83459348539

Ireland/Wales 0.0726741243702487
Ireland/Scotland 0.0625191372016303
Ireland/England 0.1170327104307371
Wales/Scotland 0.0662071306520113
Wales/England 0.0980420127467032
Scotland/England 0.1023741618921030
You do not need to know what these mean, and I hope you do not want to. Even as I write them
down, I can feel I am being drawn away from the real lives of these genes into some grey
underworld where everything becomes a number. The genes are submitting to this cruel procedure,
but they will never sing again. Now they are processed into numbers, with so many decimal places
that they assume an importance way above their true worth. It feels as though I have handed them on
to a windowless world which has severed any contact with the sea and the wind. Once a number is
produced, something, perhaps everything, of value has been lost. Like so many tabulations, the
numbers disguise individual stories of heroism and betrayal, triumph and defeat, and force them
into bleak summaries. This is no way to treat our ancestors and you will be glad that I shall not
insult them, or you, in this way again.
Since every ancestor was an individual, I was determined to treat the DNA sequences as
individuals. Each one had, at some time, set off from some distant land and stepped ashore on the
Isles, soaked with salt spray and red-faced from the cold. I decided that, if I possibly could, I
would not treat these as anything but individual journeys undertaken with deliberate purpose and
not to be grouped together in clumsy approximations. I covered the walls around my desk with
photographs of the coast and the sea, of the Isles from the savage Atlantic to the smooth sands of
Kent. Whenever I was tempted to revert to orthodox analysis I would glance upwards and
remember to tread more carefully.
Finally, I had nearly 6,000 different pieces of genetic information from volunteers all over the
Isles, each one linked to a geographical origin. By the time I came to write Blood of the Isles, I
could add in another 25,000 genetic messages from among the customers of Oxford Ancestors. I
contacted colleagues whom I knew had similar genetic information from the Isles and from other
parts of Europe. I trawled all the relevant publications for material. When I finally settled down to
listen to the music of the genes I had over 50,000 DNA sequences to work with.
For two solid weeks over Christmas I sat down to get to know these details. Fortunately, the
weather was awful. It was raining constantly and was very, very windy. I live close to a sea loch in
Skye and, when the wind is strong and in the south-west, blowing straight in from the North
Atlantic, it descends in howling gusts from the Cuillin Hills. These winds tumble off the main ridge
of the mountains and roll down the loch, pulling the top layer of water into the air in spiral twists
of spray. The oddest thing about these winds is their intermittence. The air is calm, windless and
then you hear an approaching roar and it is upon you and so strong it is almost impossible to stand
upright. Then, after five minutes’ battering, it is gone. After another few minutes the sequence
begins all over again. The alternating spells of chaos and calm can go on for hours. Hours well
suited to going through thousands of sequences one by one, giving each one a different name and a
different number. The coal fire burns well and the smoke is only very rarely forced back down the