ISLAND DREAMS
in search of
D I STA N T In his book Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession, published in 2020, Edinburgh-based GP and writer Gavin Francis weaves cartography, philosophy and literature into reflections on his own travels to islands around the globe. The following extracts include some of his explorations on Scotland’s west coast
I
was in search of distant islands, in love with the idea that, on a patch of land, protected by a circumference of sea, the obligations and irritations of life would dissolve and a singular clarity of mind would descend. It proved more complicated than that.
Iona. Blaeu Atlas Maior, Vol. 6, Æbudæ Insulæ sive Hebrides (1662–5)
One November at the close of the millennium, when I was starting out as a junior surgical trainee, I left the hospital wards behind for a week’s camping on the Hebridean island of Barra. The forecast was for storms: after a couple of nights in a shaking tent I swapped canvas for a hotel room, and set up my camp stove in the en-suite bath. Each day I walked: over the high blustery freedom of Ben Scurrival, around the western reaches of the island, down to Vatersay Sound, across beaches raked by waves. There were families of otters, endless horizons, abandoned homesteads, inquisitive seals. There was a beach that doubled as an airport runway, its landing timetable rotating with the tide. The open bays were chopped into textual, symmetrical lines of waves. The agitation kindled by my hospital work was gradually extinguished. As the days passed I began muttering as I walked, random subconscious connections, snatches of songs, memories. Their content didn’t seem to matter, my voice being lost in the sound of the wind and waves. 12 The Guide to Scotland’s Islands
At age twenty-one the writer Adam Nicolson inherited the Shiant Isles, a tiny archipelago between the Scottish mainland and the island of Lewis. In his book about them, Sea Room, he wrote: Perhaps . . . the love of islands is a symptom
of immaturity, a turning away from the complexities of the real world to a much simpler place, where choices are obvious and rewards straightforward. And perhaps that can be taken another step: is the whole Romantic episode, from Rousseau to Lawrence, a vastly enlarged and egotistical adolescence? Thinking of islands often returns me in memory to the municipal library I visited as a child. The library was one of the grandest buildings in town – entered directly from the street through heavy brass doors, each one tessellated in panes of glass thick as lenses. As my mother browsed the shelves, often as not I’d sit down on the scratchy carpet tiles and open an immense atlas, running my fingers over
