05 12 07

The urge toward naming is to make anchors for ourselves in an unreliable mutable world.

The rain’s finally stopped, though the wind is as strong as ever. In Antrim last week at a fish farm the entire harvest of salmon, about a hundred & twenty thousand fish was killed, when a mass of mauve stinger jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, filled Glenarm Bay. The numbers of mauve stingers was in billions & their mass extended over ten square miles & was thirty-five metres deep. Some salmon died of stings, but most were asphyxiated - the bulk of jellyfish prevented the flow of ocean water into their cages. The high tides & storms probably broke up that swarm, but ocean currents would have sent the jellyfish this way eventually. They have been sighted in the waters around Eigg & in Loch Sunart. Among the boats that work these waters is Speedwell out of Salen on Loch Sunart.

I walk to the fish farm in Ardtoe, from where Eigg, less than an hour’s sail from here, can be seen most days. The fish farm is called that still, but is really a hatchery, with its own tanks & waters behind dams away from the shore.

The Bay of Ardtoe, which has no name on the maps, only on the Admiralty Charts, is broad, full of small bays – from Camas an Lighe, the overflowing bay on account of the burn there, where the sands are said to sing in certain conditions, to Sailean Dubh, the black inlet. There’s a scattering of skerries – Sgeir an Rathaid, the skerry of the road, Sgeir nam Meann, kid skerry, Dubh Sgeir, Sgeir a’ Chaolais.

I stand on the rise above Rubh’ a’ Mhurain (sea bent headland). Sea bent is Arundo arenaria: a grass that, according to Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language, Linnaeus diagnostically describes as “single flowered within calyx; involute tapering pungent leaves."

I clamber down to the strand. There are no birds in this wind except a pair of cormorants far out toward unseen islands, low, skimming the crests. There is a large belt of kelp washed up to high tide line, but no mauve stingers; in fact Eigg might as well not be there, it can’t be seen either, whatever might be swarming in the waters around it. Only a black terrier is moving here, running from one end of the tide-diminished Sailean Dubh to the other at the water line, barking at the incoming ocean. The wind hustles me back onto my heels.

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FISH PRICES

Fraserburgh: monk: £70-£80; witches: £30-£60.
Boats that landed: Guide Us, Ocean Way, Ocean Reaper, Transcend, Replenish, Concorde, Accord, Gratitude, Serene, Deliverance, Just Reward
Peterhead: monks £2-£3.80; witches 80p-£1.50; megrim £1.50-£4.
Boats that landed: Constant Friend, Ocean Harvest, Our Guide

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The names we give out, sometimes at random, to creatures we share space with can sometimes return. The fact that sheep, Ovis aries go by many names, according to gender & age – tup, ewe, lamb, wether, gimmer – doesn’t diminish our need to give them personal names. If we get personal names wrong, it’s more or less insulting. So a certain tup with one eye, who once inhabited the byre where I now stay, has been offended by my misnaming. I’m happy to set the record straight, though I was only trying to protect his identity: his name’s Billy, not Charley.

Other times, like the hound here called Dharma, the naming of animals can have unsettling effects. A ewe by here, from a blackface tup to a Hebridean ewe (I’m guessing) with black & white markings, has only an unofficial descriptive name. To burst into the bar then, to announce “the badger’s had a lamb” can be the occasion for some puzzled looks among tourists.
Likewise, to encounter a man as it’s getting dark, slamming his door behind him & setting off along the road yelling “Whisky!” is something summer visitors find only too believable of west highland men. They don’t stop long enough to learn that it’s his dog’s name.