We can’t ever leave behind our love for our home,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. She reached for a tape recorder. ‘The landscape of our childhood is where we first learn and grow, but there is something else that moves us, something so powerful driving us on out into the world, into new landscapes.’
‘Listen,’ she said, and started the tape. ‘This is what I want to bring out in my work.’ I heard a thin voice, broken, in halting Danish, ‘Vejen kom i tresserne og tog alle væk.’
‘“The road came in the sixties and took everybody away”; it’s one of the old ladies who lives here in Gjógv, she doesn’t speak Danish very often. She told me that before they built the roads and the first tunnels here, each of the villages was more or less isolated but they were alive. Now the population here is falling fast, and although the people are proud of their children making new lives in Tórshavn and Copenhagen, the life of the villages is draining away.’
Her photographs were in black and white. They showed an ageing population with bright intelligence in their eyes, but in their smiles a sadness that I had seen before, in the face of the old lady I had met on Unst.
I went for a walk. The late evening light softened the mountainsides in a wash of indigo. Three children played in the creek, paddling makeshift boats deftly at an age when most children have barely mastered a bicycle. Their shouts and giggles broke the dense silence. Scuffed on the pavement was the chalk outline of an earlier game they had been playing: shapes were scratched on the tarmac representing different countries of the world, and I recognised France, India, and the USA. At the centre of them all was written Føroyar, the Faroe Islands. Following an obscure set of rules they had been jumping back and forwards between the powerful nations of the earth, but always returning to their home. After hearing the recording of the old lady, they seemed like the last children of Gjógv. I wondered whether any of them would stay.
One of the tutors had invited me to stay in the youth hostel overnight after all. Early in the morning I packed up my things and tiptoed out as the students snored gently around me. Outside the air was still cold, and as I climbed up out of the village the valley filled with a saffron light.
At some time there must have been Irishmen living in the settlement of Vestmanna, coeval with the Norsemen, either as slaves or freemen, and the name has stuck. It is a small fishing port now, and slumped by the harbour is the ferry terminal serving the island of Vágar. Shortly after I was there a tunnel was due to open, but I was glad to be one of the last ones to have to sail there, as Brendan must have.
I crossed over to the island on the ferry, left the coastal road and climbed into its interior. I was heading for the mountain Arnafjall, the one that Brendan and his monks probably climbed to see over to Mykines. Before me stretched a rolling moorland, dull and rocky, punctuated by thin sheep-tracks and streams with names like lullabies: Áin á Flatum, Kvígandalsá, Áin á Fjøllum, Tunguáin. The clouds had cleared and the sky was a flawless nursery-school blue. High in the air a pair of great skuas fought with a pair of Arctic skuas. The Arctics were smaller, sleeker, faster and meaner. They spun through the sky, locking talons and butting their adversaries into graceless tumbles. Brendan had seen gryphons fighting in these skies, and I wondered whether these birds had inspired the legend.
From the top of the plateau two ridges slid towards the west. Between them in a broad, shallow vale lay a freshwater lake, the Fjallavatn, a smooth sheet of silvered glass. I dropped down in order to walk along its shore. On its far side the mountains climbed up towards Arnafjall. An old hut stood by the lakeside. As I approached, a fisherman called out to me from his stool in front of it. Empty spirits bottles lay beside him on the shingle beach, and he smelled of cigarettes and cheap vodka.
‘Where are you going?’ he called out to me in English.
‘I’m going up there,’ I pointed up at the mountain, ‘and over to Gásadalur.’ Gásadalur was the name of the village on the other side of the Arnafjall.
‘What are you thinking about! Can’t you see how steep it is! Let me show you on the map.’ He took the map from my hands, and shakily traced a path that I should take back up the valley towards the main road, and round towards the south of the island.
I explained that I wanted to get to the top of the mountain because I was following a route someone had taken over a thousand years before. He clearly thought I was mad, but decided to humour me. ‘Oh well then,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Have you been there before?’
‘No,’ I told him.
‘Gásadalur is a strange place. There’s no tunnel to get out you know. Oh, they started one but the politicians couldn’t decide if they could afford it and so they’ve stopped digging. And it’s got no harbour. They have to lift boats up and down from the water by a winch! What are you going to do when you get there?’
‘My map says there’s a path out of it.’ I showed him the thin trace of a line up from the village to a mountain pass, and from there to the town along the beach.
