7

THE GEESE LEAVE AS the spring comes. Their absence marks the opening of the days. I have never seen that visionary moment, as the flock heads north, but whatever it is that the geese sense in the air, I know it too. Crossing the Minch with Freyja again in early May feels like my own migration to summer pastures. John MacAulay had given me at first too small a sail, reluctant to overpower a boat in the hands of a novice, but I had put it to him that she needed and could carry something bigger. He had a larger one made for me, at a sailmaker’s in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, and its clew now reached back almost to the stern. Filled with wind, the fabric made a sickle curve three-quarters the length of the boat itself. I could sit back in the sternsheets and look up at the wide scimitar of my sail above me. Freyja thrived with the new potency, lifting to the lighter breezes, heeling a little under them, so much at home, and so motherly for me, that I felt I had never been happier on sea or land. Seas which had always alarmed me in smaller dinghies now felt like Freyja’s natural element, and mine.

Crossing from Scalpay in May, the Minch was sparkling in her spring-time clothes. The water lay glittering around the boat as though sugared, a frost of beneficence across its surface. You had to squeeze your eyes against its little shafts of sun. A pair of white-headed Risso dolphins, moving south, passed me off the Sound of Scalpay, arcing together, breathing twice. Twenty yards from the boat, a Minke whale slid its long black back above the surface for a moment, as seamless and as faceless as a U-boat, before easing away again as the sea washed over its tiny fin and water-swept stern. A great skua flashed its two white-wing streaks overhead and went on. The Shiants were in the distance, ten miles away, just big enough for different weather to fall on the three islands, and I watched the slow, soft stroboscope of sun and shadow moving on their greenness.

One enormous swell after another, each a hundred yards long and about six or eight feet high, was creaming into the Minch from the north. It made a billowed downland of the sea. From the crests, all of Lewis and Harris was visible, and its troughs cut off the shore. The sea ridges were so long and certain in their movement that there was nothing alarming here, just a steady breathing of the water, as if the Minch were buried in sleep.

The tide, at springs, was running at the flood, perhaps as much as three knots in places, bubbling occasionally in one of those flat mushrooms of upwelling sea, breaking into unexpected riffles as the submarine topography disturbed the flow. The sea itself was sliding and sidling me to my destination. It was my travelator, and the winter Minch was nowhere to be seen. Pick your moment and the sea will do what it can for you, however small the boat and however unpractised the helm. The wind was steady on the beam, and as it says in an old Gaelic song, it felt as if Freyja ‘would cut a thin oat straw with the excellence of her going.’

This moment of ecstatic ease is the significant historical fact. Anywhere that can be reached on a calm day will be reached. What matters is the invitation, not the threat, and if there is an opening, people will take it. That is why the Shiants are as much part of the human world as anywhere else. The entire population of Europe is descended from a maximum of ten people, some arriving thirty thousand years ago, others arriving perhaps from the Ukraine only after the end of the Ice Age, thirteen thousand years ago. Those late arrivals, five or six of them, brought with them the ancestor of the Indo-European languages we now speak. The children and grandchildren of those ten filtered along the capillaries of Europe and filled it. In five hundred generations we have spread everywhere.

Seen on a planetary scale, it is an extraordinarily short and rapid event, a peopling of a continent as quickly as weeds can colonise rough ground. The movement for a while comes to a halt at the Atlantic shore but resumes a couple of thousand years later, when the technology is up to it and first the Norse and then the other Europeans continue to spread westwards and on around the globe. There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide is running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of all historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is its colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring. The Minch is laced with the wakes of the ancestors and this wonderful, easy-limbed stirring of Freyja on the long Atlantic swell is a stirring of the past. I smile in the boat now and open my face to the warmth of the sun and the shining of the sky.

Allowing for leeway and the northward drift of the tide, I am aiming for Sgeir Mianish, the rock at the southern tip of Eilean an Tighe. The heading is eighty-eight degrees magnetic, in effect due east. Slowly enough I gain on the Galtas. The shore of Harris retreats and greys. The stripes of the lighthouse on Scalpay fade with the distance. The bulk and reality of the Shiants grows with each yard. The enormous swells coming down from the north were breaking across Damhag in a band of surf half a mile long. In the sunshine it looked Hawaiian; a steepening of the wave along that full broad front, a blueness as deep as a new-born eye, and then above it the absolute white of the wave-cap, tumbling and breaking the whole length of the wave wall, a rippling as the sea crossed the rock bar hidden beneath it. Donald MacSween, the Scalpay fisherman, the tenant of the Shiants for many years after his cousin Hugh MacSween had retired, and now my mentor and guide to the waters of the Minch, had told me about Damhag in a swell: ‘That’s when it’ll be wearing its crown,’ he had said. ‘Crowned white from one end to another.’

The islands are flushed with greenness and colour. My heart expands at the Shiants’ spring-time welcome. On the bigger Galtas, where there are now no sheep to graze, the sea mayweed, which is like big, luscious chamomile, and the thrift, the sea campion and the rock rose have erupted into flowering cushions of newness. The winter outlines of these islets have changed. Now they are sprouting lumps of new growth, soft-edged warts, coloured carbuncles on the faces of familiar friends. On Galta Beag the sea pinks are so thick that the whole island, even from a mile away, has a pink flush, as if the rock were blushing.

