Life and Death on St Kilda

From the Gap below Oiseval on the NE coast of Hirta I turned my back to the sea and the wheeling fulmars. I made my way back down to the village.


From above I could see that what I had thought was a vegetable enclosure behind the village, is actually the burial ground.


It is the site of the ancient Christ chapel though no trace of it remains.
Photo JLW


Most of the grave stones are rough hewn with no inscription.
Photo JLW


Others are more elaborate and carved from imported stone, a sign that the Victorian St Kildans' contact with tourists had given them access to money.
Photo JLW


Although this was the remotest inhabited part of the British Isles, its very remoteness attracted wealthy Victorian tourists. They have left a photographic record of the islanders from about 1860. This is Rachel Gillies, whose grave stone is in the photo above. This photo is in the island museum.


Some of the gravestones are quite recent. Malcolm MacDonald left the island in 1924 and spent most of his life in London. He always missed the island home of his youth. He visited St Kilda again in 1967 and found it very hard to leave for a second time and return to London.
Photo JLW


His name, and that of his father, is still just legible on the faded pupil roll in the school house.

Malcolm did make one final trip to St Kilda. His ashes were buried next to the remains of his ancestors. It is likely to be one of the last internments on this island, at the edge of the world, which was inhabited for thousands of years but now stands silent, as a museum to the past.

For a moment, as the wind blew round the walls of the burial ground, I thought I could hear distant voices. But it was only the cries of the sea birds and I turned back to the village street.

03/06/2008 am

Farewell to St Kilda

Cuma now made her way down the east coast of Boreray. As we entered the shade of her high cliffs, a chill descended on our mood. We knew we were shortly to return to Harris and leave the enchanted archipelago of St Kilda in the middle of the dreaming ocean.


In reality, the St Kildans lived brutally tough lives there was little romance about their survival or their eventual evacuation. The whole island history has been viewed through the rose tinted spectacles of Victorian tourists. Because the islanders were the remotest community in the British Isles and their economy was based on shared labour without money,they were seen as a utopian curiosity. As a result, their decline and fall was well documented but any seakayaker who has spent time exploring the Scottish coastline will have found dozens of other abandoned settlements. Their residents have no history, no names, no photographs and no rows of books on library shelves dedicated to their lives and times. The only testaments to their existence are a few piles of moss covered stones.

Both my wife and I, who are urban Scots, have ancestors who lived in the isles. My mother's family abandoned their croft on a Scottish island and came to Glasgow in the 1860's, before the stone cottages on St Kilda were built and 70 years before it was evacuated! The reason the St Kildan's survived so long, was the birds. The harvest of the sea fowl made the St Kildan's lives easier than those of many of their peers on the Hebrides and remote mainland coasts.


Cuma now turned her bow towards Harris and slowly...


... the jagged cliffs and peaks of the St Kildan archipelago...


... slipped away below the western horizon.

We could, of course, choose to return any summer and I am sure we will. For most of the St Kildans, who were evacuated on that day in 1930, it was to be different. Theirs' was a final farewell, as the peaks of their island home were swallowed by the empty flatness of the Atlantic Ocean.


Soon the only evidence, of this land at the edge of the World, were the gannets. They all flew in the same direction, back towards distant rocky ledges and their hungry chicks.

03/06/2008 pm