Shaped By Extremity

SUE WILSON meets the author of the first full-length travelogue of Shetland since the Victorian era

IT’S ALMOST 140 years since someone last wrote a book-length travelogue about Shetland, a fact which, to present-day author Ron McMillan, suggested “either a niche in the market waiting to be filled – or no market at all. Obviously I’m hoping it’s the former. . .”

The eventual successor to John T. Reid’s Art Rambles in Shetland (1869) has just been published by the Dingwall-based Sandstone Press, in the shape of McMillan’s first book, Between Weathers: Travels in 21st Century Shetland, based mainly on a five-week trip to the islands in autumn 2005.

While visiting Britain’s northernmost archipelago involves a fairly major departure for any non-native, McMillan’s journey marked a particularly striking contrast with his customary bailiwick. Born in Paisley in 1958, for most of the past three decades he has been based in the Far East, including Japan, Seoul, Hong Kong and now Bangkok.

As a freelance journalist and photographer, he has made more than 50 visits to mainland China and five to North Korea, with his photographs from the latter appearing in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times.

People think it’s the other end of the world, but it quickly became clear to me just how cosmopolitan a place it is, just how many connections it has to so many places all over the planet

It was in 1999, during a few years’ sojourn back in Scotland, that McMillan was invited along on a press trip to Shetland, organised by the then Scottish Tourist Board. In Between Weathers, he recalls being “whisked around in a minibus on a tight schedule so liberally sprinkled with alcohol that much of the trip occupies a black hole in the memory banks.” Nonetheless, the islands made a forcible enough impression to plant the seed of the book.

“It struck me very quickly that this would be a great place to write about at length,” McMillan says. “It just immediately seemed so different to the rest of Scotland and Britain, in both its geography and its culture. One thing that particularly interested me was the way Shetland people have such a strong sense of their own history, of what’s gone on there even in the very distant past, but it was obvious in lots of ways that there was never going to be any shortage of things to see and write about.”

It took a few more years for the idea to germinate and bear fruit, but in late September 2005, McMillan at last found himself aboard the Aberdeen-Lerwick ferry – heading north in a Force 9 gale. “Autumn wasn’t the best time, weather-wise, to be travelling around Shetland,” he acknowledges ruefully, “especially by thumb.”

The decision to hitch-hike, however, amply fulfilled McMillan’s hopes of thereby meeting the locals, and also led to numerous encounters with Shetlanders’ deservedly legendary generosity towards visitors. A particular debt of gratitude, for instance, is expressed towards the nameless driver who, after McMillan left his precious woolly hat in the car, re-appeared at his lodgings the very same night to return it.

McMillan’s descriptions of his exposure to the full, dramatic vagaries of the Shetland climate also contribute crucially towards conveying the character of a place so fundamentally shaped, physically and culturally, by the elements. It was in Shetland, after all, on its northernmost island of Unst, that the UK wind-speed record of 177mph was logged in 1962 – moments before the measuring equipment itself blew away.

Similarly, just after the oil tanker MV Braer collided with the islands’ southern tip in January 1993, the coastline was saved by the deepest depression ever recorded in the north-east Atlantic: 909 millibars, whipping up nearly a fortnight of hurricane-force winds, which dispersed the spilled crude more effectively than any human agency.

Cataclysmic storms feature prominently, too, in the book’s wealth of older historical lore, gleaned from both locals’ accounts and library researches. There’s the one that left the Titanic’s sister ship, the Oceania – the length of two football pitches – grounded off Shetland’s westernmost isle of Foula in September 1914, before further tempests took her to the bottom three weeks later.

Or the one in July 1881 that blew up from a summer sky and claimed the lives of 58 fishermen, out in their open sixareen boats, leaving hundreds of women and children bereft of a breadwinner. Or the ones that sometimes batter the sea right through Da Sneck o’ Da Smaallie, a deep, semi-subterranean ravine stretching 150 yards inland, from Foula’s towering Atlantic cliffs to the midst of a glacial valley, creating eerie, gale-tossed eruptions of spume traditionally construed as the work of the trow – Shetland’s smaller, more mischievous cousin of Nordic trolls – for whom the Sneck is named.

Fittingly, then, it was this same climatic theme that gave McMillan his title, it being the Anglicised version of the Shetland phrase bequeathed him on the very last, unseasonably beautiful day of his trip: “It’s a day atween waddirs.”

The central strength of McMillan’s book is his skill in evoking, through a pacy, humour-laced, deceptively straightforward account of his five weeks’ meanderings, the multi-dimensional ways in which Shetland’s long, complex and singular history – up to and including the present – is inscribed in its landscapes, language and people.

Taking his lead from a community where many inhabitants remain as au fait with the details of centuries-old shipwrecks as they are with the contents of that week’s Shetland Times – and can likely fill you in on aspects of unique local geology, too – he consistently, though subtly, contextualises his narrative with era-spanning layers of evidently assiduous research.

As McMillan freely acknowledges throughout, much of Shetland’s mystique to outsiders, especially in the 21st century, lies in the same geographical extremity that has moulded its physical and human fabric. At the same time, he energetically sets about demolishing the associated preconceptions of backward insularity, with copious diverse instances of how Shetlanders, by combined dint of location and prevailing poverty, have always been world travellers, and have always welcomed the world to their rocky, windswept shores.

“People think it’s the other end of the world,” McMillan says. “But it quickly became clear to me just how cosmopolitan a place it is, just how many connections it has to so many places all over the planet. I’d say I’m fairly well travelled – I’ve been travelling for about 30 years – but I met people there who’d been places I couldn’t have contemplated getting myself to. Almost every day I’d meet someone who’d tell me about Africa, or the South Atlantic, places I didn’t know a thing about.”

Equally, there was the sixty-something man with whom he spent an unforgettable afternoon, who – apart from being born on Shetland’s main central island, and returning there for a week’s visit in his 30s – had never once left Foula, by then home to fewer than 30 people. Described with equal respect and warmth as “that rarity, a bona fide eccentric who cares not one jot what the rest of us think”, Eric Isbister mightn’t have had mains water or electricity, but he did have an extraordinarily extensive and comprehensive record collection (played on a system powered by car batteries), meanwhile enjoying international – albeit highly specialist – renown for his exquisite hand-carved models of bygone merchant ships.

“As well as being so strongly conscious of their own history and identity,” McMillan says, “almost all the Shetlanders I met seemed incredibly world-aware – in a way that an awful lot of mainland urban Scots today just aren’t.”

Between Weathers is published by Sandstone Press.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

Links

• Sandstone Press
• Between Weathers
• Ron McMillan