A Shadow Above by Joe Shute

Author:Joe Shute
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

As fast as I can, I pack away my tent and clamber back up the cliffs to safety. I look behind me to see the seal, but it has already dived back down and been swallowed up in the mist hanging over the water. I stand there for a while, watching the water rising and wondering what would have happened, had I slipped into my sleeping bag and fallen into a deep sleep? As the water begins to lap at the same ledge where I had cooked my supper only a few hours before, I turn away. Eventually I decide to re-pitch my tent close to the whalebone monument, content it has been there for at least a couple of centuries without being washed away. I spend the night high up without any shelter from the elements, and the wind gnawing at my guy-ropes. But really, what do a few hundred years mean at the edge of ancient Orkney? What narrow places humans and their history occupy when the tides come marching in.

* * *

Mid-August, morning, and time hangs still in the constant light. The frothy clouds of meadowsweet lining the road verges and coastal heaths are slowly turning to brown, a sure sign that the dark months are coming soon. The clifftops are studded with purple Scottish Primrose, like the ones I saw in Caithness, slowly wilting from their second, and final, bloom of the year. Bumblebees drone over bird’s-foot trefoil and yarrow flowers as small and intricate as pin cushions. We tread between white stars of grass of Parnassus, our boots squashing into the spongy earth. The Atlantic Ocean booms 18m (60ft) below us. Peat and salt tangs in the air.

We are aiming for a fissure in the clifftops, the length of a football pitch but only 3 or so metres across. These cliffs feel the full force of the worst storms the Atlantic can conjure, and centuries of salt spray have carved gaps into the mainland as neat and narrow as a slice of cake. The Vikings called these ramnagills or ramnageos – the ramna an Old Norse word for the ravens that nested there, the gill meaning a deep glen or a ravine. The cartographers who mapped these islands, pushing north in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion, kept the same name for these ravines. One can still find them on modern maps dotted along the coastline. As with so much of Orkney, the land the Vikings claimed remains their own.

I am walking with a man called Chris Booth, a quiet, contemplative figure with a thick, grey beard and walking stick who knows more about ravens than anybody I have previously met. He and his wife, Jean, moved to Orkney in 1969 where he worked as a dentist. Ever since, he has been studying the islands’ ravens, and while he refutes the word ‘expert’, he is an impressive authority on the birds. His interest was piqued as a youngster growing up in Cornwall in the late 1940s. These

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.