‘It’s very steep. But maybe you can manage it. You look strong!’ He slapped my shoulder and laughed. I caught another strong whiff of vodka.
‘And that path is very famous,’ he went on. ‘The men of Gásadalur used to carry coffins over it, because there’s no graveyard there. The nearest graveyard is in Bøur, here.’ He pointed to the next village on the map. ‘And so if they can manage to carry the dead, I suppose you can manage your rucksack.’ He slapped me on the shoulder again, and I began to walk off. ‘But be careful!’ he called out after me. ‘The weather is going to get worse. I will be safe in my little hut, but you…’ He pointed up to the top of the ridge, where the summit was appearing and disappearing in the cloud. ‘You will be up in the mists.’
The Fjallavatn did not end in a shore but petered out into a wide sump of a bog, filling the valley in a mattress of oily water and dirty brown moss. The ooze of the bog coalesced into a short sewer of a stream, which almost as soon as it had formed ran over the sheer cliffs of the western coast. I spent an afternoon wading in the bog, cursing its foul stink and the skuas and oystercatchers that continued to swoop over my head. When I finally reached the ridge I watched the sunset play over the western cliffs while the mud dried and cracked on my trousers, and the effort seemed worthwhile after all. Plumes of cloud reddened as they rolled in from the west, darkening the sky. The horizon was a thin stripe of sapphire and steel. On an isolated spit of land far below lay the crumbling remains of the settlement of Víkar, long since abandoned. The coast was remote and exposed. Decades before the comforts of the twentieth century had gradually rendered life there too narrow and mean and it had been abandoned. A chill crept into the air. I set up my tent, and slept.
By the next morning the light had dulled, and sullen clouds threatened to sink and dissolve the ridge entirely. The rocks were slippery in the settling mist. From the summit I saw between breaks in the cloud that Mykines did indeed lie just across a narrow strait, but it did not look lush and inviting as it had to Brendan. It looked forbidding and gloomy; a cubist tangle of basalt. I picked my way through wide fields of scree slopes towards Gásadalur. Besides the hamlet on Mykines itself it was the westernmost and most exposed village of the islands. Instead of a road it had a helipad, and I saw the yawning hole of earthworks abandoned in the mountainside. Brendan’s Paradise of Birds lay just across the strait, a sulking mass of grey rock in the mist. Four or five houses clung to the side of a scooped-out valley. Fields that were a lustrous green from the heavy rains were squeezed into the scraps of land between the cliffs of Arnafjall and the cliffs of the coast. The realisation that the mountain pass was the only way out added a desperate edge of claustrophobia to the silence.
Down in the village the houses seemed abandoned. I did not see anyone. But the farms were still working, and beside one of them stood a bright new tractor that must have been flown in, or winched up from the sea. It lay next to the rusting skeletons of its two predecessors; the three standing together like a frieze from a museum of agriculture. On a bright day in summer it must feel like a world apart there, I thought, the mountains and cliffs sheltering a haven of retreat from the towns. The winters must be miserable.
Looking out across the sound towards Mykines I wondered how it would be to live in such a place, how the realities of community life had played themselves out over the centuries. On the other side of the ridge I had seen Víkar, now abandoned because of its remoteness, but perhaps Gásadalur would be saved in time by a tunnel. It seemed a paradox that initially, in opening up the villages to the outside world, the tunnels had taken people away, whereas now they seemed the best incentive for them to stay on, perhaps even to come back.
It was unlikely that Mykines would get a tunnel under the strait to connect it, and a bridge would be too exposed on this southern shore. But there was another paradox; sometimes the very remoteness of a place meant that its future was assured. I thought of St Kilda and Fair Isle, both remote islands off the coast of Scotland. By their very remoteness they are often now seen as romantic escapes, and somehow as purer or wilder places to live. Both now have long waiting lists of people who are willing to pay to go to live and work on them for a season, either to work on archaeological digs, restore old buildings, or to identify and ring birds. And though their communities could be said to be artificial (they are administered by the National Trust) they have not been abandoned. I would still wish a more sustainable future for Mykines.
From Gásadalur I climbed up the path towards the pass. A sign marked the place where the coffin-bearers used to rest on their way over to the graveyard at Bøur. I climbed up into clouds again, and then down into the next valley where the sky cleared and my clothes started to dry off. The graveyard was bright with spring flowers, and I stopped there to rest and pay my respects. It had seemed like a long way to carry a coffin.
