View of the retreat on Holy Island from the mainland

While staying in the southernmost pincer of Lamlash Bay on Arran, I looked out at the enormous hump of Holy Island, (not to be confused with the more famous Holy Island of Lindisfarne) and plotted a trip there. It was a few days before the boat resumed its run to the island. In Lamlash’s Co-Op, the alpaca wool of my hat attracted the interest of a Buddhist monk. He too was keen to get back to Holy Island. His partner had recently died. Together they were responsible for the striking rock paintings that dot the path around the island.

He pointed to my hat and asked me if I had been to Tibet. I hadn’t.
“Tibet is not an island,” I replied.
He looked confused.
“I only go to islands,” I explained.

One of numerous striking rock paintings on Holy Island

In order to become a Buddhist monk, one must undertake the long retreat of three years and three months. Certainly this man, I think his name was Christopher, had the spacey air of a man who had spent a lot of time on a remote island. Watching him navigate a supermarket, I coined the simile of “looking as pained as a Buddhist in the Co-op, trying to chose between Flora and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” The aisles enforced bathos on this remote islander. He was sullied with his earthly concern. Yet he needed it. He needed it for his toast.

For three days, Holy Island remained coy under a habit of cloud. I sat on the beach, angry with lust for it. At moon rise, its silhouette was that of a narrow waist and voluptuous hips. The wing beats of gulls ricocheted across the bay and at dusk, the seals lolled in the shallows, turned their tails up and watched me sulk. The world turned within me, moved onto the next tooth of the cog. Finally, the skirt of cloud was hitched up, inviting us in, and we were able to take the boat across the bay.

The Holy Island project began in 1992 when the island was purchased by the Rokpa Trust. The peace centre on the North of the island is open to people of all faiths, but you must follow the five golden rules; while on the island, you are requested not to kill, steal, lie, intoxicate or fornicate, at least until you are back on Arran. The peace centre is on the retreat circuit, a path followed by people whose sense of well-being requires that the world be kept at arm’s length. On arrival at Holy Island, I had barely traversed the mandala garden before I overheard two self-examiners discussing the inevitable politics of communes as they had arisen in the various retreats they had embarked upon. Nothing I heard made me change my opinion that all communes are doomed to acrimony over lentil allocation.

The condition of contemporary life – its incessant chatter, its deprived public space – turns our faces once again out to sea, in search of peace

Just to walk around the island was retreat enough for me. A path takes you from North to South, where there is an International Women’s Buddhist retreat, then turns over the low hump of the peak and back down the other side. Along the walk, there is a grove of young trees planted for the lost children of Dunblane, a hermit’s cave, and Christopher’s striking, colourful rock paintings of Buddhist icons.

Retreat is a possibility modern man worries about on a daily basis, the way you tongue a cavity and consider the dentist. No one wants to be suburban. You want to live extremes. Either be the junction box through which all the currents of the metropolis flow, or live in a dark cave on an island a few miles out from another island. The condition of contemporary life – its incessant chatter, its deprived public space – turns our faces once again out to sea, in search of peace.

Against such romantic idealisations, there are the realities of island life. As Samuel Johnson wrote of Talisker on the isle of Skye; “Talisker is the place beyond all that I have seen, from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded; and where the hermit might expect to grow old in meditation, without possibility of disturbance or interruption.”

In For The Islands I Sing, a fragmentary autobiography by the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, he considers the sea valley of Rackwick on the isle of Hoy – “a green bowl gently tilted between the hills and the ocean”. “We must always be on our guard not to romanticise: life in a place like Rackwick must always have been stark and dangerous and uncomfortable.”

