Bleak portraits of a declining culture
An old curing station at Occumster.
THE north-east coast of the Moray Firth is wild and forbidding, its grim inhospitality welcome only to gull and peregrine falcon, to cormorant and diver.
But wherever a “fault occurs in its stretch of tall sea-cliff and low tidal-rock there will be found the little fishing village, straw thatched or slate roofed, home of a notably hardy breed of seamen. Small, often picturesque, creeks and harbours, too often with a grey silence about them, intensified, perhaps, by the presence of two or three small boats and a salmon coble or so, that are the spent backwash of a once virile storm of fishing life.”
It was the mid-1920s and the scenes of decay and abandonment that the novelist Neil Gunn witnessed on return to the county of his birth were, frankly, depressing. Twenty years later he was to pen The Silver Darlings, an epic celebration of the halcyon days of the herring fishery, but his first novel, The Grey Coast, presented an altogether bleaker picture.
The old curing yards had long since lain silent. The harbours were empty. And hauled above the shoreline once majestic sailing drifters had been left to rot.
The men were unemployed. Poverty was endemic. It was indeed a grey coast... Gunn wrote 20 novels between 1926 and 1954. The early novels, The Grey Coast (1926), Morning Tide (1930) and Butcher’s Broom (1934), provide (at times) bleak portraits of a declining Highland culture.
Although born in Dunbeath in 1891, when the fishery was a vibrant enterprise, Gunn had moved south to Kirkcudbrightshire to live with an older sister and receive a private education. He was shocked by what he saw on his return to the northlands.
So that first novel, bitter and angry, presented a grim picture of the harsh economic realities that had visited the county.
IT was all a far cry from that distant golden age when “the seaboard around the Moray Firth went up in a human blaze – as hectic a blaze as ever was seen in any gold rush to the Klondyke”.
He was, of course, referring to the pursuit of the silver darlings which had ignited the spark of industry and human endeavour on a scale never witnessed along these shores – either before or since. If we had a fabulous era, a time when future storytellers will harken back to the fabled days, this was it.
Then every crook and cranny along the fortress cliffs of Caithness were chiselled out to create tiny fishing creeks. Exposed to the elements they became symbolic of the county’s determination to capitalise on the boom times. You only have to visit places like Whaligoe, with its dramatic 350-odd steps plunging from the clifftops to the shore, to marvel at their ingenuity.
A chain of small harbours and havens bejewelled the Caithness coastline. Places like Achastle, Clyth, Sarclet, Staxigoe, Auckengill, Huna, Brough, Castlehill, Sandside... and between them a myriad of even tinier creeks, some barely tidal landing points, places like Elsay goe, near Papigoe.
You can still see the remains of concrete walkways over the jagged rocks. Or the rusty stumps and rings of old bollards and mooring points. But rust, as we know, never sleeps. And neither does time nor tide. And so most of these old creeks have long since fallen into disrepair and atrophy. And who really cares anyway?
THOMAS Telford, the eminent civil engineer, dismissed Whaligoe as a “dreadful place”. According to the Old Statistical Account of Caithness, the fishermen to “secure their boats from being dashed against the rocks, particularly in storms and stream tides, had to hang up their yawls on ropes, on hooks fixed to the face of the rock, above the level of water, where they were safely suspended till the weather was fit for going to sea”.
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At Sarclet, Telford, not always best disposed to our northern coastline, had drawn up magnificent plans and constructed a “haven” at the exposed cove. But not even Telford could hold back the wrath of the North Sea and the haven succumbed to the wild elements. Barely a stone or two of the harbour wall remains.
Peter Anson, a Benedictine monk, undertook a very personal pilgrimage when he visited every fishing location along the Scottish coastline. His 1930 travelogue, Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk, complemented by his beautiful drawings, is now considered a collector’s rarity. In it, and his later Scots Fisherfolk, the “roving recluse” describes the scenes that confront him and records the “customs, traditions and social background and daily life of a particular class of men and women who have played an important part in the evolution of the country”.
Not a “serious treatise on the fishing industry in Scotland”, his work is wonderfully intimate and descriptive and provides statistical evidence which charts, what appears to be, the terminal decline of a way of life. Now “fewer and fewer sons of fishermen,” he says, “are following in their fathers’ footsteps”.
SO if the old creeks were abandoned when Gunn and Anson saw them back in the 1920s and ’30s, they are, today, quite lost and forgotten. What now for that “once virile storm of fishing life”? Indeed any industry?
Or will the economy of the Highlands, ever susceptible to big industry – think of the nuclear age at Dounreay, the aluminium smelter at Invergordon, the Corpach pulp mill, the silent oil yards of Kishorn – remain forever fated to external forces?
Historians Thompson, Wailey and Lumnis in their definitive oral study Living the Fishing, 1983, argued: “If the past constrains us, it nevertheless also presents us with a simple choice: to accept or challenge what we have been given by history. Like the fishing communities in their struggle for survival, we are all caught within the contradictions of an increasingly exploitative and, in too many ways, senseless world. Let us at least make sure that future generations are allowed freedom to make that choice.”
We are told that we are on the brink of another golden age and our shores are set to become the “Saudi Arabia of the North” as the renewable-energy sector heralds another halcyon chapter. How much more vibrant or sustainable will this industry be? What choices will we have?
When we think back on our fishing heritage, as the American writer Cormac McCarthy once lamented of his own bygone community, we realise: “They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”
Is that how future generations are to remember us? Are we just, at the end of the day, a “grey silence”?