Prospero's islands

Twenty years ago, on his 21st birthday, Adam Nicolson was given three islands by his father. His father, Nigel Nicolson, had bought the Shiants, three specks on the map in the sea called the Minch, between the Outer Hebrides and the Scottish mainland, in 1937 for £1,400. Nicolson senior had fallen immediately for "their remoteness, isolation, grandeur". For Adam, in his turn, these islands have been "a kind of heartland for me, a core place".

In four years' time, Nicolson will give the Shiants to his son Tom, when he turns 21. This book is, then, as Nicolson says, a long, farewell love letter to the islands. And if, at times, there are three sentences where one will do, you forgive him for the intensity of his relationship with the place and the lyric beauty it inspires in him.

As Nicolson describes them, the Shiants ("one definite, softened syllable 'the Shant Isles', like a sea shanty but with the 'y' trimmed away") are a world in themselves. Garbh Eilean (Rough Island) rises on black, columned cliffs 500 feet from the sea. Watched over once by sea eagles and now by great skuas, it is home to crowds of guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes and to 240,000 puffins. Eilean Mhuire (Mary Island) is "another continent", soft and fertile, a rolling meadow 200 feet above the sea. Eilean an Tighe (House Island), "this most domestic of the islands", combines the qualities of the other two and, with its mooring place and freshwater springs, is where a shepherd's hut stands today. But how can an outsider, an "English toff" in Nicolson's own self-mocking definition, claim to own pieces of uninhabited wilderness that have been part of a very particular human history for millennia, and which continue to assert their own participation in a much grander story of ocean tides and volcanic eruptions, fish, bird and plant-life, wind and weather? A great part of the urgency and vividness of Nicolson's writing in this book derives from his questioning of his own paper title to these islands and his desire to win them legitimately.

He does this partly by plunging as directly as he can into the raw life of the Shiants. He sails himself across wild seas to the islands. He explores every nook, sea arch and crevice. He digs his own vegetable patch in abandoned, lazy beds, sleeps out in all weather and experiments with limpet stew and roast puffin. He helps the tenant farmer heave his sheep one by one into the boat to go to market. He becomes a modest hero in his own epic.

A second route is to recover the hidden history of the islands. With the energy of the possessed, Nicolson pursues geologists, linguists, experts in Celtic monasticism and historians of every period. He tracks down any document that mentions the Shiants and culls from the local people who have become his friends as much folk memory as remains.

Archaeologists invited on successive digs uncover the "tutelary objects" of the islands: an 8th century hermit's pillowstone, a medieval brooch, decorated pottery, stone tools, kelp irons, boat nails and the wooden hull of a small model boat. Together with the spectacular late Bronze Age gold torc dredged up by fishermen, it is a small hoard, but allows Nicolson to piece together a continuous chain of human life. In one sense this book is an encyclopedia, containing all that can ever be known about the Shiants.

Foremost, however, Nicolson is a writer. So beyond the scholarship and getting dirty, it is through language that he masters these islands. He revels in the different vocabularies of ships and sea, of plants and rocks, lovingly evoking the concrete world. He conjures the numinous spirit of the place in long, lyric stretches and weaves a vivid tapestry of people and events. And then, finally, like Shakespeare's Prospero, he must leave the islands and all they have become for him and for the reader, to allow his son to make of them what he will.