Ghostland Read online

  In the 1830s Thom’s Tam and Souter Johnny were perhaps the closest visual equivalent to cinema, seemingly capturing the essence of Burns’s characters and his poem. They were taken on a tour of Britain that called at Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, with people paying an entrance fee to view them. Thom even hired an agent and sent copies of the figures around the United States, though none of the profits found their way back to him and he eventually was forced to take a ship across the Atlantic to rectify the embezzlement.§

  The Bard of Ayrshire was himself long gone by the time the statues went on their travels, having died in 1796 from a presumed heart condition. He was thirty-seven. When his Dumfries grave was opened in 1834 to allow his wife’s body to be placed beside him, casts were made of his skull – an attempt inspired by the new pseudo-scientific craze of phrenology to divine the nature of genius from the shape of a person’s head. After the coffin lid was removed, Burns’s body lay, according to John McDiarmid, editor of the Dumfries Courier, perfectly preserved, ‘exhibiting the features of one who had recently sunk into the sleep of death’. However, the sight that transfixed all those involved in the grave’s exhumation was short-lived, ‘for the instant the workmen inserted a shell beneath the original wooden coffin, the head separated from the trunk, and the whole body, with the exception of the bones, crumbled into dust’. It’s a description reminiscent of the climactic scene of Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s 1921 unauthorised reworking of Dracula, in which the cadaverous Count Orlok walks into a ray of dawn sunlight and fades away, leaving only a thin wisp of smoke. As has been made clear in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, earthly delights are transient. One minute we are here and the next we are gone:

  But pleasures are like poppies spread:

  You seize the flower, its bloom is shed …

  Three months after visiting Glasgow and its Necropolis I was back in Scotland – or at least in Scottish waters. I was travelling through the Minch, the strait that separates the Highlands and Skye from the Western Isles. It was a mist-filled, mid-March day and occasional clockwork-winged seabirds – black-and-white guillemots or razorbills, it was hard to tell in the poor conditions – beat low across the water, fleeing from the bulk and noise of the cruise ship I was journeying on up to the Faroes and Norway. Now and then I caught a glimpse of land on the horizon, but, staring down into the greyness, I saw no semi-translucent movements among the waves that might have been the Blue-Green Men. These folkloric underwater mermen, fond of rhyming and wordplay, are said to accost fishermen in their boats in this stretch of the Minch; they’re wonderfully described in Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room, his memoir about the tiny Shiant Islands, which sat somewhere in that Hebridean mist.

  Further out, eighteen miles into the Atlantic, beyond the obscured mass of Lewis, lay the Flannan Isles – a remote collection of islets uninhabited since 1971, when the lighthouse was automated. The place is known chiefly for a still-unsolved mystery that occurred there in December 1900. It was reported by a passing vessel that the light had gone out – although its continuous warning presence was the major task of the island’s three lighthouse keepers. A ship was sent to investigate, its crew found the building (which had only been completed the previous year) empty, but in good order. No trace of the men was ever discovered, nor anything to explain what had happened, and over the following years the public developed a growing fascination for the story. Wilfrid Gibson, the Georgian poet who, along with Walter de la Mare, would become a beneficiary of Rupert Brooke’s will, commemorated the incident in his 1912 poem ‘Flannan Isle’, an imaginative embellishment of the evidence that added details subsequently fixed as fact – particularly the set dinner table in the men’s living quarters.¶ Ominously, as the rescue party approaches the ‘lonely Isle’, the poem’s narrator notices ‘three queer, black, ugly birds – / Too big, by far, in my belief, / For guillemot or shag’. They plunge from sight as the boat nears, a portent of the scene that will shortly present itself to the searchers. The birds – if they are birds of this world – would seem most likely to be cormorants, like the ill-omened fowl that landed on Boston Stump and foretold the distant death of the town’s Member of Parliament aboard the Lady Elgin.

