DUNCANSBY STACKS
To walk the cliff-edge at Duncansby before the world wakes is to feel the land dissolve. It is a midsummer morning, but the sun is a rumour, a lost pearl somewhere above the haar. This sea-mist, which breathes in from the North Sea, is a soft erasure of the world. It clings to the thrift and the salt-scoured grass, muffling sound, turning the solid headland into a place of ghosts and guesses. The air tastes of brine and damp earth. Below, the sea is a sigh, a rhythmic churn against unseen rock.
The path down is a slick ribbon of mud and stone, a descent into a geo – that Norse-word for a narrow, steep-sided inlet, carved by the sea’s patient violence. Each step is a negotiation with the wet ground. The fulmars, those masters of the updraft, are spectral shapes that glide from the cliff-face and vanish back into the white. Their calls are thin and reedy, the only language in this muted landscape. The world shrinks to the immediate: the glisten of a spider’s web strung between gorse, the deep green of moss in a rock-crevice, the startling pink of a campion flower against the grey.
Then, through a thinning in the mist, they appear. First one, then the other. The Stacks of Duncansby. They are not so much seen as sensed, immense presences pulling themselves out of the void. These are sea-stacks, teeth of Old Red Sandstone left behind as the surrounding cliffs fell away to the ceaseless hunger of the waves. They are geological time made manifest, standing as silent witnesses to millennia of weather. The mist swirls around their bases, making them seem afloat, unmoored from the earth. On their ledges, the white guano-stains are bright, and the faint, collective cry of a thousand nesting kittiwakes and guillemots drifts across, a city of birds suspended between sea and sky.
At the water’s edge, the world is all texture. The pebbles are smooth, ancient things, each one a history of being tumbled and worn. Rock pools, dark mirrors to the white sky, hold tiny, perfect ecosystems. Bladderwrack lies in thick, olive-green drifts, its pods waiting to be popped under a boot. To stand here is to feel the immense pressures that shaped this place – the weight of ice, the scour of water, the slow, inexorable pull of gravity. The mist begins to lift, not all at once, but in veils. The sun asserts itself, and the grey sea slowly finds its colour, turning a deep, cold turquoise. The Stacks solidify, their red and green strata becoming clear. The world is remade, but the memory of its dissolution, of that quiet, ghostly morning, lingers in the mind.