Argonauts of the Scottish Isles: Sea-Kayaking Adventures by Robin Lloyd-Jones

Author:Robin Lloyd-Jones [Lloyd-Jones, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Europe, Great Britain, Sports & Recreation, Water Sports, Kayaking, Canoeing, Special Interest, adventure, History, General
ISBN: 9781788853101
Google: K_1zEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2022-06-07T20:35:07+00:00

For myself I would sacrifice snugness for something else: for a very special relationship with the sea, granted only to those who take her measure against their own puny strength.

Mice were rustling amongst the gear outside my tent. On St Kilda, the native mice disappeared after it was evacuated, probably because of competition from the more powerful field-mice. The latter are absent from Lunga and house-mice still live in and around the deserted village. Then eerie cries filled the darkness and strange voices babbled, sang and moaned. At the time, I did not know about the storm petrels which burrow underground, or occupy the ruins. Fraser Darling and J. Morton Boyd in their book The Highlands and Islands subsequently shed light on the matter for me. Referring to the ways of ‘Mother Carey’s chickens’ they wrote: ‘The churring noise in the stormie is one of the comforting things to the human visitor in his nights on a lonely island . . . the birds in the air have an arresting, wild staccato calling, but those in the burrows make an exceptionally sweet ascending trill, which is not often heard.’

Nor did I know of the habits of the Manx shearwater, whose cry is the stuff of nightmares, sounding like an unearthly shriek as of someone being throttled. Could the underground noises made by these birds be the origin of the Norse legends about trolls? An interesting correlation has been shown between the nesting sites of shear waters and place-names with ‘troll’ in them. Trollaval on Rùm, and Trollkarpin the Faeroes, for example, are both regular breeding places for shearwaters.

But, with no such explanation to steer my thoughts, they drifted towards treacherous whirlpools of imagination. I concentrated hard on that memorable sunset view from the summit. I began counting all the islands we had seen: Jura, Colonsay, Iona, Staffa, Ulva, Gometra, Bac Beag, Bac Mor . . . I had reached nineteen when I fell asleep.

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