The small Mykines ferry looked like a fishing skiff. It was tied up in Sórvagur harbour, delayed by the poor weather. Its captain was red-faced and jolly, and he was optimistic about our chances of getting there. ‘Soon we leave,’ he said, resting his gumboots on the gunwales of the boat and smoking his pipe. The wind was getting up.
Waiting on the boat were two teenagers on a Danish exchange programme and their hosts. One of them was a bored Australian girl with an empty expression on her freckled face. She wrapped her jacket tightly around her and muttered, ‘I hate this place, it smells of fish. You just try spending a year here.’ Her Faroese host winced as if he had chewed tin foil. After a year in the islands she could not pronounce the name of the village she lived in. She gorged herself on crisps and fizzy juice, and complained about the weather.
The other was a Turk. He had quick eyes, sleek styled hair and creamy olive skin. When he laughed he threw his head back with a roar. When I asked why he had come to the Faroes his arms shot into the air and he bellowed, ‘The Faroes chose ME!’ Although he had only been on the islands for six months he chatted to the captain fluently in Faroese. The two local boys who were their hosts had never been to Mykines. It was rare that the weather was good enough to land there, they said.
The wind seemed to calm for a while, and the captain decided to risk a crossing. We sailed west out of the fjord and past the island of Tindholmur, a series of improbable pinnacles extending in a line towards the west. ‘You know there’s a legend around here,’ said one of the boys to me, ‘that if you didn’t keep your babies safe indoors the eagles would take them and fly them up there.’ He looked up at the spires of rock and whistled. ‘There’s an old story of a woman who climbed up there to get her baby back, but its eyes had been pecked out by the time she made it.’
Passing Tindholmur it felt as if we were leaving the world where people were in charge, and entering one dominated by birds. Crossing the sound an infinity of them swarmed around the boat. Billows of seabirds wheeled between the stacks and arches of rock of Mykines which burst forth from one another at impossible angles. I counted gulls, guillemots, puffins, gannets, razorbills, terns, kittiwakes, fulmars and skuas. The easterly wind whipped against the incoming tide, and the sea boiled amongst the caves and columns of basalt. The Australian girl started to vomit up her crisps and juice. The captain held his course under the southern cliffs of Mykines and then tried to bring the ferry in closer to the mouth of the stream that ran up into the island. Men waved at us from a short pier, their boots awash as the waves broke over the concrete. The captain puffed at his pipe, and looked impatiently at the bag of mail that he was supposed to deliver to the village. A beam of light broke through the clouds and fell on the village, shining on the church spire. It lay along the banks of the small stream, which was about the width of a coracle.
After half an hour of trying to bring the ferry in alongside safely, he turned the vessel around. There was a chorus of protest from us all. But his decision was final. ‘What about the mail?’ I asked.
‘It will have to go by helicopter,’ he said. It would be over a week before he would try to get to the island again.
It was disappointing not to get to Brendan’s Paradise of Birds, and on getting back to Sórvagur I found that the small helicopter was fully booked until well after I was scheduled to leave the islands. But I consoled myself that at least I had seen the cliffs and the birds that must have awed the Irish monks all those centuries ago, and seen the stream that Brendan had taken to be a gift from God.
The speaker dominated the common room of the small youth hostel. His forehead was high and domed like a spinnaker at full sail and his beard was a mat of kelp on his chest. Even his wire-framed spectacles did not detract from his uncanny resemblance to Neptune. Though he was a Dutchman he held forth in English with ease, and for an hour or two I was held in his sway.
‘These Faroese,’ he said, ‘are not an open people. They love their country, but they do not want to share it. I find it difficult to get on with them. To them I will always be an intruder.’ And then:
‘They will not survive independence. Iceland did it because they left in 1948, before the revolutions of the welfare state. They had to create the new society themselves. The Faroese have Danish policemen, Danish doctors, Danish teachers all paid with Danish taxes! They can’t go alone!’ And:
‘I like to take photographs, but they don’t allow it! They are an insanely private people! I have to pretend I am pointing out something or someone to my son, and then take a picture. I don’t like using my son in this way.’
His son was a mild-mannered little boy with sandy hair and a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. While his father spoke he was at the window, watching terns wheeling over the sound. The Dutchman regularly travelled back and forth across the North Atlantic – Orkney, Shetland, Iceland and Greenland – working as a tour guide and photojournalist for ‘lifestyle magazines’.
‘What are “lifestyle magazines?”’ I asked.
