IT WAS JUST AFTER 11AM and the sun had barely risen. From its place just above the horizon it cast golden beams of light across the frosty landscape. The stillness of the night had given way to a strong gale from the east, carrying with it lashings of hailstones that periodically obscured the view in opaque, fast-moving curtains.
I was walking towards the northern tip of the isle. There the sea was visible on three sides. White-tipped waves moved urgently, with little space between them as they splashed against the rocky shore. The cold of the wind hurt my face, so I pulled my scarf closer around me, my gloved hand keeping tight hold of the bucket that the wind kept threatening to rip from my grasp.
Two Shetland ponies, a mare and foal, stood sheltered in the lee of the hill watching my approach.
Despite the storm that raged all around me, there was a sense of peace as I walked towards them. So many must have walked this way, in this weather, carrying feed for their animals. I felt my footsteps join theirs, separated only by time.
The places we live and the landscapes we love are an essential part of who we are. They capture our imagination, stimulate our senses, and become part of our experiences, hopes and dreams. The lives of others, past and present, human and animal, enter our experiences through the traces they leave. A lone rowan tree still standing to protect a croft long gone, a hat on a gatepost, hopeful for its owner’s return, or fresh hoofprints by the side of a loch. This book is about these connections between lives and landscapes, place and time.
In 2015 I travelled north to live in Shetland, a windswept archipelago more than 100 miles from the Scottish mainland. I came in search of ponies. The story of Shetland ponies is one of love and survival against the odds. Sharing a latitude with Greenland and with no area of land further than 3 miles from the sea, salt-drenched and windswept, Shetland is a land of extremes. This environment has, over thousands of years, shaped all who live here. For much of history, Shetlanders were entirely dependent on what they could produce from their land. This land was mostly rough, heather-covered hill, exposed to the elements and unsuitable for cultivation.
For thousands of years, ponies have been part of Shetland lives and landscapes. Living out on the open hill, ponies became smaller, helping them conserve heat. Their winter coat, mane and tail grew thicker, protecting them from the elements, and their agility and intelligence allowed them to efficiently move across the hill in search of food and shelter. Costing little to keep, with incredible strength, despite their small stature, meant they were a lifeline for crofters, transporting people and goods across the countryside and bringing home the peat, the island’s only source of fuel.
Much has changed in Shetland since the days ponies brought peat home to the crofts. Ponies are now rarely used as a working animal, and crofting, the small-scale agriculture most common in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, isn’t usually a household’s primary economic activity anymore. Yet, the ponies from this time – sometimes named individuals remembered to this day – filled the stories pony breeders told me. Across the hills, ponies graze in herds, as they have done for thousands of years, and people seek to preserve valued historic characteristics in the ponies bred on the islands today. As life on the islands changes, for people and animals, adaption and innovation merge with myth and memory as, together, they continue to belong to these wild landscapes.
I watched the line of horses walking slowly, nose to tail, out of the gate and along the tree-lined road. As the clopping of their hoofs receded into the distance, I felt tears of disappointment and frustration spill onto my cheeks.
Weekdays spent trapped in stuffy classrooms – watching dust dance in the shafts of sunlight, dreams of horses distracting me from the teacher’s words – were spent longing for this moment, when I had the chance to ride. Every weekend I was here, grooming, mucking out, carrying water, exhausting work in all weather, in the hope of joining a trek when space allowed. But the last ride of the day had just left, without me.
I returned to the stable block and sat with Max, an old, grey Highland pony who’d also been left behind. He stood by me, resting his head on my shoulder. The smell of horse, the feel of his soft nose, and his warm breath filled my senses. I ran my hand along his neck, pulling out the loose hairs that remained from his winter coat, and slowly he moved his head, lightly biting my jacket, grooming me in return.
