‘He thought he was doing them a favour, but these new houses had windows. If the glass broke, well, where do you get window glass, here? They needed paint . . . timber . . . but how d’you get timber where there’s no trees . . . ?’
Sam gestured out into the bay, in the direction of the faraway mainland cities and then burgeoning factories.
‘That was the beginning of the end. Seventy years later, everyone was gone.’
Next morning, laden with rucksacks full of equipment and spare clothes, because the weather could turn on a sixpence, and carrying metal strongboxes with the more delicate equipment, we passed along the street and, when it petered out, crossed a damp hillside and a burn, then picked up the army road Jill had spoken of, which climbs the thousand feet up onto the heights of the island. The road connects the base with a collection of white-domed radar buildings that face the Atlantic on a promontory, and which, the surveyors pointed out, feature on no map. Once you were high, breathless on the hillcrest, though, if you turned your back on those, the modern world vanished. Village Bay, the base, the abandoned houses and village cleits were all out of sight, and at the top of the hill we were on a scant two miles of high hinterland that looked like birds had designed it for themselves. Everywhere was flight and fall, tilted rock and ramparts, a few turf slopes and sheer cliffs to breed on, and no need of anything else.
The surveyors divided into two teams of two, each with an archaeologist. The most senior of the surveyors was Ian Parker, a gentle, knowledgeable man. He and his colleague Adam Welfare would be working with Sam and they intended to make their way along the edge called Mullach Mor, a southwest-facing clifftop from where the land sloped steeply 800 feet down to the sea. The rock ramparts and tremendous sea-views attracted me, so I asked to tag along with them. As Sam nimbly led the way, in single file they carried the rucksacks and boxes along little paths the wild sheep made. To the left, the sea was too far below for its sound to reach us. It was breeding time, so a constant traffic of birds swirled around the island; every tiny gleam over the sea was a bird. Gannets, from the great gannetries of Stac an Armin and Stac Lee, four sea miles north, and silent fulmars and arrow-lines of guillemots. There were bonxies, too, nesting on the short turf. You had to watch out for them, these great skuas. If they didn’t like the cut of your jib, they’d lumber into the air, fix you with their unintelligent eyes and swoop at your head till you were gone.
A ‘cultural landscape’ they called it, but up on the island’s heights, giddied by the cloud shadows over the turf, and by sea and sky, and distracted everywhere by birds, you could be forgiven for asking where, in this wild place, was the culture? But soon I understood that, ranged along the clifftops, camouflaged by stone and turf, were yet more cleits. They were everywhere. The more you saw, clinging to steep slopes or perched on rocky tables, the more there were.
Perhaps it was his white beard, but when Ian strapped on the portable surveying equipment, he looked like a sort of techno-prophet. The hefty batteries were carried in a backpack with an aerial sticking out, and he held before him a tall staff with a saucer-sized satellite dish mounted on top. This also had a small monitor attached, called a data-logger, which he used to tap in figures and instructions and read off relevant numbers. Amongst other things, it told him how many satellites were present beyond the clouds at any given moment—they used those of the US-controlled NAVSTAR system—and how they were disported in the skies, and how many others would shortly rise over our horizon.
When Ian explained this to me, he used the language of stars, spoke about ‘constellations’ of satellites. He told me that to get a GPS reading you need at least four out of the twenty-four NAVSTAR satellites orbiting above you. With these in place, and with their readings fine-tuned by a small base station erected in the village, you could scramble all over the island, and pinpoint your position to the nearest centimetre.
A centimetre? I was appalled. Too much accuracy! It was like pinning a moth to a board.
But, Ian went on to say that, actually, such precise surveying reveals that nothing is truly fixed. For example, when the tide comes in on the west coast, the whole UK landmass dips a little under the colossal weight of water. Furthermore, the UK is creeping toward Norway, just a fraction, year by year. The surveyors’ equipment can detect these infinitesimal shifts.