Once ashore in the spring-time, it is difficult to imagine that the islands could ever be unkind. Winter does not exist. I walk through the new grass with my shoes off. The geese have left it paddled flat but it is already, quite literally, springing back. There are primroses in the clefts of the rock and violets as big as pansies next to the well. Thrift makes its cushions on stones where it seems impossible to derive any sustenance, and next to them, where the sheep cannot reach them, the sea campion or bladder campion makes white gardens in the wilderness. There are forget-me-nots growing by the stream and the first dark, hairy leaves of watermint have gathered at its edge. The lichen glows like cracked lacquer on the cliffs. Big, lush, red campions, some pinker, some paler, grow in the clefts between the columns. English stonecrop, only just lifting its head above the modesty of a lichen, encrusts the grooves and shallows of the boulders. The spear-tips of the flag irises have begun to prod above the surface of the bog, sharp but still flowerless, a stipple of brighter green among the tweed of the marsh plants. The orchids too are now just poking above the grass, and in the marshes the kingcups glow like cartoons of marshland flowers as the snipe flick away from your footstep, a jittering into new life.

This is what I have come to the Shiants for, year after year, at just this moment. It is a half-season. The new lambs all have the same little bony body, the same strange combination of fragility and resilience, the same jumpy immediacy. On their suddenly vast green grassy playground, they perform from time to time a startling leap, all four legs in the air, a quiver along the tensed back, a sudden blowing off of the synapses, for no real reason and always followed by a look of bemused horror. Why did my body do that? What is this sensory, neural life I have acquired? Am I me? What is this shocking, jerking, stuttering of which I am a part? Where’s my mother?

Spring here is always beautiful for those uncertainties, for its hesitations and incongruities laid alongside each other without comment or context. ‘I will be fed,’ the lamb’s cry says. ‘I will not be fobbed off. But help me, look after me, I need you.’ And spring replies, ‘I will freeze you and cosset you, I will be everything you have hoped for and nothing you could desire, I will be banks of primroses open to the sun and the reticent, denying face of the vernal squill in shade.’

It is the season of discontinuity. The other three have a sort of wholeness to them. All of them have something at least of unbroken length and continuity. Think of the summer and what drifts into your mind – or mine anyway – is languor, the breadth of the grass banks on Eilean Mhuire where the thick summer growth stretches unbroken from cliff to cliff, the length of days, the sheer extent of summer; autumn hangs on like an old tapestry, brown and mottled, a slow, long slide into winter, unhurried in its seamless descent into death; and winter itself, of course, has persistence at its heart, a long, dogged grimness which gives nothing and allows nothing and becomes more dreadful each year, one long, wet, dark, hard day after another.

There is none of that in spring. Its music is broken and jerky, moving backward as much as forward, offering gaieties and delicacies only to withdraw them, with frost as much as warmth in its heart. Botticelli’s Primavera does not belong in the Hebrides but it is the true image of the Hebridean spring. Among the crowd in the picture, it is Flora who commands your attention. She walks barefoot through a meadow. The flowers are brooches on its cloth. Her dress, arms, neck and hair are garlanded with flowers. Her manner is delicate but definite, like a Grace but more tentative, or like the Venus behind her but newer, less knowing. There is nothing lush here. Flora is in the process of becoming: the embodiment of life as life actually emerges. That is why, like spring, she is still slightly withdrawn. She still has something of the winter in her. And every time I walk around the early spring-time Shiants, I see her on the path ahead of me, picking her way between the stones and the flowers.

The Barnacle geese are on their way to Greenland. They follow the spring north, catching the wave of new grass as it sprouts under the sunshine. The birds are tuned to the world, to the planetary fact of the northern hemisphere tipping towards the sun and their journey is an elegant and perfectly measured surfing on the breaking wave of greenness that ripples towards the Arctic with the spring. From a satellite you could see them, long skeins of the goose bodies, sewn like stitches into the air, travelling in family and in island groups, flogging north with the lengthening of the days. From offshore islands along the entire length of the west coast of Ireland, clouds of them from the coast of County Clare and the Arans, a huge concentration leaving from the Inishkeas at the tip of County Mayo, others in Sligo Bay, a scattering all along the coast of Donegal, up to Malin Head, over to Islay and Tiree, from one island after another the flocks have lifted away.

The Shiant birds have joined them. Day and night they are making their way to the Faeroes and then on to the valleys of north-west Iceland, concentrating in the spring-time in their tens of thousands, descending en masse to the wet river pastures of Húnavatnssýsla and Skagafjarðarsýsla before heading off again, across the Denmark Strait to the breeding grounds in north-east Greenland, between Kangertittivaq and Orléans Land. There, at last, in a savage stretch of country, whose hinterland is one enormous glacier, sliced with deep fjords and glacial valleys, and on the islands that lie offshore, they arrive for the nightless summer months to breed. The Shiant geese, it is thought, will remain together there, recognising each other, a flock within a flock, and will return together in the autumn with their young.

