Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

This book delivered what I’d hoped for - a vicarious living, study and attempt at understanding a land and life I can never know. The best books do this: they impart from the author an account and accounting of their own experiences, life, perspective, and conclusions. You’ve succeeded at leaving your mark in the effort of storytelling your love and interest in something larger than yourself, Mr. Nicolson. Thank you for telling such a worthwhile tale.

This book is, as one reviewer accurately puts it, a "scattershot" account of one man and his deep, abiding love for the Shiants (pronounced "Shants"), the three barren islands he has inherited in the Outer Hebrides. The man is Adam Nicolson (Baron Adam Nicolson, mind you, though he never mentions the title here, in keeping with his ambivalence toward "ownership" of them, described quite thoroughly herein). This love and attachment to place and his experiences - sometimes quite harrowing - constitute the theme of the book in the first several chapters and the last. N.B. - The web page here, for some reason, puts the book's length erroneously at 256 pages. My copy and those of other reviewers with different editions who mention the length all seem to have the correct page number: 391. The middle of the book - especially compared with the poetic prose of the first chapters - is a bit weighted down for my tastes with geological, socio-economic and historical minutiae about these islands. It's all quite interesting at first. But, caveat lector, Nicholson does go on a bit. In fact, the middle of the book would serve quite well, I think, as the foundation for a doctoral dissertation. But let me get on with what I loved about the book. Nicolson is a highly reflective, poetic and yet dogged writer who writes with a lovely relish about the desolate, frequently perilous beauty of these islands. He describes - better than I can - his instincts in life and writing beautifully: "One of the reasons I loved the Shiants was that they were away from the world of definition.....I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up." He goes on to quote some lines from poet Denise Levertov: "There's nothing The dog disdains on his way, Nevertheless he Keeps moving, changing Pace and approach but Not direction - every step an arrival." He also mentions Emily Dickinson and quotes Yeats and Shelley. These are the sections I truly loved. Other reviewers have tended to dwell on the last chapter and the question of whether Nicolson should "own" the islands. The question is very much a non-starter for me. He should. In his passage describing medieval solitaries, Nicolson writes: "All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisors, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding." It is the great wonder of the best parts of the book that the reflective Nicolson describes his own inner personae, but that also the reader meets actual people - fulfilling these same roles - whom Nicolson has encountered during his long enchantment with the Shiants.

Reminiscent of Heat-Moon's PrairyErth: A Deep Map Nicolson's work is also a map in depth of the Shiants; tiny islands off the coast of Skye, in the Hebrides that his father gave him. Nicolson, born in 1957, lives with his family in Sissinghurst Castle, and is the 5th Baron Carnock, although we are told he never uses the title. (Can I borrow it then please Adam?) His father author Nigel Nicolson who gave the islands to Adam, bought the islands when his mother, authoress, Vita Sackville-West found them listed for sale by author Comptom McKenzie! All this talent, Nicolson claims, descended from an early branch of marauding Hebridean pirates and shepherds. Indeed, the Shiants were actually owned by the Nicolson clan centuries before his father's gift but were lost to one of those perpetual clan wars and raids the featured in this glorious region's long history. Adam decide on conservation and archeology, not profit, eventually opening up the isles to scholarly research international archeology teams and camping Boy Scouts. He has the honour of preserving these wonderful, floating, tiny bits of man's history but later argues against his own `ownership' in context and principle. Early in his ownership, whilst visiting his mentor and tenant he meets a typical "Jock of the North', looming over the author he challenges; "Ar yew the man who says he owns the Shiants?' "Yes," I said, smiling charm, the English defence, "I am actually". "Will, yer a sackful o' shite". Adam commissions an appropriate boat, a sixteen-foot, clinker built replica of the ancient boats with a Viking heritage. Declaring her a beauty he hesitating asks the dour, neat Hebridean builder if he will be able to become a proper sailor of her. "Aye, if you had another life" is his reply. But, in fact, he is a quick learner and studies his craft as closely as his windswept and near-barren islands, uses his `little ship' well, joins the shepherd's in their annual roundup and gets the local accolade of knowing "every inch, rock and pebble' of his glorious heritage. He notes that ladies never find the `house island' (Eilean an Tighe) a welcoming environment and later archeology reveals a valid reason for such feminine detection of vibes - a limpet pile in the byre that shows the famine years, even decades, of starvation and hardship when the residents were reduced to eating this, the island's most repellent resource. Adam has deeded his islands to his son in turn and they remain a glorious resource in trust for us all (...).

This is a magnificent book, beautifully written with many excellent illustrations, likely to be the definitive volume on the Shiant Islands for years to come. More, it provides the benchmark for what is required for a study of all Scotland's outlying islands; all previous studies will be found wanting after this exemplary model. The book consists of sixteen chapters fundamentally dealing with the geology, wildlife and archareology of three uninhabited islands lying five miles or so off the coast of Lewis. But this is no dry history. The back cloth is a dazzling concentration of towering basaltic cliffs, crowds of guillemots, razorbills, great skuas and 240,000 puffins; the violence and danger of the surrounding seas; the songs and verse which encapsulate former island life, accounts of attempted murder, witchcraft and catastrophe and the treasured place the Shiants still hold in the Hebridean mind. The stage is a microcosm of richness: Bronze Age gold, the memory of sea eagles, an 8th century hermit and his carved stone pillow, memories of cruel clearances soaked up by the landscape and tales passed down from generation to generation. This is not another 'happy-clappy' saga written by a romantic, weekend recluse but a powerful baring of the soul by a man who has earned the admiration and friendship of his fellow islanders intertwined with his love of the past and a deep understanding of the rocks from which these islands have been hewn. For the first time since he inherited the Shiants from his father twenty years ago, Adam Nicolson tells the full story of his own experiences there in a style no other writer of the Hebrides has ever attempted before or since. Overall SEA ROOM is a stimulating book and one I read pleasurably and admiringly from cover to cover, non-stop. For this well written, well researched and scholarly work, Adam Nicolson has placed all students of the Hebrides in his debt. It deserves to be read by all involved in the contemporary study of Scottish life.

Visited the Outer Hebrides a few years ago and was enraptured with its isolation, beauty and community. It's a stripping away of all the distractions to what is really important. Adam Nicolson certainly gets it ands captures the essence of it beautifully in his writing.

I enjoyed reading this book which is full of all sorts of information about a remarkable set of islands. It got a bit heavy on archaeology at one point but I skipped that section, and then decided to go back and read it to get the full picture. It's great to read also about the owner's thoughts on how such a trio of islands should be treated and managed. Congratulations to Adam on putting pen to paper to produce such an authorative but readable account. But a measure of any good book is whether it opens up further enquires. This one does. Using the internet and Wikipedia, I led on the read about some of the other remoter Hebridean islands, and using Ancestry.co.uk (I'm into family history), I also researched and read up on the Nicholson family and earlier generations through the 19th century - equally interesting, a touch of scandal here and there, and a totally different aspect of life!!

A friend gave me a copy of this book years ago. I loved it and gave it to another friend who enjoyed it. I bought this copy to give to a friend as a gift. He loves it! If you enjoy the escapism of finding out about the history of a remote dramatic Scottish island, the people and the wildlife then you’ll love this!

Adam Nicolson is a lucky man to have inherited the Shiant islands- a lot of detail here- I found myself having to skim through some of it. Some beautiful passages. More pictures needed!