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Sea
Room - Adam Nicolson
Adam
Nicolson's father had answered a newspaper advertisement
in the 1930s...: "Uninhabited islands for sale. Outer
Hebrides. 600 acres. 500 ft basaltic cliffs. Puffins and
seals. Cabin. Apply Col. Kenneth Macdonald, Portree, Skye."
These were the Shiants, three of the loneliest of the British
Isles, set in a dangerous sea, with no more than a stone-built,
rat-ridden bothy as accommodation, five miles or so off
the coast of Lewis. They cost £1400 and for that he
bought one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
Adam
Nicolson inherited the islands when he was 21 - an astonishing
gift - and they became in many ways the core of his life.
In this book, he tells the full story of his own experiences
there, amid the dazzling concentration of birds, with flocks
of guillemots, razorbills, great skuas and 240,000 puffins
coming in every spring out of the North Atlantic to breed;
the violence and danger of the surrounding seas; the songs
and poems which cluster around the islands; the accounts
of attempted murder, witchcraft and catastrophe; the treasured
place which the Shiants still hold in the Hebridean mind.
"Sea
Room" describes the Shiants as a microcosm of richness,
their long and at times painful history combined with a
natural world at its most potent: Bronze Age gold and the
memory of sea eagles, an 8th-century hermit and his carved
pillow stone, 18th-century memories soaked into the landscape
and stories passed down from generation to generation. This
is not the account of a castaway on a deserted rock but
its opposite: a celebration of the life which an extraordinary
island enshrines.
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