The geese are en route for a few weeks each spring and again each autumn. If you could watch the North Atlantic over the centuries, you would see their passage flashing on and off twice a year. From the west coast of Ireland, across to the Inner Hebrides, up past the Shiants to Rona and Sula Sgeir, on to the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland, this is a line creased into the palm of the world’s hand. It is also a map of something else. These were the paths taken by the Celtic hermits between the sixth and the tenth centuries. Is it possible that they, in search of ‘a desert in the ocean’, followed the track the geese had blazed for them? It is often said that the wild goose became a symbol in the early Celtic church of the Holy Spirit. There is no evidence for that. But this is a separate question. Did these wonderful birds lead the churchmen, by example, to the north?

Whether in the wake of the geese or not, the idea of holiness clings to the Shiants, as to other islands. Remoteness from the world looks like a closeness to God and intriguingly, it turns out that the association of islands and holiness predates anything Christian. There was an important Christian moment on these small Hebridean islands but it was part of a much longer continuum. There is some evidence that, in Britain in particular, islands were thought of as holy places long before the Christian idea of the hermit arrived here from Egypt in the sixth century. Three pieces of evidence coalesce. In Plutarch’s essay ‘On Oracles that have ceased to function’, the Athenian scholar and philosopher reports a conversation that occurred in Delphi in about AD 83. A traveller called Demetrius of Tarsus, a grammatikos, a literature teacher, had just returned from Britain. The traveller told the priests at Delphi what was happening at the far end of the world:

Demetrius said that many of the islands off Britain were uninhabited and widely scattered, some of them being named after deities and demigods. He himself had sailed, for the sake of learning and observation, to the island nearest to the uninhabited ones, on an official mission. This island had a few inhabitants, who were holy men, and all held exempt from raiding by the Britons.

At just this period, another man called Demetrius (or perhaps the same one: there are few Greeks mentioned on Roman inscriptions in Britain) left two small bronze votary tablets at a temple in the Roman city of York. One was dedicated to the ‘Gods of the Governor’s Praetorium’. The other ‘to Ocean and Tethys’, the male and female deities presiding over the wildness of the outer sea. And again, at this same period, the last years of the first century AD, Agricola was conducting large-scale sea-borne explorations of the west coast of Britain, sending a fleet around Cape Wrath and through the Minches. It is at least a possibility that Demetrius was describing the situation in the Outer Hebrides and the Shiants may well have been holy for millennia. And were these islands once, I wonder, named after a Pictish deity, as Demetrius described?

What can only be called a pagan sense of the holiness of islands lasted well into the historical period. When Martin Martin in the 1690s asked a man of Lewis

if he pray’d at home as often, and as fervently as he did when in the Flannan Islands [a group to the west of Lewis], he plainly confess’d to me that he did not: adding further, that these remote Islands were places of inherent Sanctity; and that there was none ever yet landed in them but found himself more dispos’d to Devotion there, than anywhere else.

Because of this sense of ‘inherent sanctity’, a whole set of superstitious rules applied to the language people could use on the Flannans and to the way they could behave.

Customs of this kind are not recorded for the Shiants but the same conditions apply. They, too, are never given their true name in Gaelic but are called ‘the Big Islands’ or even simply ‘The Islands’. What is it about islands that summons this tiptoeing around them? This is difficult and speculative territory, but it is worth considering why, outside any Christian framework, islands have for so long felt holy. The Christian experience is centrally shaped by the experience of Christ in the desert, and by the idea that Satan and the flesh can be overcome by exposure to the dangers of a desert place. That idea is important in the history of hermits in the Hebrides, but leave it aside for a moment and other aspects of islandness move to the foreground.

For want of a better word, the holiness of the Shiants, their numen, the inherent spirit which the Lewisman described to Martin, is tangible enough. Only once in my life have I felt it strongly enough to be disturbed by it, but that single experience has entered my own private understanding of the place and it remains an underlayer which shapes everything I know and feel about the Shiants. The first time I was there on my own, I was nineteen and an undergraduate at Cambridge. Donald MacSween had dropped me on the beach and I had with me no more than my one or two boxes of supplies, books and candles, a small canoe and a dog. I had waved goodbye to Donald’s boat, the Favour, as it disappeared around the rocks on its way back to Scalpay and I spent the day of my arrival arranging everything I needed. I collected wood from the beach and water from the well, I unpacked my stores into the house’s cupboard and laid out my sleeping bag. I was there alone with a dog. I had three weeks’ literal isolation in front of me.

Even then, before I had learned what I know now, I knew the islands had a reputation. Their name in Gaelic could mean ‘haunted’ as well as ‘holy’. And there was a more recent story. In about 1911, a man was said to have gone to live in the house which had been finally deserted by the Campbells only a few years earlier. He had his furniture delivered by boat and his stock of sheep. He set everything up in the two simple rooms, one for living and cooking, the other a bedroom. He lay down to sleep and in the middle of the night woke to find an old man at his bedside. ‘Do you realise,’ the figure said in a straightforward and conversational tone, ‘that you are sleeping on my grave?’

As soon as he could draw the attention of a passing fishing boat – he was said to have set fire to the heather on the top of one of the islands so that its whole upper surface sprouted a blazing head of flame – he left again, taking with him his furniture and his pots and pans. Except for visiting shepherds and lobstermen, the islands had been deserted ever since.