‘I must confess that I don’t really know,’ he replied, and looked out of the window where light glittered on the sea around the islands of Hestur and Koltur. ‘But they pay the bills.’
He was a self-confessed lifestyle-magazine snob. ‘They tried to publish the National Geographic in Dutch, but it was untranslatable! That view of the world, it is like bubble-gum. Oh, it is alright chewing through it at first but then you realise it is all the same!’
When I told him that I was on my way to Iceland and then to Greenland his face grew watchful. ‘Be careful in Greenland… Colonialism has failed there and it’s in collapse. Alcoholism, rape and murder are much more common than in Europe, and you can buy shotguns in the supermarket! The Danes are in retreat, and the Greenlanders are getting angrier about them being there.’
It was the most pessimistic view of modern Greenland I had ever heard. ‘What do you think went wrong?’ I asked him.
‘They totally underestimated the Greenlandic mind. Their thinking is Asiatic, not European, but the Danes tried to bureaucratise them in a way alien to them, put them in high-rise flats and get them to work in Danish industries. It’s been a disaster for those people.’
He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and began to smooth his beard. ‘But out on the ice-cap, or hunting with them on the sea ice with their dogs, you see the Greenlanders as they really are. They love it out there, and when they see that you love it too, then they can start to trust you. Maybe.’
After leaving the Paradise of Birds Brendan had sailed west until he had found a large island that sounded, from the description of the Navigatio, suspiciously like Iceland. Like the Faroes, those islands still had small communities of Irishmen living on them when the Vikings arrived late in the ninth century. In the three hundred years between Brendan’s voyage and the westward expansion of the Vikings it seems that the Irish monks continued to nurture those tiny island communities across the North Atlantic. Though the monks wrote little about these communities themselves, descriptions of them have survived thanks to the literacy of Charlemagne’s Frankish court.
To many, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was a glutton, a drunkard, and an illiterate oaf with an appetite for brutality. In one day’s campaign in 782 he slaughtered nearly five thousand Saxons. A couple of centuries after Brendan wept on the Paradise of Birds he marched into Saxony, Lombardy and Bavaria, and spilling the blood of thousands of Europeans, united the Holy Roman Empire. But, like King Alfred the Great in Saxon England a century later, he respected book learning and longed to become more educated. At his court in Aachen he gathered together the intelligentsia of Europe, including an ambitious monk from York by the name of Alcuin.
It was Alcuin who began what became known as the Carolingian Renaissance, taking charge of the intellectual development of the court and summoning some of the greatest scholars of the age. New trails were being forged between Iona and York, Aachen and Lyon, Salzburg and Pavia. One of the men to take the long march to the seat of the empire was a monk named Dicuil, from the island of Iona. It is fitting that he should have been an Irishman.
Frankish custom decreed that on Charlemagne’s death his empire should be divided between his sons, but only one of them actually managed to make it to adulthood: Louis the Pious. In 814 when Louis was crowned the Second Holy Roman Emperor Dicuil had already begun the major astronomical treatise for which he is renowned. By 825 he had completed the work, which he called Liber De Mensura Orbis Terrae or, ‘The Book of the Measure of the Earth’. In his cell in Aachen he read all that the ancient and modern authors had to say about the edges of the world, and he was not afraid to interject his own experience and that of his contemporary Irish monks when those works seemed to him incomplete. The only author as yet to have described Iceland was Pytheas, but the fragments that came down from ‘Concerning the Ocean’ made no reference to the Faroe Islands. Pytheas may have missed them in fog, or it may simply be that as they were not at the edge of the earth he did not make much of them in his account.
Here is Dicuil on the subject of the Faroe Islands, well known to him as the Islands of Sheep:
A trustworthy priest told me that he had sailed for two summer days and an intervening night in a little boat with two thwarts, and landed on one of these islands. These islands are for the most part small; nearly all are divided from one another by narrow sounds, and upon them anchorites, who proceeded from our Scotia [Ireland and western Scotland], have lived for about a hundred years. But as since the beginning of the world they had always been deserted, so are they now by reason of the Norse pirates emptied of anchorites, but full of innumerable sheep and a great number of different kinds of sea-birds. We have never found these islands spoken of in the books of authors.
Dicuil was a man of eminent good sense. It seemed strange to him that the Faroes had not been mentioned by any of the great authors, especially as they were so well known to him and to his fellow monks. It is with the same offhand manner that he describes visits to Iceland, which he calls Thule, as if there had never been any doubt as to the identity of that island and he did not understand what all the squabbling by the ancient critics of Pytheas had been about. He writes as if it was common for the Irish monks to travel between their home monasteries and there, even if only for a summer.