That kind of life is more meaningful by far than the lives of people who set out each morning for an office by train

Islands have been used as prisons. Consider Alcatraz or its forebear, the prison isle of Chateau D’If off the coast of Marseilles. It was on the Chateau D’If that Dumas imprisoned The Count Of Monte Cristo (even in Dumas’ lifetime, sightseers journeyed to the isle to see the cell in which the Count was held, and so one was constructed, along with a hole from which the character supposedly escaped). The prison is a forbidding construction. The boat drops you at the base of a rock staircase zig-zagging up the side of the stark fortress. The sun hammers away at the anvil of your skull. You get off the boat and immediately want to get back on again.

Still, we are people of extremes. Could we not cope with the privations of island life, especially as we would now have a few tricks of modern technology up our sleeve? Let Mackay Brown spell out our case for becoming an islander:

“Yet I believe that their closeness to the elements, their pursuit of whale and herring and their anxious tending of the corn all summer, the winter flame on the hearth that their own hands had dug from the moor, while – if the harvest of sea and land had yielded an adequate bounty – the cupboard was well stocked till spring; that kind of life is more meaningful by far than the lives of people who set out each morning for an office by train with The Times to read; a holiday in Spain with wine and sun the only oasis in their desert.”

Back >> Islands | page 1

The cliff at Foula as featured in The Edge Of The World (1937)

What is the promise of an island? Isolation? Certainly contemporary fears stoke in all our hearts a secret desire to hide away, with a good few miles of water between us and them. An island promises untapped resources. Fantasy Island. Treasure Island. Stand on the cliff and look out at the promise of an island, and you understand some of the urges that drove the ancient peoples to make perilous sea journeys to them.

The myth of a Great Flood appears in many cultures, not just in the story of Noah in the Old Testament. The Aborigines of central Australia say that in the Great Flood, man retreated to the mountain tops. Hawaiian legend tells of a time when the sea entirely overcame the land, aside from one peak on Maunakea, where two people were spared. In the Great Flood, mountain tops become islands. The peak of Ararat where the Ark tottered is the Ur-island, the point from which Man started all over again.

As soon as you land on one island, you are hunting on the horizon for another. There is always another island. This is an ancient rule. When hopping between the islands of the Western Isles and Outer Hebrides, I read of an axe-head discovered in the moorland of Lewis, dating from somewhere between 3500 and 3000BC, the late Neolithic Age. The material it was made of – porcellanite – is found in Northern Ireland, suggesting that there was trade between the Lewis and Ireland. Trade across two hundred miles of Atlantic Ocean, with no map, no lighthouse, no lifejackets! Was the prospect of a barter solely what drove the ancient peoples to make such a trip, or was it the irresistible prospect of landing on another isle.

The island is a grave, opening into the great void of the Atlantic

Admittedly in 3000BC, the climate of the Western Isles was warmer and drier than it is today. This was before the climate change of 1500BC, when higher rainfall waterlogged the soil, turning it into recalcitrant peat. The islands were more bucolic. Treacherous prehistoric journeys from isle to isle make more sense if you reckon in a more hospitable climate, a more fertile soil. Isn’t that a prospect? A fecund virgin isle (for some reason, islands stoke my libido – we’ll consider that question in more depth later, unless you prefer to draw a discrete veil over it now). Once the Western Isles became clad with peat, it was harder for the crofters to scratch a living. As Dr Samuel Johnson remarked in his A Journey To The Western Islands Of Scotland, the islands of the Hebrides have little to recommend them unless one is a “mere lover of naked nature”. (There – you see – his sexual turn of phrase shows that even Dr Johnson felt the stirrings of isle lust somewhere below his enormous gut.)

Perhaps an adolescent viewing of The Wicker Man, set on the fictional Summerisle, where every young lad was obliged to lose their virginity to Britt Ekland, is the crucial influence here

The endpoint of Dr Johnson’s journey was the spiritual island of Iona. Boswell, his traveling companion, was very keen to visit the isle, supposed burial place of the Kings Of Scotland and the point from which St Columba spread Christianity to the wild highlanders. Iona is a mere kerb of land off the coast of Mull, reached today by a small ferry from Fionnphort. It is an island just beyond an island, a hop and a skip from the mainland. This makes traveling to Iona feel even more like an adventure.