I knew the story but I didn’t want to pay attention to it. I did not want to be alarmed at the prospect of being alone on this big, remote and empty place. I had been here before with others and loved its many uncompromised beauties. The idea that it was haunted lay somewhere in the background, in the basement of my feelings. More, I was filled with a deep underswell of excitement and pleasure at being out there, exposed and unfettered, at the feeling of being dangled in a solution of such richness, so uninvadable. But perhaps, now, looking back on it, these twenty years later, I can recognise that those are the pre-conditions for an awareness of the metaphysical.

I know I was frightened because I moved the bed from one room to the other. I moved it in other words away from the grave and went to sleep there, deeply ensconced in the red, downy sleeping bag. The dog, a terrier, was curled up on the mattress beside me and the fire was well stoked, flaming and then glowing.

Nights are not long in northern Scotland in mid-summer. Real dark only lasts for three or four hours, but when it comes it is as black as night ever is. There is no sodium haze. There is no electricity on these islands, but I had a torch with me. Right in the middle of this dark darkness I suddenly woke up. The dog, a terrier, keen to dig any rat out of any hole, not a fearful creature by any account, was standing on the bed next to me, shaking, utterly alert, staring at the far side of the room. I shone the torch over there. Nothing to see beyond my own pots and pans, the washing up bowl, my own coat hung on the back of the door.

His fear infected me. I felt at that moment colonised by terror. There was nothing to see, but my torch made the places where it wasn’t shining even darker. The dog would neither move nor relax. There was no sound beyond the swell on the shore fifty yards away. I began to shake, dragged the dog down into the sleeping bag with me and then pulled its hood over the two of us, the torch still in my hand, cocooned from that fear. I couldn’t sleep. The dog and I shook together. From time to time I would make a little eyehole of an opening at the top of the bag where I was holding its rim gripped in two fists, waiting for the light to come, for colour to drain back into the shapes and blackness of this room.

The length of short nights! Again and again that eye, opened on to the world beyond the downy warmth of the dog and the cotton of the sleeping bag, revealed only blackness. It became a matter of patience, of out-waiting the night. At three or four o’clock, the world started to grey. I could put my head out into air. It felt as though the room and I had been through something deep and long together, that used-up sensation of exhaustion and a world clarified because some of its deeper possibilities had been seen.

I realised, as I cooked breakfast over the fire, that I was exhilarated. Perhaps this was some physiological effect, a drained, post-adrenaline high, but it felt more than that, a new intimacy with a place that went beyond the purely aesthetic. I had somehow met its soul. But at the same time I knew I didn’t want to go through it again. It was too frightening. That day, after the sleepless night, I did everything I could to exhaust myself, walking from end to end of the islands, rowing from one to the other, setting pots, collecting firewood from the shore. By the time the evening came, my whole body was slack with tiredness, my limbs drooping like eyelids. The dog had come with me here and there, to and fro, and by early evening it was asleep.

I drank beer in front of the dropping sun. I knew I would sleep and I did, straight through, waking to find a beam of sun pointing its finger through the window and across the room in a diagonal on to the floor. From my bed I could reach out and put my hand into its light, which felt warm, like sun in a greenhouse. The morning was calm and the sea slick in its stillness. I spent the whole day out in the boat, the dog curled up on a rope in the bow, and the sun plunging through the green water, lighting the guillemots diving there for fish. That was a morning not to be forgotten. Whatever had frightened me that first night now seemed to embrace me. I lay adrift in the boat and felt the arms of the islands around me. They could never frighten me again. If there was a tutelary spirit here, I could live with it, I could love every aspect of it, however bitter its moods, or harsh its treatment of me and that love would, in a way that I cannot properly describe, be returned and sustain me. From that moment I can date my love and affection for this place, an attachment to it beyond the touristic. In the course of those nights and days, the Shiants became a kind of home, a place which would never desert me wherever I might be, the touchstone of reality.

Years afterwards, I read a remark by Jung to the effect that if ghosts are said to be ‘nothing but projections of your own unconscious thoughts and fears on to the outside world, no intellectual acrobatics are needed to turn that sentence around and describe your own fears as ghosts that have taken up residence in you.’ That permeability of the skin, the flippability of inner and outer, seems to me now like a true description of that experience and perhaps of island experience more generally.

Islands, because of their isolation, are revelatory, places where the boundaries are wafer-thin. My sons tell me that night after night, asleep in their tent on the island, they have heard footsteps beside them in the grass. Not the pattering of rats, nor the sheep but something else. And although I have never heard anything like that, I am inclined to believe them. These remote islands are ‘places of inherent Sanctity’ and the footsteps are perhaps some of the last modern echoes of an ancient presence.

Everyone who comes here responds to it. This is not the preserve of outsiders or holiday-makers. The shepherds acknowledge it conversationally enough. For them all it is a kind of dream country, a place over which the mind can roam, to which your thoughts always turn at a spare moment, walking with your mind’s eye across the loved contours of the place. Both Hugh MacSween and John Murdo Matheson, the young shepherd from Gravir, who since 1996 has had the sheep on the Shiants, have talked to me about the Shiants with an intensity outsiders would never credit. We can have entire conversations about hollows in rocks and pools in streams. It is a bond for anyone who comes here, or at least for anyone that allows the islands to envelop them, to be the encompassing limit of their world, even for a while.

