Silver Darlings
At John and Fiona Cumming’s house looking over to Hoy, we watched the Scrabster ferry plunge into the streaming dark sea, wind and rain in loud gusts on the windows. A hare hunched, ears flat against its back, and a farmer called a sheep down from the green sides of an old quarry with a handful of feed. We watched Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World, filmed on Foula, which tells the story of the abandonment of a remote northern isle by its divided community. We talked of fish, and the once booming herring industry which brought the Swan into being – one of the finest, and fastest sail fishing boats in Scotland – but ultimately collapsed through overfishing and mechanical plunder (the fishery is now in better health following a fishing ban in the 1970s and the introduction of quotas). We talked of the smell of birch and oak barked hemp nets and sails, of Neil Gunn’s magnificent The Silver Darlings, of the women who gutted the herring, of 90 million herring caught in a single day off Yarmouth at the height of the boom…90 million. We talked of the decline and collapse of fishery after fishery under the converging pressures of overfishing, pollution and climate change. We listened to the wind gusting, buffeting in the dark…Change, transformation, the ebb and flow of traditions, technologies, and hopes.
Beautiful! x