The first sea creatures I saw as I rounded Westray’s northern headlands were seals. Whiskered snouts protruded from surf in almost every inlet. I’d soon discover Orcadian seals to be the friendliest and most playful I’d ever crossed paths with, but that’s not because their relations with humans have been peaceable. Two days later I suddenly realised how many small structures I’d been paddling past were placed with sight lines to intertidal rocks where seals lounge. They were shooting stations (figure 3.3). Seal killing was once an enticing pursuit for Orcadian crofters: a single sealskin sometimes had the monetary value of a week’s farm labour. And a seal served many other purposes, providing food, warmth, light from oil lamps and even protection for harvest machinery: anything vulnerable to rust was coated in seal fat for the winter. There is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to see use of these marine-life fats and oils as ‘traditional’ or even ‘barbaric’ rather than ‘modern’: it was oil from north-east Atlantic basking sharks that lubricated moving parts in the Apollo moon missions.
It was not so much the import of cheap oils as new passions for wild animals that put an end to the seal trade. But recordings in the archive suggest the economic benefits of the seal to have changed rather than died out. One Westray resident, Alex Costie, recalled the end of seal hunting:
All the greenies, the likes of Greenpeace, were protesting so much … that totally destroyed the markets, but I have discovered nowadays how easy it is to get money for showing a tourist a seal that I am now the most reformed seal hunter you would ever come across.
By the time I reached the end of my first day’s travel I was at the end of Westray’s western peninsula, Noup Head. I climbed the cliffs of this dramatic promontory and slept beneath an imposing Victorian lighthouse. I was back among gannets. Shortly before I came in to land, one eccentric bird approached my kayak and clamped its beak around the bow before swimming alongside for a while (figure 3.6). When I watched them from the cliffs, these tardy birds – the last of the colony to leave for the ocean – were exceptionally bad-tempered, like autumn wasps, protecting their enclaves from each other with a noisy vigour I hadn’t witnessed before.
Next morning I awoke surrounded by half a dozen curlew and, further away, a flock of lapwing. I steeled myself to the task of imagining them as breakfast. Westray folk once used dried strips of seal hide as rope for lowering islanders down from precisely the spot I’d slept to snare birds on the cliff face. In the archive, I listened to discussions of the subtle ethical considerations behind the collecting of eggs and wildfowl. The first brood of lapwing eggs, Tommy Rendall said, was always gathered in, but then lapwings were off limits for the year: the second litter, being further into the summer, was more likely to be raised successfully than the first. I was intrigued to find that some of those interviewed had not entirely shaken off old habits of seeing wildfowl as food:
The guillemots that came here, they still come here … you’ll no get any more here unless you build more cliffs because the cliffs are full of them … It was always a great source of food for the old folk you see. No expense, you didna have any vets’ bills or anything … you know it is very dark-coloured flesh that’s in them … sometimes they were just stewed but usually they were just boiled, you know boiled until the flesh fell off the bones, fried up with onions.
We used to eat eider ducks more than guillemots because there were more eider ducks in our area … and cormorants was better still, especially the brown ones, the juvenile ones. The meat in that is tender, better than any of the other birds I would say, apart from curlews … but nobody seems to eat that sort of thing nowadays. They are just dying of old age and going to waste.
As subsistence activities, these practices tend to evade the historical record. Never in British history has there been a market for the meat of young brown cormorants, however tender. The community activity of catching spoots on the biggest ebb tides of the year (for which children were even taken out of school) could produce a huge surplus of razor clams, but without refrigeration there was no potential for that to be exported either. Children might make a few pence from collecting whelks or catching coastal rabbits but that was the limit of such trades. These shoreline practices, unrecorded in tallies of import and export, are the great forgotten industries of Atlantic coasts. They were local, but far from peripheral because life itself depended on them.
The most marketable of traditional coastal pursuits is unsurprisingly the one that has survived. Every day I saw small creeling boats, most of which gave me a hearty wave as they motored through the tides. The potential to exchange lobsters for money means that not just fishermen or farmers have kept creels; for two centuries at least, almost everyone could supplement their income in this way. Many islanders recall collecting lobsters with particular pleasure: ‘The smell o’ the sea, a creel coming in with a lobster flopping, the tail banging about, it is a grand sound, a grand sight.’ Some added that they didn’t eat lobsters themselves (‘well, perhaps just a small one’): these were seen not as food but money.
After Noup Head, Westray’s dark cliffs alternate with gentle grassy slopes and long white sands. Farmed extensively but spectacularly un-intensively, each of these landscapes is stalked by sheep and large tawny cows. Between the modern farms on my skylines were many other abandoned buildings dating from a time of much more intensive usage of this landscape. Such ruins, with their sagging and crumpled flagstone roofs, attest to the slow exodus from the island. From over 2,000 residents in 1880, Westray had around 1,000 by 1940 and little over 500 by the turn of the millennium.
The 1930s were key to this process because two island industries collapsed. One was herring. From the mid-nineteenth century, fleets of drifters, like pods of orcas today, followed herring from the Western Isles to Orkney and Shetland. Their crews lived on ship and had limited contact with islanders, but Westray men took on the task of keeping fleets supplied with coal. The herring season saw the arrival of hundreds of women who gutted the fish. Unlike the men, they became fleetingly, precariously, integrated into Orkney life. As one islander, Jack Scott, recalled, ‘suddenly, one beautiful day in summer 300 girls would appear … they were Gaelic-speakers and we didn’t know what they were saying to us’. Scott went on to recount the pranks these women played on young island boys. The gutters were also associated with the arrival of exciting things: new Harris tweed suits for schoolboys and, for adults, exotic goods like cherry brandy and peppermint wine. After a summer of singing and accordion-playing the women were gone: ‘it felt as flat as a flounder when they went’. Another island resident, Meg Fiddler, recalled the legacy they left behind in knitwear to last the year. Many photographs of these 1920s gutters show fashionably dressed women who look more like film stars than modern prejudice against the smell of herring might lead people to assume. A slump in herring numbers signalled the industry’s demise. In 1939, the buildings used by gutters and sales agents were commandeered for the war effort and, for Orcadians at least, the industry was dead.
Kelp was another rich trade that hit hard times: this was an export entirely dependent on the whims of distant industries. At the peaks of a kelp boom whole families helped build huge piles for burning. Westray and Papay were as alive with the smoke and fire of industry as Manchester or Coalbrookdale. Orkney was unique in making large local fortunes from kelp. Elsewhere, aristocratic lairds considered trade unseemly so rented the shore to incoming kelp crews. But Orkney’s merchant lairds pursued the trade with their resident workforce. These landowners could manipulate labour with ease because many Orcadian tenants paid rent in labour rather than money or goods. Their lives involved being constantly on ca’, moving at the laird’s command between tasks of land, coast and sea. This is one reason why remnants of the kelp trade litter Orcadian shores. Most such ruins are from the first