The wilder shores of Britain

After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, and camping overnight on top of its cliffs, David Gange awoke to revelation. To the west he could see almost the entire length of the Outer Hebrides. To the north-east the mainland, with its distinctive peaks, stretched towards Cape Wrath. The British Isles may be diminutive on a global scale but, Gange realised, ‘just how small they really are depends on how you measure them’. Merely the first hundred miles of longitude on the mainland’s north-west coast hold thousands of miles of coastline, with mountains, bays, estuaries, cliffs and islets — ‘enough to repay a lifetime’s exploration’. At that moment, he writes, the ‘need’ to undertake the journey described in The Frayed Atlantic Edge was born.

And so begins a journey by kayak down the western littoral of the British Isles. Paddling from Shetland to Cornwall over the course of the seasons, and taking in Orkney, the Western Isles, Sutherland, Skye, Argyll, Ulster, Connacht, Munster, and Bardsey Island in North Wales, Gange is both extraordinarily intrepid and deeply attentive to all he encounters, and his prose runs, breaks and shifts with the force and beauty of the seas that bear him. Near the great cliffs at Eshaness in Shetland, he describes how the swell of the water

was immensely peaceful, its phases gentle and unthreatening as I moved through four dimensions with every stroke. But at the bottom of the cliffs, the swell seemed to come from all directions at once: unpredictable and disorienting.

Paddling into what had once been a volcano

it felt strangely appropriate that in a spot where I was separated from writhing magma only by time, I should be plunging and leaping with violent swell, head rhythmically falling beneath where my feet had been.