  A haunted lighthouse also features in the evocatively titled film Thunder Rock, a 1942 slice of supernatural British wartime propaganda from the Boulting brothers (who went on to make the classic, though rather different in tone, Brighton Rock). Set in the recent past of 1939 on a remote lighthouse in Lake Michigan, Thunder Rock centres on its reclusive English keeper, David Charleston, played by Michael Redgrave. Before shutting himself away, Charleston was a campaigning journalist battling to expose the rise of fascism in the Europe of the 1930s. He wrote a well-received book about the subject, Report from Inside (which sports a sleeping John Bull on its cover), but became disillusioned with the apathy that greeted the increasingly urgent warnings of his ‘Britain Awake’ speaking tour, leading him to take refuge in the solitude of Thunder Rock. He retreats into his imagination, conjuring up half a dozen ghosts whose names are in the log book of the Land o’ Lakes, a sailing ship that sank – like the Lady Elgin – in the lake, and is commemorated with an inscription on the lighthouse’s wall that details how the packet struck a nearby reef. Now the structure promises to ‘Turn friendly light across these forbidding waters.’

  Charleston tries to piece together what caused the various passengers to leave Europe ninety years before, though his early efforts fall short, being a reflection of his own world-weariness. ‘These skimpy, bickering characters were not my passengers!’ objects the ghost of Captain Joshua Stuart – a sterling performance from the Scottish actor Finlay Currie, who would go on to play Magwitch in David Lean’s 1946 adaptation of Great Expectations, as well as the dour, but kindly, boatman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s tribute to the magic of the Hebrides, I Know Where I’m Going! In the latter film supernatural weather forces might just be responsible for keeping Wendy Hiller’s headstrong Joan Webster and Roger Livesey’s Torquil MacNeil together, while a Walter Scott-like curse and a fierce whirlpool, the dreaded Corryvreckan, try to keep them apart.

  Michael Powell’s first outing as director, 1937’s The Edge of the World, was inspired by the 1930 evacuation of the last thirty-six residents of St Kilda, fifty miles to the south-west of the Flannan Isles and even further out into the rugged Atlantic. It’s a beautiful film of a lost way of life – and lost existences – that early on features a moving sequence as one of the islanders, Andrew (played by Niall MacGinnis), returns to the place a decade after leaving for what he thought was the final time: the half-faded imprints of his family and friends file past him once again, taking their laboured steps down to the quay. ‘The slow shadow of death is falling on the lonely Outer Isles. This is the story of one of them – and all of them.’**

  The spirits of Thunder Rock, of course, might exist only in Charleston’s head – though towards the end of the film when he tries to banish the passengers as figments of his imagination they stubbornly refuse to leave, suggesting they have corporeal substance. The Captain takes on a role similar to Dickens’, Ghost of Christmas Past, flitting back to the English Midlands of 1849 to show how one of the doomed immigrants, Briggs, has been worn down by life’s hardships in the Potteries, abandoning his children to an uncertain future while he and his wife, who is pregnant again, allow themselves to be cajoled into heading to the New World. The other fellow travellers, like Charleston, have given up their efforts to educate and improve society: we have Ellen Kirby, a Mary Wollstonecraft-like campaigner for women’s rights; and Dr Kurtz, whose new-fangled anaesthetics have proved too ahead of their time for Vienna’s medical establishment. These phantoms drift around the lighthouse as if it’s a stage, highlighting the film’s origins as a play. Tragically, they have no comprehension that they are dead. Only the Captain knows the truth that all sixty hands perished, and he urges Charleston to see the true meaning in the passengers’ spent lives – and to reco
ver a proper purpose for his own. Unlike the lost souls, David has the chance to stop running away, the chance to make a difference.

  Later, in the waters north of the Scottish mainland, my ship was to take me in sight of Britain’s most isolated, formerly manned lighthouse: Sule Skerry, some thirty-five miles west of Orkney. Barely breaking the waves, the low uninhabited islet is nowadays home only to hordes of seabirds, since the operation of the light was taken out of human hands in 1982. Around a tenth of the UK’s breeding puffin population nest here, as do gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes and storm petrels. And although scientists visit the island in the summer months to monitor seabird numbers and ring the chicks, no one comes here at other times, meaning the skerry’s undoubted potential as a hotspot for tired spring and autumn migrant songbirds is virtually unknown.