There was nobody to overhear, so I spoke to him, whispering worries I had never quite known how to put into words. As he listened patiently, our worlds merged, and I felt him understand. As surely as if he had spoken aloud, he told me to be still, that difficult times would pass and things would once again be all right. Reassurance that I badly needed but rarely heard. Perhaps because I didn’t know how to ask.
I hadn’t realised at the time what a lasting effect my childhood love of horses would have, how these weekends would become part of me, continuing to shape my mind, my body, and the course my life was to take. Every time the wind carries the smell of horse manure baking in the summer sun, I feel a deep sense of happiness, and the sweet smell of grassy breath from soft-whiskered noses brings an instant release of tension. Before my mind has processed the stimulus, my body responds.
If this is the love, built over weekends and summers long ago, then what is the legacy of enduring love? Sustained over generations of shared lives, human and equine, where this love is part of the story of place, entwined in the landscape and carried in the wind. This is the love I discovered in Shetland, where, on the edge of the world, people and ponies make home together.
I walked, eyes fixed forward, the details of shopfronts and the faces that surrounded me passing unnoticed. Grey concrete surroundings, the never-ceasing sound of traffic, a new day but little change. As I waited to cross a busy road, a sudden gust of wind caught my hair. Anticipating a moment’s relief, I turned my face towards the wind, but there was silence. The wind had nothing to say to me. I was separate from it, and it from me. Startled by this thought, I continued to walk, trying to figure out what I even meant by that. What did I expect the wind to have said? And how?
This was my first walk through Glasgow since returning from a week in Shetland, a place whose presence had hit me like a physical force. Walking the island’s high cliffs, where the wind carried stories of places unseen, intangible, ephemeral, I felt connected to land, sea and sky, experienced an awakening of senses. Memories, a sense of knowing long forgotten, fleeting, impossible to hold, drifted with the salt-laden air.
Standing in Glasgow’s silent wind, I understood that somehow, somewhere, I had drifted, got lost, strayed from the paths and places I loved. I felt Shetland calling me, and in this moment, I began my slow, imperfect journey towards finding home.
My childhood was filled with stories from the north. My maternal grandparents were from Orkney and most of my mum’s summers were spent on the islands. She described her deep love of the sea and how, on account of being a woman, her older relatives thought her presence on a boat was unlucky. The days when she, the Jonah, was allowed to join the fishing were some of her happiest memories: days of discovery, with birds overhead and fish below. She always said I was connected to the sea, as she was, and I often wondered if she was right, as I feel most peaceful, most myself, when I am beside the ocean. My dad spent several years in Shetland as a young man working with snowy owls on the island of Fetlar, and I grew up with tales of endless light in summer nights, when great white birds swooped overhead and earnest ornithologists needed to contend with Old White Face, a very opinionated Shetland pony. I visited Shetland when I was three, spending much longer than originally planned due to Mum falling and shattering her knee on the remote island of Papa Stour. While she lay in the Gilbert Bain hospital, I explored the islands with Dad, in a summer filled with seabirds, wildflowers and ancient ruins.
When my husband, Steve, was invited to a wedding in Shetland I was eager to visit the islands again. As soon as we landed at Sumburgh airport I was struck by an incredible feeling of presence, of history, visible in the landscape, alive in conversations of the wind. It felt both familiar and strange, exciting yet peaceful. The wedding was not like any I had attended before, two days filled with celebration that included family, friends and the wider community. I came as an outsider, but was welcomed like a friend. When the week ended and it was time to return to Glasgow I was overwhelmed by an intense sadness and a reluctance to board the plane.
Shetland is considered a place apart, connected to but also separate from the rest of Britain. The islands were originally part of the Norse empire, a time considered by many as a happy and prosperous golden age, central to the formation of a distinct Shetland culture. Relationships with Scotland, though, are somewhat ambiguous. In 1469, the king of Denmark pawned Orkney and Shetland, as he didn’t have enough money for his daughter’s dowry. The debt was never paid and the islands have remained part of Scotland ever since. Scottish rule was often colonial in nature, with lairds exploiting the land and labour of the islands. Shetlanders’ ability to survive this oppression, while maintaining their distinct culture, is still celebrated as an example of an enduring Shetland character.