That is a strange but perfectly real effect: after a few days here, the place seems to expand. The Shiants no longer seem, as Compton Mackenzie described them, like ‘three specks of black pepper in the middle of that uncomfortable stretch of sea called the Minch’ but a world in themselves. To walk the mile or so from one end of Garbh Eilean to another becomes a day-long expedition. Eilean Mhuire is another continent. The details of rocks and plants, of the little alders growing in the rock clefts, the honeysuckle twined around them, the acre after acre of dwarf willow growing on the marsh, the wrinkles in the turf which might or might not hint at previous lives: all of this becomes as varied as America. The Shiants have no wood but they have hidden places, tucked among the rocks. They have no rivers, but they have streams in which the watermint and the forget-me-nots grow. They have no lakes, but pools around whose margins the turf luxuriates into neon green and across whose still, dark surface the water boatmen paddle like Polynesians between their archipelagos. And they have of course the richness of the sea.

Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant. They are defined by it, both wedded to it and implacably set against it, both a creation and a rejection of the element which makes them what they are. They are the not-sea within the sea, standing against the sea’s chaos and erosive power, but framed by it, enshrined by it. In that way, every island is an assertion in an ocean of denials, the one positive gesture against an almost overwhelming bleakness. They would not be what they are without the bleakness. The state of siege is creative and an island, in short, is life set against death, a life defined by the death that surrounds it. Like the peak of a mountain, or perhaps more like your own presence on the peak of a mountain, it is an image of salvation and of eternity.

It has long been thought that a hermit once lived on the Shiants. On Eilean Mhuire, the tradition is that one of the ruins there was a chapel to the Virgin. That is, I think, mistaken, as will emerge, but what can be said for certain is that the island’s Gaelic name, Eilean Mhuire, is the name given to the mother of God, and is quite distinct from Mairi, the name used since the Reformation by Protestants for their daughters. This, unequivocally, is the Virgin’s island. The men and women of Scalpay, strict church people, when referring to the island in conversation nowadays, call it not Eilean Mhuire but Eilean Mairi, avoiding any taint of Catholicism. The Ordnance Survey officers in 1851 were told that Eilean Mhuire had been a refuge for a priest ‘in the time of Knox’.

That seems unlikely, although the island might conceivably have sheltered one of the Franciscan missionaries who evangelised the Hebrides from Ireland in the early seventeenth century. Perhaps the name of Eilean Mhuire is a thread leading to a more ancient past. The church in the centuries before the first millennium, the age of Columba, not only in Ireland but in the whole Christian world from here to Syria, was deeply devoted to the cult of the Virgin. Hymns to the Virgin were composed on Iona, sung antiphonally there in the timber-built choir. Mary was the embodiment of fertility and hope. She had made good everything Eve had spoiled and the cross to which she gave her son restored everything the tree in Eden had destroyed. Without Mary, the world could never have been redeemed.

Dedications were made to the Virgin all over the Ionan world. But the Mary of Iona was not the keening figure at the foot of the cross which the later Middle Ages would make of her. Instead, the focus of the Columban devotion was on Mary’s gift to the world, the remaking of the universe in her womb, her conceiving and delivering of the Kingdom of Heaven. She was, in other words, the image of holy fertility.

Eilean Mhuire is an island of astonishing richness set in the middle of the wild sea, where the grass even today clogs your feet as you walk across it in midsummer, seventy-five acres of extraordinarily fertile pasture, a rolling meadow two hundred feet above the sea, surrounded by cliffs, where the lambs fatten so quickly that, as John Murdo Matheson, the shepherd, says, they are always ‘ready for the hook by the end of August’, and the sorrel grows in miniature, heady-scented forests. It is not difficult to recognise the resonance of that fecundity for the early Christians. You can quite literally roll in it, wrapping yourself in the fullness of life on Eilean Mhuire.

Is this a key to the attraction of the Shiants – and of other equally fertile islands – for the Dark Age saints? Those early Christians would have absorbed from the Gospels and from the writings of the Desert Fathers in Egypt and Syria what has been called ‘the theology of dispossession’. This was the doctrine which, as the Celtic scholar Dr Thomas Owen Clancy has written, ‘lay behind the Irish attraction to peregrinatio, in which the ascetic would leave home, lands, family and wealth, and seek salvation on a distant island.’

In a fallen world, redemption could come only by abandoning the everyday and by finding in the desert the pearl of great price conceived in the Virgin’s womb. No Hebridean island I know fits the description of a desert pearl better than Eilean Mhuire. It is in itself an icon of the Christianity that held sway here a thousand years ago.

There is a long-standing confusion that must be clarified. In the late seventeenth century, Martin Martin said of the Shiants that ‘Island-More hath a Chappel in it dedicated to the Virgin Mary’. Since then, this has been taken as a reference to a building on Eilean Mhuire, because of the coincidence of the names. That is a mistake. The chapel was not on Eilean Mhuire but on what is now known as Eilean an Tighe and was until the mid-nineteenth century known as Eilean na Cille or Church Island. The passage runs as follows:

Island-More hath a Chappel in it dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and is fruitful in Corn and Grass: the Island joining to it on the West is only for Pasturage. I saw a couple of Eagles here … those Eagles are so careful of the place of their abode, that they never yet killed any Sheep or Lamb in the Island … so that they make their Purchase in the opposite islands, the nearest of which is a League distant.

