Wherever you turn on Orkney the sea is at your back, linking the islands with its junctions of light. It is not enough that the islands are already so scattered. The sea is always gnawing at them, looking for avenues to open up, fractures in the rock to prise apart. The sea up here has myriad ways to breach the land. It showers the western cliffs with its salty mists and peoples the thin soils with its kin: creeping willow, eyebright, sea thrift, sea plantain, all plants that love the sea’s breath on them.
It is a trickster sea that comes ashore with subterfuge. Orkney children once made imaginary farms with scallop shells for sheep, gaper shells for pigs, as if the sea, like a toymaker, had carved each shell and left it on the shore, waiting for a passing child. And at night selchies dock in the deep geos and patter ashore in their wet skins to slip amongst the dozing kye.
I arrived on Orkney in the dregs of a May gale. Low pressure swelling in from the Atlantic, hurting buildings and trees in their new growth, ransacking birds’ nests. Rushing across Scotland and speeding up over Orkney as if the gale had hit a patch of ice. The hardest thing of all up here, I’d heard, was learning to endure the wind, worse than the long winter darkness. It is a fidgety wind, rarely still, boisterous, folding sheds and hen houses, raking the islands’ lochs into inland seas.
This morning the wind still has a sinewy strength. Lapwings are lifted off the fields like flakes of ash. Eric is telling me about the valley. He is alert to the slightest wren-flick through the heather, seeing the birds before they arrive. When he speaks the wind gashes at his words, gets inside them. The hill is shaking with wind. We pass the kestrel’s nest and Eric points out a clump of rushes on the hillside where a hen harrier is sitting on her eggs. She is invisible on her bed of rush and ling. Her eggs are pale white, polished, stained with the colours of the nest material. If you could see like a hawk you would notice her bright yellow eyes, framed by a white eyebrow on a flat owl-like face. The face made rounder by the thick neck ruff that flickers bronze and almond-white like the ring around a planet.
Then Eric is leaving and I don’t feel I have thanked him enough. I watch him descend the moor, walking quickly along the gleaming track towards the farm and the car like a skiff bobbing amongst the lit puddles. After he has gone there is a sudden rush of rain. But the wind is so strong it seems to hold the rain up, stops it reaching the ground, flinging the shower away, crashing it into the upper slopes of the hill. Only my face and hair are briefly wet; the rest of me stays dry, as if I’d poked my head into a cloud. I have never seen rain behave this way. Months later I came across a list of beautiful old Orkney dialect words for different types of rain and wondered which described the behaviour of that wind-blown shower: driv, rug, murr, muggerafeu, hagger, dagg, rav, hellyiefer … A rug, perhaps, meaning ‘a strong pull’, rain that was being pulled, yanked away by the wind.
I had not thanked Eric nearly enough. For a walk like that will have its legacies, store itself in you like a muscle’s memory. Walking up through layers of birds, Eric explaining the narrative of the moor, where last year’s merlins hid their nest, where cattle had punctuated the dyke and damaged the delicate hillside. Till we reached a fold in the hills, the ‘nesting station’, where the hen harriers had congregated their nests, and we could go no further.
I know of other walks, like the one with Eric that morning, where their legacy is precious and defining, walks born out of that experience of guiding or being guided. My great-grandfather, Seton Gordon, in the early summer of 1906, when he was only twenty, walked into the Grampian Mountains with his boyhood hero, the naturalist Richard Kearton. That walk began with Gordon telegramming Kearton with the news he had found a ptarmigan’s nest, one of the few birds, Gordon knew, that Kearton had never photographed. Kearton packed hastily and rushed to catch the next train to Scotland. Early June, travelling north through strata of light; a 600-mile journey from Surrey to Aberdeenshire, where Gordon met Kearton off the train at Ballater. They decide to climb the mountain at night to avoid the heat of the day, setting off in the dusk, the smell of pine and birch all around them. Kearton is lame (he was left permanently lame after a childhood accident) and has to walk slowly, stopping often to rest. They toil up the mountain through the thin June dark, Kearton bent like a hunchback under the huge camera he is carrying (the heaviest Gordon has ever seen). At 1.45 a.m. a redstart’s song spurs them on.