This Viking identity remains strong today. Norse words and imagery appear everywhere, from the names of streets, houses and boats to the spectacular fire festivals that light up the dark winter nights. Alongside the beards and axes there is a conspicuous absence of tartan and thistles. Such symbols of Scottishness are generally seen as irrelevant in Shetland, symbols of a separate history, and sometimes evidence of unwanted encroachment. When tourist signs were erected across the islands bearing VisitScotland’s thistle logo, local residents took it upon themselves to erase the troublesome weed. Today, in a place otherwise absent of graffiti, few signs remain where the thistle image is not obscured by spray paint.
I think again and again about this pull towards Shetland, how a week-long visit left so much of an imprint on me that it changed the course of my life so completely. Shetlanders describe the islands as being a part of them, as being in their blood, and that wherever they go in the world they will always call the islands home. The landscape, animals and history are woven into the very fabric of their being. This was so different from everything I had grown up knowing: my parents and grandparents had always lived a transient lifestyle, residing in areas all over Scotland, rarely staying anywhere for long. When people ask where home is for me, I don’t have a ready answer.
Impermanence was a regular part of my childhood. By the time I was eleven I had lived in six houses and changed school three times. Visiting friends’ houses I was always amazed by the evidence of years of life within the same walls, furniture made by grandparents, lines depicting children’s growth on door frames, traces my family never left.
My feelings about this continual moving, uprooting, are also in flux. At times I have felt a deep longing for permanence and the types of familiarity and security this might offer, and yet, within me there has always been a restlessness – a desire to travel, experience new places – and a fear of being trapped. Yet here I was, living in a city, struggling to find employment other than poorly paid temporary contracts. This wasn’t what I had hoped for. I had studied anthropology at university, focusing my work on areas of conversation and conflict between nature conservation and other uses of landscape. I had hoped to continue in this field after graduation, but most jobs required work experience that I didn’t have, and student debt and high living costs meant I had to take any employment that was available. The only work I found was low-paid and temporary, which for a time felt OK, but as months became years, I found the situation increasingly difficult. I spent much of my free time volunteering, hoping to improve my CV. Although I was lucky to get a job I enjoyed working for a homelessness charity, this was also temporary, my contract renewed every three months. The relief of each extension soon faded, and even when my contract was extended there could be weeks with no work or pay while paperwork was sorted. I started to feel increasingly anxious and trapped. I couldn’t make any plans, there was no guarantee that I could even pay the next month’s rent. I was approaching thirty and hoped one day to start a family, but I didn’t see how this could ever be possible while I lived with such uncertainty. I felt happiest at weekends when I could leave the city, taking my tent and walking the hills and coastlines, escaping for a time. But that moment in the wind told me this wasn’t enough, that something had to change.
Around this time I reread Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment, in which he states that ‘through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it’. The beauty of this line led to me to read more books about the deeply social and reciprocal bonds humans can have with landscapes and animals. Descriptions of more than human worlds, co-created through everyday relationships, got me thinking about my own changing connections to place. I spent my childhood talking to plants and animals, feeling joy and wonder at the natural world, exploring beaches and forests, and feeling entirely at home, even when the houses I lived in changed. I had not noticed these relationships fading, but over time they had, and nature had become somewhere I visited rather than where I was at home. Had I just grown up, the process of becoming an adult necessitating a shift away from an animate nature? Or had I grown apart from an essential part of who I was? It had been such a gradual process, one I had largely not noticed until I felt the intense connection to Shetland.