Apart from Martin’s muddle over ‘West’ – Garbh Eilean is in fact north of Eilean an Tighe – he is describing a situation in which Eilean an Tighe contains the Chapel and Garbh Eilean the eagles. Eilean Mhuire is the place in which the eagles ‘make their Purchase’.

Several times in the nineteenth century, travellers in the Hebrides had pointed out to them the ‘cell’ of the hermit on Eilean an Tighe. The artist William Daniell saw it in 1815. John Macculloch, the geologist, saw it four years later and TS Muir, visiting on 21 July 1859, while conducting the research for his ‘Ecclesiological Notes on Some of the Islands of Scotland etc.’, found after landing on the beach and coming to the shelf of ground immediately to the south of it on Eilean an Tighe, that ‘on this level space, there are traces of a burying ground, and the foundation of what seems to have been a chapel of small size.’ By the 1850s, then, at a time when the islands were empty for a while, the site of the chapel had virtually disappeared.

The archaeologist Pat Foster re-identified the cemetery in the summer of 2000. It is a hundred yards or so north of the present house, a low mound on whose surface there are still one or two fragments of Lewisian gneiss, which might or might not be grave markers. The mound has been dug into at some time and there is a story still current in Scalpay of a woman finding a skull here in the 1930s. There is the ruin of a building within the western side of the mound, which has some squarish masonry in it, but has clearly been built up and adapted since Muir saw the chapel reduced to a ‘foundation’ in 1859.

A hazy folk-tradition of a saint or hermit, an ancient island name, ruins which certainly don’t sound earlier than medieval, a burial ground which cannot be dated: that until the summer of 2000 was the limit of the muddle and the knowledge.

A discovery made by Pat Foster’s archaeological team changed that. The excavation of the house, whose larger findings will be described later, had reached its final day. All fortnight, one intense squall after another had moved up the Minch. The sun had shone brilliantly in the intervals, but those dark, cold showers were like little patches of night travelling through the mornings. A cold wind blew them in from the south. As Pat had indefatigably stalked the islands, mapping out all the early sites, Petr Limburský and Linda Čihakova, had taken charge of the excavation. Both are among the most brilliant of young Czech archaeologists, the most careful of excavators, patient beyond belief, able to sift, it seemed to me, the brushings of one eighteenth-century week on the house floor; the peat ash and charcoal, the fragments of broken pot, the odds and ends of daily life; from those of the week after and of the week before. As the final investigation of the year (a party from Prague would be returning each summer for perhaps another five years) Linda had decided to cut a trench – ‘sondage’ was the more glamorous word she used – through the floors of the house to see if there was anything immediately beneath them. In the trench, about half-way along the house, immediately next to the northern wall, she slowly uncovered a smooth, flattish round stone about twelve inches across, deeply buried in the clay and peat ash of the mid-eighteenth century.

We all came to look at the revealed upper surface of the stone. Even in situ, it had an air about it, simply through the perfection of its shape: not the knobbled awkwardness of most of the wall stones, but this organic circularity, this fullness and shapeliness. It looked as yeasty as a loaf. Jana Žegklitzová, the draughtswoman from Prague Castle, had been baking bread for us every day in the oven in the house, and Linda’s stone looked like one of Jana’s loaves. ‘She must have been up here this morning!’ Linda laughed, sitting back on her heels on the clay floor, reddened with the peat ash trodden into it two hundred and fifty years ago, and pulled her hair back from her face.

Linda approached the stone with her trowel. On her hands and knees she cleared the soil from around it and then with her fingers slowly turned the stone over to see what was underneath. It was heavy and as the stone rolled over on to its upper side Linda jumped back and away, shrieking at what she saw, holding her hand to her mouth. Deeply carved on the underside, the side which had been set down and buried in the floor, was a four-armed cross set within an equally firmly carved circle, just in from the outer circumference of the stone.

The four quadrants left by the cross stood proud, doughily pillowed like scones. Clay clung wetly in the carved grooves. An encircled cross, buried face down in the floor of the house: clearly this was something that had been significant twice, once in its making and once in its burying. I carried the cross stone down to the house and we photographed it there against the silverweed and the grass. It was the culmination of the dig, the conclusive find, a reorientation of this place, its history and meaning.

I sailed back to Harris with the stone beside me in Freyja, a touchstone, the most beautiful man-made thing the Shiants had ever known, heavy and perfect, radiating significance. It belonged, like everything else recovered in the dig, to the Queen, but she graciously allows excavators to hang on to their finds for a while so that their origins and meanings can be understood. It will eventually end up in a museum, perhaps in Stornoway, perhaps in Edinburgh. Feeling like Little Jack Horner with my plum beside me, I travelled Britain with the stone. I wanted to know what it was and I wanted to know what it meant. I showed it to Professor Charles Thomas, the first of the modern excavators of Iona and one of the leading experts on early Christianity in Britain. He was definitive. ‘It’s a grave marker, a primary grave marker. They put them either in the grave or on the grave. Not before the seventh century AD; probably somewhere between the seventh and tenth centuries. You can’t date them more precisely than that. They didn’t exist before AD 600 and they became more elaborate after 1000.’ And what was it doing in the early-modern house where we had found it? ‘People, at least until the modern reform movement, would always have been very receptive to these things,’ Professor Thomas said. ‘They would have taken it there from the grave. They would have liked it in the house.’

