Living on the edge
WIND is the defining element of the thousands of islands that encircle the British Isles. Wet and salted, it sculpts every branch and bush, burns palm fronds (yes, our islands do have palm trees—albeit bedraggled), shifts shorelines and leaves surfaces rimed and rusted, skin tanned. Incessantly, it buffets the seabirds and whines at windows; often, it sends the ferry back to port, marooning islanders on their anvil of rock and sand.
Ours are not the great city islands of Venice and Stockholm or the blue-lagooned atolls of the tropics, but kelp-fringed outposts of tough survival for generations of farmers and fishermen and places of insular retreat. They encapsulate extremes—of weather, architecture, landscape and emotion—preserve faith and tradition, offer refuge or redemption, feed dreams and intensify dramas.
The sweep of a distant landform merging on the horizon with sea and sky echoes the liminal quality of islands as places where the veil between the secular and the divine is thin. Since ancient times, they have provided a rich source of imagery, history and fantasy for poets and musicians and to see their winged shapes mapped out in ragged archipelagos, to hear their names spoken, is to yearn to set to sea. Norman Ackroyd, known for sublime etchings inspired by his voyages up and down the Atlantic coast, delivers a sea-chart incantation of the Norse and Celtic isles and headlands he has navigated: ‘Muckle Flugga, Unst, Eshaness, Foula… Glencolmcille, Lissadell, Benbulben, Lake Isle of