  It is this potential for rare birds that draws the narrator of an excellent Algernon Blackwood-esque tale – just as the remote spot calls to me. The Scottish author of the story, John Buchan, is most famous for his novel of adventure and international intrigue set in the months before the First World War, The Thirty-Nine Steps. He also wrote a number of supernatural stories that utilised his knowledge of his native landscape and its wildlife, of which ‘Skule Skerry’ is one of my two favourites – along with ‘No Man’s Land’, written while Buchan was at university. The latter paints a vision of an ancient stunted race still holding out among the Highland hills that could pass for the work of Arthur Machen.

  In Buchan’s ‘Skule Skerry’ the narrator, Mr Anthony Hurrell, a pioneering ornithologist, has come to the fictional Norland Islands, hoping to find a place called the Isle of Birds that is mentioned in the Nordic sagas. He concludes that this must be the remote Skule Skerry, clearly modelled on its near-namesake to the west of Orkney. The local fisherman, John Ronaldson, tasked with dropping off Hurrell for a few days of birdwatching, tries to dissuade him, his warnings of doom at times beginning to sound like John Laurie’s Private Frazer from Dad’s Army. (As a young man Laurie, who was a favourite actor of Michael Powell, starred in The Edge of the World, and later had a minor role in I Know Where I’m Going!)

  ‘Not Skule Skerry,’ he cried. ‘What would take ye there, man? Ye’ll get a’ the birds ye want on Halmarsness and a far better bield. Ye’ll be blawn away on the skerry, if the wind rises.’

  But Hurrell’s mind cannot be altered, even when Ronaldson lets on that local superstitions lend the place an ‘ill name’. Indeed, if anything, this makes Hurrell keener to visit and he is dropped off the next afternoon. He has his tent and enough provisions for a few days’ stay – Ronaldson will pick him up at an arranged time; he does have an emergency flare he can use to summon help if events take a turn for the worse. The idea of the trip is immediately justified, because as the ornithologist sits cooking supper on his first night, scores of migrants – fieldfares, bramblings, buntings, and various waders – pass close to him in the gloaming. When he awakes the following morning, however, the scene outside the canvas is much changed: it is colder and all the flocks of the previous evening have departed, leaving behind only a solitary Sabine’s gull, a beautiful, rare High Arctic nester that has come to rest fleetingly on the skerry. Then comes the arrival of winds that seem preternaturally strong, like those in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ (of which the story reminds me); they soon build, lifting away Hurrell’s dinghy and tent, before dying down during the ensuing, interminable hours. He is overcome by a deadening terror, exacerbated by the increasingly numbing temperatures; filled with a certainty that ‘This island was next door to the Abyss, and the Abyss was that blanched world of the North which was the negation of life.’

  Finally, Hurrell finds strength to release his flare and muster John Ronaldson to his rescue. Yet under its strange, artificial brightness he sees the arrival of ‘someone’ from the sea. ‘I saw a great dark head like a bull’s – an old face wrinkled as if in pain – a gleam of enormous broken teeth – a dripping beard – all formed on other lines than God has made mortal creatures.’ And then he passes out, only returning to proper consciousness back in the Norlands several days later, where he wonders if he has seen the legendary Black Silkie that the locals talk about.

  The real Sule Skerry has its own version of this legend, ‘the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’. Silkies (or selkies) are seal beings, not unlike the Blue-Green Men of the Minch, that can remove their outer skins to appear like people. Using this deception the Sule Skerry silkie is said to have made a woman on the coast pregnant, afterwards paying her in gold to raise the child; several archaic songs, the lyrics of which were gathered in the 1850s, retell the tale. In Buchan’s story, Hurrell, recovering in bed from his delirium, overhears his rescuer talking to a local farmer about a moribund walrus that came ashore nearby – surely the awful creature he witnessed on the madness-inducing isle.