‘And the cleits,’ I asked. ‘Do you know how many there are?’
‘Mary Harman counted 1400 on Hirta alone, more on the other islands, and the stacks . . .’
‘And you’re going to survey every single one of them down to a centimetre’s accuracy?’
The cliff heights didn’t dizzy me, but that did.
* * *
So it began. Every structure the team approached over the next days received the same treatment. Ian, with the rover-receiver, consulted his screen and took an initial reading, calling out ten-figure coordinates for his colleague Adam to note down. Then he moved around the building, taking a new reading every few paces. By joining these dots, the building’s ‘footprint’ appeared on his screen. Each was a oval with a gap at one end for the door, a shape like a broken link. Which they were, in a sense, now the people were gone, and the land supported no one.
Adam took notes the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper. His job was to describe in natural language the building’s state of repair, and any distinguishing features. ‘This one’s a side-loader,’ he would say, meaning that, unusually, the door was on the longer wall. ‘Aw, its hat’s blown off!’ meant the turf roof was gone. He noticed that those built on steep slopes had a vent at the lower end, presumably to let the draught through, to keep the contents dry. That the walls were thicker than the space they contained. Sam took photographs, so there would be a visual record, too.
It was patient work, which proceeded a few windblown yards at a time. They’d approach a new cleit, press the right buttons, take the GPS readings, measure, make notes, photograph, move on. Weathers and cloud shadows moved swiftly across the island, a sudden stinging hailstorm would arrive and pass on, and the sun would come out again. We always had to shout to be heard. Record, and move on. I thought the cleits curious, half nature and half culture, with their stone walls and turf roofs that shivered in the breeze. We could measure them all we liked, but they were still mysterious. Always we were in sight of the sea. Waves broke against rocks far below, sending out white spume and turquoise wash.
This careful recording was a wholly different way of looking at St Kilda to what I’d have done alone. Alone, I’d have rushed around, thrilled but hampered by a kind of illiteracy, unable to read the land. I wouldn’t have studied the cats’-paw pattern of lichen on a lintel-stone, so similar to the patterns made by the wind on the surface of the sea below. I wouldn’t have noticed a clump of tiny violets quivering on a cleit roof. Sheep liked to shelter in the cleits. Their interiors smelled of dung; sometimes a rotting carcass sent us away gagging.
Often we wondered exactly what a particular cleit had been used for. Especially when the surveyors, again led by the sure-footed Sam, had to edge two or three hundred feet down steep slopes, to reach cleits so far down they looked like turtles that had climbed up out of the sea. Surely these must have held eggs or birds the St Kildan men had taken, climbing barefoot with horse-hair ropes round their waists.
When such questions arose, it was strange there was no one to ask. You couldn’t just nip down to the village and ask someone. As Sam had intimated the first night, it all seemed very recent and very ancient at once. Ancient, because all was stone. Recent, because the evacuation had been a media event, with reporters and cameras. Someone told us that that there was one St Kildan woman still alive, who had been a small child in 1930, and who was living her final days in a Hebridean care home.
* * *
We had a run of good weather, and the teams worked long hours. They surveyed cleit after cleit, in friendly rivalry. A hundred a day! Not only cleits: occasionally a turf dyke, or something that may hav
e once been an enclosure. If it could be interpreted as a man-made structure, it was surveyed.
There was method in it—the sequence they followed was Dr Harman’s. She had taken photographs; our task meant matching her small black-and-white photographs taken thirty years ago with a real world-view of changing light and colour and tugging wind. It was my job to scout ahead. I’d seek salient features in the photo, a jagged lintel, say, or a stone shaped like a horse’s head, and look for those. It was obvious from the photos that time was taking its toll. Every cleit looked more tired, more loose, was heading fractionally toward collapse.
‘I know,’ Jill said later. ‘It’s a pity, but this is what we’re doing—studying how cleits die.’
Thus, when the surveyors moved over the island, from one feature to the next, conducting their short ritual, they were like priests, giving each of these little buildings the last rites.
