We should really think of ourselves as an islands race, considering how many of them we have
How many islands make up the British Isles? A couple of hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? In fact, according to the folks at Ordnance Survey whose job it is to keep track of such matters, the official total is 6,289. Of these, 803 are large enough to appear with a coastline at 1:625,000 scale, while the rest are recorded as point features – mere specks on the map.
Because two of the British Isles – Great Britain and Ireland – are much bigger than the rest, because they are home to the most people, and because the tides of history and politics have imposed certain invisible borders on the land, we tend to think of ourselves as five distinct island nations: Scotland, England and Wales sharing the largest island while Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland share the second largest. When the other, smaller islands register in mainland consciousness at all, it is as often merely as adjuncts to nation states: the Hebrides are “Scottish islands”; Lindisfarne is English, Rathlin, Northern Irish and so-on. Inhabitants of the smaller islands, meanwhile, tend to define themselves in terms of the things that make them different from the mainland (often viewed, in my experience, as a place to be visited only in the direst of emergencies.)
But to an alien from another planet, observing us from the stratosphere without any knowledge of our politics or culture, none of these abstract concepts would exist. Viewed through a pair of highpowered alien binoculars we would simply look like approximately 68.7 million bipeds, all sharing the same archipelago, albeit scattered very unevenly across it, choosing to inhabit just 137 of the six-thousandplus islands available to us. The idea that there might be some sort of shared island culture that operates at a deeper level than a relatively recent construct like the nation state is tangentially explored in a new book by Mathew Clayton, with illustrations by Anthony Atkinson. Entitled Lundy, Rockall, Dogger, Fair Isle: A Celebration of the Islands Around Britain, it only offers a tiny sampling of our archipelago, featuring just over 50 real islands (and a handful of imaginary ones, of which more later.) But Clayton suggests that, although these islands lie many miles apart, they still have plenty in common.
Some of the assertions he makes are a little lacking in intellectual rigor: the idea that on an island without cars “you have to walk everywhere and have much more time to experience your immediate environment” doesn’t stand much scrutiny. When he gets into the universals of island culture, however, he’s on safer ground. The major themes of island stories – smugglers, shipwrecks, pirates, hermits – are, he suggests, the same from Jersey to Shetland. And then there’s the chapter devoted to “Islands of the Imagination”. British mainlanders may not spend much time thinking about the smaller islands that lie just off the coast but they spend a lot of time dreaming up imaginary islands and telling stories about them, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Avalon to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, from the Tir na nóg of Irish mythology to Enid Blyton’s Kirrin Island, and from Thomas More’s Utopia to Thomas the Tank Engine’s Island of Sodor. We may not realise it, but islands and stories about islands are hardwired into our imaginative DNA.
Of course, these things don’t just link together the inhabitants of our own island chain; they also link us to other islanders across the globe, many of whom have their own imaginary islands. In Japanese folklore, the hero Momotaro travels to the Island of Demons, defeats its evil inhabitants in battle and makes off with their treasure; the Ancient Greeks, meanwhile, believed in the Fortunate Isles, lying somewhere far to the west – an earthly paradise inhabited by gods and those who had lived particularly virtuous lives.
Anyone interested in the interconnectedness of different island cultures would do well to check out the Island Review website, edited by Scottish writer and editor Malachy Tallack and dedicated to art and writing that “celebrates or seeks to understand the appeal of islands, as places and as metaphors.” Clayton and Atkinson’s book, meanwhile, makes for an entertaining jaunt through our own archipelago, both real and imagined.
Lundy, Rockall, Dogger, Fair Isle, £9.99 (Ebury), is out on Thursday