THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

It is a Hebridean stratigraphy: possible Bronze or Iron age houses, nineteenth-century shielings in which the girls and boys would stay in the summer, tending to the cattle, making the cheese and butter, and above them the skuas, heroic, bitter northern, aggressive, magnificent modern invaders.  Bits and pieces of puffin and kittiwake litter their nests.

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The Shiants have no wood but they have hidden places, tucked among the rocks.   They have no rivers, but they have streams in which the watermint and the forget-me-nots grow.  They have no lakes, but pools around whose margins the turf luxuriates into neon green and across whose still, dark surface the water boatmen paddle like Polynesians between their archipelagos.  And they have the richness of the sea.

Nicolson/Sea