At one stroke, the Shiants had acquired their early Christian reality. Columba, the prince-poet-bishop-saint who in the mid-sixth century had founded the monastery on Iona and an archipelago of related monasteries and outlying hermitages in Ireland and the Hebrides, had been an ascetic himself. According to Adomnan, his biographer and the abbot of Iona at the end of the seventh century, ‘He returned to his lodging and reclined on his sleeping place, where during the night he used to have for his bed the bare rock; and for pillow a stone which even today, stands beside his burial place as a kind of grave-pillar.’

Here then on the Shiants was the pillow stone of a follower of Columba. Here his head would have rested in life and with this stone his grave would have been marked in death. I took it with me to the Primary School in Scalpay, and asked Mrs MacSween, the headmistress and form mistress of the upper form, and the other Mrs MacSween, the form mistress of the lower form, if I could conduct an experiment. The children of both classes had to lie down with their heads on the stone as a pillow. It was a holiness test: whoever could treat it as a pillow would be a saint. The beautiful children of Scalpay, their pale, freckled skin and thick black hair, their dark, observant eyes, lay down one by one on the classroom floor. Most of them gingerly and carefully lowered their heads on to the stone, tentative at its hardness. Only two boys passed the test, lying down as if going to bed and believing so easily this was their pillow that they banged their ears into the unyielding stone and were rubbing them for the rest of the day. They were the true heirs of Columba.

The pillow stone’s transforming presence was doing what archaeology was meant to do: the hazy and uncertain were now pinned to the incontrovertible material fact. What had only drifted before in half-imagined half-memories was now suddenly concrete and alive. The legend of the Shiant hermit was true. And the discovery, of course, enhanced the astonishing fact of that memory. With no other sustenance or confirmation, over a thousand years or so, the presence on these islands of an early Christian figure, perhaps bringing Christianity to this part of the world, had, it now turned out, been accurately remembered.

The stone, sitting beside me on the front seat of the car, dwelled in its silence. It was a window on another millennium. Everyone who saw it said ‘What’s that?’ A woman at the toll booth outside the Dartford Tunnel said ‘That looks nice.’ A man in a garage thought it was a fossilised meat pie. This most private of objects was making acquaintances. I took it to Dr Fergus Gibb, the Sheffield geologist. I had never been to his office before and as I walked in I stopped. It was exactly like my work-room at home. Its walls were lined with maps and photos, diagrams, sections and analyses of one thing only: the Shiants. It was like a teenager obsessed with Britney Spears. Fergus got out his eyeglass, examined the crystalline structure of the cross stone and pronounced that the rock certainly did not come from the Shiants. It was a nodule of Torridonian sandstone of which there is none on the islands. Its surface had been pecked and battered as if it had been in use for a long time, dropped and knocked and some of the larger crystals had fallen out leaving a skin pored and dimpled like an orange. But almost certainly the stone had been picked up as a largish beach cobble. There were cobbles on the big beach on the Shiants now which in form, if not in substance, resembled the cross stone. So if not from the Shiants, where did this stone itself come from? That was almost impossible to say. Torridonian sandstone outcrops all along the west coast of Scotland for two hundred miles. There is even a submarine exposure of it ten miles or so north-east of the Shiants under the Minch. It could have been washed up on this beach, as cobbles of other alien rocks are. Or it might have been brought there.

Scanning with Fergus the geological map of the west coast, I saw with excitement that Torridonian sandstone outcrops on Iona. Frank Fraser Darling had found a piece of what he thought was ‘Iona marble’ in the chapel in North Rona (although that identification is now thought to be suspect). The foundation of new churches in the ancient world often involved the pioneer taking with him, in a bag blessed by his bishop, soil or stones from the mother church. According to the Icelandic Placenamebook, compiled in the twelfth century but collecting far earlier traditions, an Irishman called Orlyg was sent by St Patrick to Iceland ‘with wood, suitable for building a church and a meeting house and an iron bell, a golden penny and consecrated earth, to put under the corner pillars.’ Sanctity inhered in objects that had been blessed. Was this stone, by any chance, a piece of Iona, made blessed by its carving, carried out into the far north by the hermit who came to settle here? Sadly not: the Torridonian on Iona is too ‘flaggy’ – it makes big paving slabs and not cobbles. This wonderful object had not come to the Shiants from Iona.

I then took it on to one of the world’s leading experts in early Christian sculpture. Ian Fisher works at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland and he has, among other multifarious interests, made a lifetime’s scholarly study of the crosses which are littered around the lochs and islands of the west coast. Many of them are free-standing grave markers, the entire stone cut into the shape of a cross. Others are carved on to boulders or cliff faces, above landing spots or next to wells, sanctifying the daily acts of existence. Ian is known to have a buzzard’s eye for these things, spotting them in obscure mossy declivities where no one has thought to look before. The map of early Christian presence in the Hebrides has thickened and grown thanks to his years of labour.

When I brought the Shiant stone into his Edinburgh office, Ian’s eyes quite literally shone with delight. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, his hands grasping it, moving his palms carefully over the roughened surface. ‘Yes, yes,’ as if it were a home-coming. The stone had only been out of the ground ten days and had already found a godfather.