As life continued, beneath the usual routine, a plan started to form. I had always thought I might return to university someday and now I realised I could combine these questions about our relationships with place and my desire to return to Shetland by starting a PhD. I was delighted when my application to the University of Aberdeen was accepted, but I was unable to secure funding that year. I had the choice to defer starting until the following year or begin that first year, working to support myself while applying for funding. I knew I couldn’t wait. I handed in my notice to my job and flat, and together with my husband, Steve, moved to Aberdeen to start my PhD. Looking back, deciding to move with no job, no funding and no guarantee of either seems incredibly reckless, but I had an overwhelming sense that it was the right thing to do and that things would, somehow, work out.
I completed coursework and funding applications while working the night shift, feverish with a combination of sleep deprivation and caffeine. My anxiety increased as I had funding applications rejected, saw talented colleagues also missing out on opportunities, and began to realise how difficult it was to secure these few grants. There would be no option to continue without funding: university fees alone are thousands of pounds, and a PhD requires extensive work that would be impossible with the number of hours I would need to work to cover basic living costs and the move to Shetland. But still, as I walked city streets, feeling the presence of the sea, thinking about Shetland, I felt I was finally on the path I was supposed to be walking.
Thankfully, towards the end of that year, I secured a full studentship for my research proposal on Shetland ponies. When I heard the news I could hardly breathe with gratitude and excitement: not only was my dream of going to Shetland a reality, but this would allow me to, once again, spend my days with horses. My PhD position was with the anthropology department’s Arctic Domus project. This multidisciplinary team’s remit was to rethink the concept of domestication through studying human–animal relations in northern places.
Domestication has traditionally been understood as a point in history where humans gained control over animals and landscapes. It’s often associated with a separation from, and commodification of, nature. While this was once celebrated as evidence of humans’ step into civilisation, much in these relationships is now considered harmful. The exploitation and violence of industrial farming wreaks unthinkable harm on animals and ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and accelerating climate change. But these processes are also hurting us, turning nature into resources and profit rather than something to be understood and respected, something to be loved that may be capable of loving us in return. The home I describe in these pages, belonging created through relationships between people, ponies and landscape in Shetland, is situated and particular. Yet we all live in an interconnected world, and so how we all make home affects the very planet we live on.
If we become who we are through our lives with others, then silencing so many potential relationships – those with landscapes and animals – leaves us isolated, feeling separate from the worlds in which we live, rather than part of an ongoing, engaged social life. This is why I want to tell a different story about domestication and home. A home co-created with animals, based on love, respect and gratitude, where through their domestication practices Shetland pony breeders are actively creating possibilities for shared lives. When Shetland summers are spent outdoors with foals that will form the next generation of island ponies, and winter winds simultaneously carry stories of past survival and hopes for unknown futures, then this land truly becomes part of body and mind. These connections are social and reciprocal. Through their love, their ways of noticing nature every day, people affect the land and animals, and feel this love returned through the landscape, their home.
When we know how to look, listen, notice and respond to the lives around us, the world we inhabit becomes a more social and loving place. For the earth, sea and sky to speak to us, we must know how to listen. How we speak of, and to, land and animals affects our relationships with them, shaping what conversations are possible and transforming the worlds we inhabit. Shetland is not in my blood, there is no place that contains the memory of generations of my family, no roots. Yet as I began my new life on the islands, I began to feel more connected to the worlds around me. I came to realise that home is not just a place, but a journey. Even for those who have found home, who can identify where and what it is, perhaps even trace roots back for generations, the journey home always continues. For home is a relationship, a way of being, an ongoing act of communication and reciprocation. It is created and recreated through living.
Ponies
by Robin Munro, 1973
But you have to come back to Shetland
for the true strain.
They grow weak at the knees in France and in
Suffolk meadows.
They degenerate.
They need the wind all the time
the lift of the scattald, the bare
mouthful of moor
cropped from the stone
tasting of flowers
and a salt whipping, force five ‘Viking’,
to fairly set them moving.
Like fire, they are not to be stopped.
But unlike fire, they are soon contented
in a different geometry
an unspoiled taste
and a same old world.