  I too experienced a similar apparition coming out of the waves, as I trudged along Norfolk’s Blakeney Point at the end of September 2010. I had made the arduous walk in the afternoon to watch an alder flycatcher, only the second ever to be seen in Britain – an olive-coloured American songbird that had somehow found its way to Britain’s east coast in the strong westerly gales we’d been experiencing (it’s the sort of vagrant Anthony Hurrell might have dreamt about prior to visiting his far-flung skerry). The three-mile trek is hard work at the best of times, as the shingle saps your strength and the lack of landmarks, particularly if you follow the beach route, is monotonous and demotivating. But if you take the more inland path through the tangled, scratchy Suaeda shrubs there is more to look at, including the Halfway House, which offers a dispiriting indication of the distance still to go.††

  Near the end of the Point I, along with a huddle of others, watched the flycatcher as it periodically showed itself, taking refuge in the selection of stunted pines and sycamores that make up almost the entirety of the tree cover of this slither of land (a small fenced-off rectangle known, with some overstatement, as ‘the Plantation’). The darkness descended rapidly as I made my return and I opted, perhaps in retrospect somewhat foolishly, to walk beside the breaking waves. Foam was carrying far inland – beyond even the Halfway House – but at least the going was easier with the wind behind me.

  At some stage a shape drifted out of the whiteness, an immature seal driven in by the force of the storm; on surfacing in such proximity to me it hauled itself hurriedly back out. The waves were striking the shore with a relentless violence, when in front of me lay another, much larger seal. Only this time one that did not move as I approached.

  A dead adult grey, its body mottled and pristine, its skull stripped of skin – a thing like Sule Skerry’s Great Silkie. With an unfilled eye that seemed to stare right through me.

  As I came alongside the Halfway House – still more than a mile to go in near-darkness – I felt a similar kind of elemental dread to that which overcomes Anthony Hurrell in Buchan’s story. When, finally, I reached my car and could take cover from the gale’s incessant roar, I phoned my brother. Normally in such circumstances I would have regaled him – ‘gripped him off’, in birding parlance – about the rarity I’d seen and he ‘needed’. Yet the little lost bird paled in comparison to the awesome sublimity of the crashing waves, the shore turned to snow, and the life – and death – that crawled before me from the water.

  ‘It was biblical out there,’ I said to him.

  Beyond the last static caravan, I take the track to the left that skirts – a little too closely for my liking – the cliff edge.‡‡ On the guano-stained rocks below a few pairs of herring gulls are beginning to think about nesting, though no other seabirds are yet present. It’s the very end of March and the evening light makes the landscape blush, but offers scant comfort against the biting breeze. A male wheatear, my first of the year, flashes up in front of me from a hollow in the short, rabbit-cropped turf, showing off its rump – the ‘white arse’ that this long-distance migrant’s Middle English name i
s derived from; the grey-backed songbird will have wintered somewhere south of the Sahara and is now presumably en route inland to the Highlands where it will breed. The land continues to rise before me and I realise I’m heading away from the spot I’m trying to find, so I turn back towards the sun, which is dipping below the Mull of Galloway. Two middle-aged men and a lad wearing a Rangers shirt are having a kickaround on the bleak football pitch. One of them, the boy’s father, crosses the ball and the other, the uncle I presume, runs in and jumps to nod it into the netless goal, only for it to skid uncontrollably off his bald patch into the surrounding tall grass, causing them much amusement.

  Burrow Head in Dumfries and Galloway. It’s an unlikely, end-of-the-world location for a holiday park, anchored miles from anywhere on a treeless promontory overlooking the Irish Sea. It isn’t an island, though it feels cut off enough to be, doubling for one in the climactic scene of an iconic work of Scottish cinema. The Wicker Man was released in the UK in December 1973, a few days before I was born, and a couple of weeks before Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Lost Hearts was scaring Christmas television audiences, but it was not until soon after I’d started secondary school that I first watched it, on my aunt and uncle’s video recorder.

  The Wicker Man is a horror film – at least in a sense – yet it contains no monsters, no ghosts. I don’t want to say too much about its plot because if you have seen it you’ll already know, and if you haven’t then I envy you watching its surprises unfurl for the first time. Essentially, it depicts a clash of beliefs between two opposing faiths that results in a vision of nihilistic, godless indifference. Until that point it doesn’t seem a bleak film, but a clever, atmospheric unravelling of a mystery – the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison, on the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle, a fecund pagan paradise that benefits from the caress of the Gulf Stream. An island remarkably self-sufficient and cut off from the mainland, until the arrival of Edward Woodward’s devout Christian policeman Sergeant Howie.