Straight away, of course, he knew the provenance. ‘This reminds me very much of the stones on Inishmurray,’ Ian said, half-cradling the stone, allowing his fingers to explore its rough and dented surfaces. A book came down from the crowded shelf, was flicked open to the relevant page, and there was a photograph and an engraving of this very stone. But it wasn’t this stone. It was its near twin, along with a large collection of about sixty others, in a Columban-age monastery on the small rocky island of Inishmurray off the coast of Sligo. ‘What is Inishmurray made of?’ I asked Dr Fisher. ‘A sandstone, I am told.’ I rang the office of the Geological Survey in Dublin. ‘Hallo, Solid,’ the Irish voice answered. The Solid Geology department could provide the information but it was disappointing. The Inishmurray sandstone is part of the Mourne series, grey and fine-grained, quite different from the Shiant stone.

Nevertheless, the connection was undeniable. In form and in atmosphere, the Inishmurray stones, from a tiny, bare and windswept rocky island three hundred and fifty miles away in Donegal Bay, were, apart from the material itself, indistinguishable from the one we had dug up on the Shiants. The route between them was, quite simply, along the flyways of the barnacle geese. Given good weather, and favourable winds, even Freyja could do it inside a week, or certainly two. And the Inishmurray stones had been long known as beautiful. Many were in the National Museum in Dublin. Another, very like the Shiant stone, had ended up in the Duke of Northumberland’s collections of antiquities in Alnwick Castle.

The stone then went on for yet another interview with another Edinburgh archaeologist, the Irishman John Barber, who has excavated extensively at Iona. He too took the thing into his hands like a doctor with a patient, a stroking investigation in his handling of the relic. He runs a private archaeology company now, hired out to developers, but he was treating this like a sculptor with another man’s work. The ring around the cross had clearly, he thought, been ‘pecked’ with some pick-like tool. But the arms of the cross, had at least in part been made by grinding, perhaps with a piece of flattish stone and some water and a little sand, rubbed backwards and forwards along the chosen line. Very slowly, it was perfectly possible to grind away the lines of which the cross was made. You could see where the inner parts of the v-shaped incision had been polished in the very process of grinding. The work, Barber thought, looking down through his half-moon glasses, might not be entirely finished. One of the arms had been ground deeper than the other. It was ‘country work’ and so was not something, you could safely say, that had emerged, as had the high-figured stone crosses of Iona or the sculptures and illuminations of the great monasteries of Ireland, from a rich and powerful centre. ‘It’s a cross all right,’ he said, ‘no two ways about that. But it is such a simple thing. You couldn’t found a monastery on the basis of this.’ Instead, the Shiant stone had all the other virtues: naivety, simplicity and the unadorned directness of work done by a man on the margins of the known world. This looked, in other words, like the work of a hermit and as likely as not had been done on the Shiants themself.

Still no one knew where it had come from. The sheer spread of Torridonian sandstone made sourcing it a near impossibility. But I needed to know. This thing was the most resonant object ever found on the Shiants and I continued worrying at the problem. Eventually, I realised that if I could find the right person, I could ask one intersecting question which might throw up the answer: was there any place in the Highlands where cobble-making Torridonian sandstone coincided with an early Christian presence? Ian Fisher didn’t know. John Barber didn’t know. I asked John Wood, Senior Archaeologist at the Highland Council in Inverness. He didn’t know but he passed the query on to Patricia Weekes, archaeologist at the Inverness Museum. She didn’t know but asked her colleague, the natural historian Stephen Moran. Moran remembered something, a place he had last seen in 1979, on a footpath along the coast between Applecross and Coillegillie in Wester Ross, on the mainland opposite Skye. There, a few of miles south of Applecross, was a section of the coast on which, as he told me on the phone, ‘the Torridonian outcrops in lovely cushions, in large piles of brownish, pinkish cushions, heaps of them on the shore. They are all sizes, six or eight inches thick, any length you like. I think that might be where your stone comes from.’

It is the best possibility. The monastery at Applecross was founded by the Irish prince and saint Maelrubha in 673. He had been born a Derry man, was educated at Bangor in County Down – no direct connection there with Inishmurray on the Sligo side – and came north with his following of monks to Ross when he was thirty. Having founded Applecross, Maelrubha became the Apostle of Skye and perhaps of Harris and Lewis. The Shiants sit in the very centre of his province. Did a follower of Maelrubha’s, seeking his hermitage in the desert of the ocean, bring a holy stone with him from the founder’s monastery on the mainland and keep it with him at his island hermitage as a symbol of sanctity in a wild world?

As that stone sat in the car beside me and above all as it rested with all my other gear in Freyja’s bilges, acting its part as holy ballast, leant on by the dogs and cushioned by my sleeping bag as I sailed to and from the Shiants that summer, I came to see in it a focus of the kind of eremitic Christianity which had produced it between ten and thirteen centuries ago. As a talisman and companion, I carried the stone with me every time I crossed the Minch. It is a wonderful and powerful object. Its symbolisms are highly concentrated and it sits beside me, now as it must always have done, as a capsule of sacred intensity. It came with a halo of questions. Could I, in any way, approach the mind of the man who had made and treasured it? I could feel his presence on the islands, but could I know in any way what he was like, what ideas filled his mind, what his reasons might have been for being in this place at all? Could I, in other words, draw this individual out of the silence of the past?