Of course, you can only record what remains. What’s gone is gone. Every rock, every feature, on the island had a name. We worked around Claigeann an Tigh Faire, the Skull of the Watching House; the Lovers’ Rock; Cam Mar; Mullach Sgar; but who knows how many other names are now forgotten. Maybe each of the cleits once had a name, now lost, too.
They had to work quickly, but there was always time to admire a pair of golden plover, innocently parading their bright speckles, then go carefully for fear of trampling their nest, or shield our eyes to watch a midair dogfight between a bonxie and a screaming seagull. Lunches were a sandwich taken huddled out of the wind, and from time to time there was an enforced break, a ‘spike’—a short while when too few satellites were available for readings to be made. A ‘spike’ was a chance to sit against a high rock, eat wine gums, and comment on the sea and clouds and the birds’ dramas. To my mind, a ‘spike’ had a special feel. Not that the satellites could ‘see’ us, but nonetheless it was a chance to be unobserved, free for a while. We were very high, not quite a satellite view, but high enough to see patterns on the sea’s surface, long trails of shining water like the marks left behind by an ice-skater. We watched gannets dive, and puffins, those stout little householders, at the doors of their burrows. Once, a whale arched from the water below, blew and rolled down again, a black sigh.
Being with the surveyors taught me to change my focus. It was like the difference between looking through a window pane and looking at it. Look through the window, and you’d see the sea, wildness, distance, isolation. Look at it, and you saw utility, food security, domestic management. We moved between the Stone Age and the Age of Satellites. What separated them? Only thirty years. A mere thirty years after the St Kildan people had finally given up, defeated by their isolation, Telstar was launched, and the world had satellite communications. Thirty years. A fulmar can live longer than that, if left in peace.
There was a spike. Sam and Ian and Adam and I sat side by side, backs against a sheltering rock and watching the sea and tumbling birds, and wind-driven clouds crossing the blue sky. From here you could see the so-called Western Isles ranged faintly on the eastern horizon. You could close your eyes, feel the sun on your skin, and fancy yourself far from the modern world with all its technology, were it not for Ian checking his data-logger to see if more satellites had climbed into the cultural landscape of the heavens.
* * *
In truth, I found this level of scrutiny a little unnerving. It was disquieting, to be aware all the time of satellites prowling unseen above the sky, while examining a landscape others had created and left behind. Nothing here escaped notice—not a bird, not a stone, certainly not a person. St Kilda, far from being an escape, the remotes that German couple sought, and I had myself thought I might find those years ago on my first trip, was instead a place of comment and note. More than once I’d marvelled at the sheer number of cleits. Cleitbuilding seemed an absolute mania. After a week I began to wonder if they’d had an unstated purpose; if people had built small dark closets just to get some seclusion, some corrective to the sky, the sea and wind and each other.
Nothing escaped attention. One day a snowy owl wafted in over the sea, probably from Iceland. It wasn’t long, of course, before he was spotted, and the news was relayed to us via the little VHF radios the surveyors carried in their pockets. The owl frequented a particular rocky overhang which gave him a view of the valley called Glen Mor, and once you knew where to look you could see him half a mile away, like a white-robed hermit at the door of a shrine.
Everyone knew the weather had to break, so the surveyors pressed on while they could. At five or six o’clock, depending on progress, Ian would get on the radio to the other team, and suggest calling it a day. Work was still work—we were glad to knock off. When we all met up, there were always snippets of news and details to exchange. To save lugging it up and down the hill every day, the roving receivers were stored overnight in a particularly strong cleit. I liked to see them being loaded through the dark entranceway. For a short while the cleit was brought back into use. It became a store again, a strong room, but for items its builders never dreamed of.
So were the working days. Amassing cleitfuls of data, recording against loss.
* * *
Cresting the hill homeward we could see at once if any new boats were anchored below. I always looked for Donald’s yacht, but didn’t see it. No doubt he was showing his clients other wonderful places.