When I visited, on 11 September 2001, the beach at Fionnphort was riddled with jellyfish, a dozen flesh Frisbees. Down in the narrow sound, fishing boats meditated at anchor.  The silence was prehistoric. The ferry to Iona is full of Catholic pilgrims to the sacred isle. It pulls up by a line of whitewashed cottages and the island’s fine hotel, The Argyll. The stone of Iona is rich in iron, and at sundown the Argyll looks like it is constructed out of chunks of steak, with the mortar resembling the marbling of fat. Take the rainslick Street Of The Dead through the ruined nunnery and you come to the grounds of the Abbey.  Sitting out as the last of the light lurks above the distant hills of Mull, one feels negligible. A bystander in the eternal war between the sea, the sky and the rock, that red rock, stained with the blood of Oran, a pictish convert buried alive in the foundations of the Abbey by his friend St Columba. When the burial was done, Columba decided he wanted to see the face of his friend one last time. Heaving the earth aside, he found Oran still alive and uttering such blasphemous descriptions of heaven and hell that he was briskly buried once again. There is a lot of flesh in the rock. The Kings of Ireland, Scotland and Norway were buried here. The island is a grave, opening into the great void of the Atlantic.

"There is a lot of flesh in the rock"

There is always another island, another stepping stone. At Iona, just as I was smugly downing malts in the bar of Argyll, enjoying that edge-of-the-world frisson, I learnt of the remotest inhabited island in the British Isles; the isle of Foula, separated from the Shetland Isles by fourteen miles of ocean. A place so remote that its people still observe the Julian Calendar, celebrating Old Yule on January 6th with the New Year not beginning until January 13, and so storm-tossed that the ferry has to be winched out of the water in case it is dashed against the harbour. One of its sea cliffs rises to over 1200 feet, topped by a rock platform that hangs over the abyss, a natural diving board. It is this cliff that features at the opening of Michael Powell’s film The Edge Of The World about the evacuation of St Kilda (Powell wanted to film on St Kilda but it proved impossible so Foula stood in for it). Two young virile men race to the top of the peak to decide whether they will abandon the island or not. But one of them, taking a short cut, doesn’t make it and falls to his death.

The loss of a young man is catastrophic to the community, unleashing the forces that will lead them to abandon the isle. At its peak, St Kilda supported two hundred people. By the time of its evacuation on 29 August 1930, the population was down to thirty (after an outbreak of smallpox in 1720, Foula’s population was down to three). In Powell’s film, the modern world in the form of trawlers provide too much of a lure to the young people. Also, they lack the medical resources to care for a young baby. In Powell’s fiction, the islanders leave the place “where life as our fathers knew it is no longer possible”.

St Kilda had been inhabited for 4000 years. Go and find a map. Look how far out it is! One hundred and twelve miles west of the mainland, forty one miles west of the Outer Hebrides. Sea storms would isolate it for nine months of the year. How far out could you go there? Mentally, that is. And socially. Is that the libidinous appeal of the island? Being cut off from normal propriety? Perhaps an adolescent viewing of The Wicker Man, set on the fictional Summerisle, where every young lad was obliged to lose their virginity to Britt Ekland, is the crucial influence here. Yet, with their low populations, on these islands you were obliged to breed. Urgently breed. And young men are wanted, needed, for survival. Teenagers are useless in cities but on islands, they are the ones who can climb down the steep cliffs to fetch the puffin’s eggs for breakfast.

"There is always another island"

In my imagination, Foula is a terrifying place, a mist-shrouded rock with Atlantic winds speeding you over its sheer cliffs. As Samuel Johnson noted, the monks had a habit of building their retreats in the most beautiful of spots, and they never really bothered Foula. That there is one further island than Foula, the abandoned St Kilda, the two bound together by Michael Powell’s film, makes me shiver.

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