David Gange - The Frayed Atlantic Edge

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © David Gange 2019

Cover art by Joe McLaren

Maps by Martin Brown

David Gange asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008225117

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008225124

Version: 2020-06-19

For Llinos, who taught me to love big seas and small languages

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Copyright Copyright Dedication Preface Introduction: A Journey in the Making Shetland (July) Orkney (August) The Western Isles (September/October) Sutherland and Assynt (November) A Mountain Passage (December) The Inner Sound and Skye (January) Argyll and Ulster (February/March) Connacht (April) Munster (May) Bardsey to the Bristol Channel (June) Cornwall (July) The View from the Sea Picture Section Notes Index Acknowledgements About the Author About the Publisher William Collins An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019 Copyright © David Gange 2019 Cover art by Joe McLaren Maps by Martin Brown David Gange asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008225117 Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008225124 Version: 2020-06-19

Dedication

Preface

Introduction: A Journey in the Making

Shetland (July)

Orkney (August)

The Western Isles (September/October)

Sutherland and Assynt (November)

A Mountain Passage (December)

The Inner Sound and Skye (January)

Argyll and Ulster (February/March)

Connacht (April)

Munster (May)

Bardsey to the Bristol Channel (June)

Cornwall (July)

The View from the Sea

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

THIS JOURNEY INVOLVED arriving, dripping and bedraggled, in dozens of coastal communities. When I set out, I hadn’t imagined just how generous the people whose homes and workplaces I dampened would be: without such openness, particularly evident on small islands, this project would never have got far. I learned as much through long evenings of discussion as through the other three resources on which the book is based: libraries, archives and the observation of land and sea from the kayak. It wasn’t just the spectacles of sea cliffs, nor the dramas of ocean weather, but also those social occasions that meant I ended the journey with greatly intensified enthusiasm for scattered Atlantic islands like Foula, Barraigh and Thoraí.

Such conversations worked to strengthen the conviction I set out with: that British and Irish histories are usually written inside out, perpetuating the misconception that today’s land-bound geographies have existed forever. Despite the efforts of authors such as Barry Cunliffe, whose Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (2001) inspired much debate among historians, the significance of coasts is consistently underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of their histories is rarely explored.

This book sets out to put some of that imbalance right, showing not only that Atlantic geographies have been crucial to British and Irish life but that they continue to be so. It is structured by region, because part of its purpose is to show how similar ingredients of wind, waves and rock have been transformed into entirely different island and coastal cultures by the divergent processes of history. The chapters were written in order, while I travelled, so my process of learning runs in parallel to the reader’s experience of moving through the book: burrowing gradually deeper into the many ways in which the shorelines are significant. This allows the narrative to follow a trajectory in which the opening chapters evoke the act of kayaking, establishing sounds, smells, sights and stories of the venerable tradition of travelling at sea level. Only gradually does the balance shift towards historical research, literary criticism and argument, revealing the implications of new perspectives picked up through slow travel.

The final section, ‘The View from the Sea’, completes that transition. It switches to a different register as it unpicks historical significance from the chapters. It argues that the whole shape of British history is transformed by granting Atlantic coasts and islands a central rather than marginal role. The implications of key historical moments are problematised or reversed. The so-called Enlightenment, for instance, might best be interpreted as the triumph of a few cities – Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Birmingham – at the expense of other regions. For coastal communities it was the beginning, and the cause, of a lengthy dark age. In contrast, much of what were once referred to as Dark Ages had been eras of great coastal strength and enlightenment, when the intellectual traditions of the Irish Atlantic were the most advanced in Europe. Such reversals abound. The widely celebrated Education Acts of 1870 and 1872 were unmitigated disasters for many coastal zones, while the grim economic recession of the 1970s saw an island renaissance unprecedented for two centuries. All British history looks different when inland cities are made remote by seeing them from Atlantic shorelines, and the most powerful element of a year’s journey by kayak was immersion in that changed perspective.