Down in the village, too, there was news to catch up on, the events that we’d missed. If winds were favourable the place was in constant activity. One morning, a cruise liner put in, landing 200 visitors for the warden to cope with. One visitor had been so overcome with emotion or agoraphobia that the nurse stationed at the radar base had to be called to coax her back to her boat. Another day, a helicopter carrying a Japanese film crew had flown illegally close to the cliffs, panicking the birds, which are supposed to be protected. The helicopter was traced by its number—nothing goes unnoticed—and there were furious phone calls. A couple of days after that, an environmental health officer arrived, courtesy of the base helicopter, to do his rounds.
You soon get into the swing of life at Village Bay, but in truth I didn’t care for the place. Not because it was sullied by the base and its Cold War paranoia; not because it wasn’t ‘remote’ enough—though with the satellites and cruise liners and environmental health officers, you do wonder what ‘remote’ might mean. It was the village itself that troubled me, those cottages we walked past twice a day en route to plot and measure every last jot their people had left behind. They didn’t sing of a lost idyll, those cold empty doors. If the cottages spoke at all, it was to say—Look, they made their decision. They quit. They moved on.
* * *
For several days in a row we ladies in our boudoir were puzzled by a persistent early-morning tap-tap-tapping at the window, until we discovered it was a pied wagtail, infuriated by his own reflection. Then, one morning, the sound changed. There was no pecking; instead the wind banged at the same east-facing, sea-facing window. A higher swell licked along the rocks; overnight, clouds had covered the hills. The village was as I’d seen it the first time, fleetingly. ‘Nach du bha’n a Hirst!’ The forecast was for more wind, out of the dreaded east.
With the wind, there arose a dilemma. The skipper who’d brought us arrived with some day-trippers, and said he had space to take two or three of us back to Harris almost at once, if we wanted. To accept would mean leaving St Kilda a couple of days earlier than planned. But the forecast was such, the skipper warned, that it might be a full week before he was back.
For an hour I wandered round the village, swithering. Stay, or go? Leave St Kilda?
In the little museum were the nineteenth-century photographs. People with weather-worn faces in homespun clothes. Go or stay? I was hardly the first to have faced that choice. There came to mind that poor German couple on the yacht, who had so dreamed of coming to St Kilda. To leave early did seem a terrible luxury. But, then again, my children were still young; another week would be too long
.
The power station droned, soft rain fell, ewes and their lambs sheltered in the doors of cleits. Ach. Enough. I went to get ready. It wasn’t as if I had work to do, like the surveyors. To linger on St Kilda just for the sake of it would merely have been romance.
LA CUEVA
THE WALLS OF THE CHAMBER are the colour of old ivory, but damp, amphibian, as though they still remember the long-ago rivers which formed them. They bulge toward us, gravid, then shrink into shadow.
One of the two girls carries a lamp; her friend is too encumbered with a large leather handbag. The girls are student age. When the girls arrived laughing at the guide’s desk, in the cool of the cave mouth the bag had made me smile. Funny thing to bring into a cave. Now we are two or three chambers in, the air is weighty and humid; it smells of iron and deep earth. The way we have come from is in darkness. So is the way ahead. We move through passages in a clot of light, cast by the two hissing paraffin lamps. When the lamps move, shadows lope along the walls.
Now we are gathered around him, the guide is speaking quietly. A lean young man, he’s a member of the family who rediscovered the caves a hundred years ago. I can pick up certain words: agua, water, murcielagos, bats—a cluster of whom, like a scrunch of black pubic hair, hang from the roof above. Tomas says there are thousands more bats, asleep in further, deeper galleries. He says that’s how the caves were discovered—by bats. Two farmers, his own forebears, had been looking for bat guano to fertilise their olive trees, so they took care at dawn to watch where the bats went, and, like the Pied Piper, the bats led them to an opening in the mountainside. So the dance began again, animals and humans and cave.
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