They reach the snowfield beside the ptarmigan’s nest at 6 a.m. The sun is up and bright, the short grass sparkles. Kearton assembles his camera on its tripod and begins, cautiously, to crawl towards the sitting bird. She is a close sitter, Gordon reassures him, and if he stalks her very slowly she should sit tight. The next few moments are so precarious: Kearton exposes a number of plates and after each exposure he edges a little closer towards the ptarmigan. He stops when he is just nine feet away. He can hear his heart thumping in his chest. One last exposure, that’s it! He is close enough to see the bird breathing and the dew pearled across her back.
Seventy years later, the year before he died, Gordon was still able to recall that walk, writing about it in an article for Country Life magazine. The details of that day still fresh and resonant: the brightness of the sun that morning, the dew along the ptarmigan’s back, the cost of the telegram he sent to Kearton (sixpence).
Richard Kearton’s photographs of birds, taken at the end of the nineteenth century (many with his brother, Cherry Kearton), were to my great-grandfather what Gordon’s own photographs of birds are to me, jewels of inspiration. I grew up surrounded by Gordon’s black and white photographs of birds: golden eagles, greenshanks, gannets, dotterels … peering down at me from their teak frames. I liked to take the frames off the wall, wipe the dust from the glass, then turn the pictures over to read the captions Gordon had written on the back of each print:
– Female eagle ‘parasoling’ eaglets. The eaglet is invisible on the other side of the bird.
– The golden eagle brings a heather branch to the eyrie.
Whenever I have moved house the first pictures I hang on the new walls are two small photographs Gordon took, one of a jackdaw pair, black and pewter, the other of a hooded crow in its sleeveless silver waistcoat. Under a cupboard I keep a great cache of Gordon’s photographs in an ancient marble-patterned canvas folder. You have to untie three string bows to open the folder, and every time I do so a fragment of the canvas frays and disintegrates. My young children like to open the folder with me, and the process of going through the photographs with them – identifying the birds and mammals – has become a lovely ritual. The photographs are beautiful. I am still amazed that anyone could get so close to a wild bird as Gordon did, and photograph it in such exquisite detail. In one photograph, taken in 1922, a golden eagle lands on its nest with a grouse in its talons as a cloud of flies spumes out from an old carcass on the eyrie, as if the landing eagle has triggered an explosion. There is a stunning photograph he took of a pair of greenshanks just at the moment the birds change over incubation duties at their nest. One bird steps over the nest, ready to settle, as its mate pulls itself off the clutch of four eggs. The timing of the photograph, to capture the precise moment of the changeover, is extraordinary. The patterning on the eggs matches the patterns down the greenshank’s breast as if one has imprinted – stained – the other.
Along with Richard Kearton and another wildlife photographer, R. B. Lodge (both important influences on Gordon), Gordon was in the vanguard of early bird photography in this country. Cycling around Deeside in the first years of the twentieth century with his half-plate Thornton Pickard Ruby camera with Dallmeyer lens, Gordon took many exceptional photographs of birds and the wider fauna of the region. Upland species were his speciality: snow bunting, curlew, red-throated diver, ptarmigan … Many of these photographs he published in the books he wrote. Twenty-seven books in all, the bulk of them about the wildlife and landscapes of the Highlands and Islands. His books take up a wall of shelving in my house; greens and browns and pale silver spines, embossed with gold lettering: Birds of the Loch and Mountain; The Charm of the Hills; In Search of Northern Birds; Afoot in the Hebrides; Wanderings of a Naturalist; The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland; Amid Snowy Wastes; Highways and Byways in the West Highlands … I love their Edwardian-sounding