In his book he describes a visit of a group of monks to Thule in 795. They arrived at the start of February, which indicates with what ease they made the journey; even taking into account the relatively benign climate of the eighth century, February would still have been one of the stormiest months to sail in the North Atlantic.
In preparing his description of The Measure of the Earth it is the properties of the northerly latitude that interest him the most. What had been to the classical world unbelievable celestial wonders had become to the Carolingian Empire simply an intellectual curiosity:
It is now the thirtieth year since some monks who dwelt upon that island [Iceland] from the Calends of February to the Calends of August told me that not only during the summer solstice but also during the days near that time, towards evening the setting sun hides itself as if behind a small hill, so that there is no darkness for even a very short time; but a man may do whatever he wishes, actually pick the lice from his shirt just as if it were by the light of the sun; and if they had been on top of the mountains the sun probably never would have hidden from their eyes.
Some authors had drawn mistaken conclusions from the work of Pytheas. It had been reported that there was continuous day on Thule for six months, and then six months of continuous night. Dicuil sought to put them right:
During the winter solstice, and during a few days around that time, dawn occurs for only a brief time in Thule, that is to say, when it is midday in the middle of the earth. Therefore those are lying who have written that the sea around Thule is frozen and that there is continuous day without night from the vernal to the autumnal equinox; and that, vice versa, from the autumnal, to the vernal equinox there is perpetual night.
But he took care to corroborate one part of the story of Pytheas, one of the greatest stumbling blocks to the acceptance of his reports by the disbelieving Mediterranean world: that just to the north of Thule the sea had been frozen, and for that reason he could not go on. ‘Those monks who sailed there during a time of year when naturally it would be at the coldest and landed on this island and dwelt there always had alternate day and night after the solstice; but they found that one day’s sail from it towards the north the sea was frozen.’
With Dicuil the first tentative steps were taken towards a systematic exploration of the North since the voyages of the Romans. Given more time perhaps emissaries from the Frankish Court would have explored the Faroes and Iceland on the strength of the stories of the Irish monks. But the history of Europe was about to take one of its convulsive turns, and the Franks were soon to have their hands full with other matters. Dicuil had hinted at them when he said that the Faroes had been emptied ‘by Norse pirates’. It would be these ‘Vikings’ who would harass the Frankish Empire and also undertake the next stage in the exploration of the North. It was their story I would follow on the next stage of my own journey, in Iceland.
The youth hostel in Miđvágur was a few kilometres from the Faroes’ little airport. It was the only place in the Faroe Islands where there was enough flat land to build a runway, and a short one at that. The weather systems of the North Atlantic so conspire with the landscape that it is not unusual to be stranded for weeks waiting for fogs to clear. A visitors’ book in the hostel was filled with entries written by those waiting for the weather. I had thought at first the book represented a high turnover of visitors, but then I noticed that the thin volume stretched over a decade. They were all nationalities, and some seemed like modern anchorites in Brendan’s tradition, in search of the sensation of being on the edge of Europe: ‘I came to Føroyar to find the silence. I found silence indeed in this place. And rain, and wind. It looks as if the world around has disappeared. Jan, Belgium.’
Some were disappointed to have missed the storms that grounded the aeroplanes and blew the sheep from the cliffs: ‘I have done this travel in the Faroes to see the famous September storms of the North Atlantic. The sea was quiet and the weather really sunny. But these islands are also very interesting under the sun. I shall come back. Roland, France.’
The sky was clear, the sun warm on my face. I walked to the airport, taking a detour around a lake to the south where it spilled over cliffs into the Atlantic Ocean. Waves rolled into the caves far below, squeezing tonnes of water into the rock and sending thunderous booms shuddering up through the basalt. The spray caught the wind and refracted it into rainbows which drifted away to the east on the breeze. It occurred to me that I had never before hiked to an international airport, and kicking the mud from my boots, I enjoyed the new sensation.
The plane, when it arrived, was a light aircraft with twin-propellers, and as it banked up into the sky I looked down on the Islands of Sheep. They slowly became insubstantial, clouded by the mists flowing down out of the Arctic. Through a break in them I caught a glimpse of Brendan’s Bay. A golden sheen played on the water and a fishing boat ploughed a white furrow into the fields of the ocean.
