by David Yeadon
And so we did…
17
A Journey to St. Kilda
IN THE PAST, GETTING TO ST. KILDA was a long and often hazardous venture. On one of the Hebridean fishing boats—if you could persuade the oft reluctant skippers to add you to their crew—the journey could take up to nine hours, with no clear itinerary for a return. A couple of other companies offer more traveler-oriented camping voyages, but these can last for up to a week. This seems like a long time to be stuck on a virtually deserted island, unless your bird-watching enthusiasm is such that creature comfort requirements are negligible and you possess a stoic attitude toward solitude and the furious tirades of fickle Atlantic storms.
But then, along came the farsighted Angus Campbell, the fisherman who had tolerated my neophyte presence on his boat, Harmony, in the spring when we’d spent a day prawning together in The Minch. For years, Angus had nurtured a dream. Surely, he thought, if you could build a boat strong enough and fast enough, you could offer one-day round trips to the scores of adventurous travelers and bird-watchers who came to Harris not only enticed by the powerful beauty of the little island but also entranced by the mystery and myths enveloping the St. Kilda archipelago, now celebrated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Others had considered the idea but balked at the huge investment required and the high prices that would have to be charged (up to $150 per passenger) to make the project viable. But Angus held fast to his dream. He designed what he considered to be the perfect motor cruiserfor the projected two-hour, twenty-five-knot journey, and a passenger contingent of around twelve. He also managed to obtain “enterprise” funds from the Western Isles Council, supervised the boat’s construction in Ireland, and finally launched his Interceptor 42 (the 42 denotes the length of the boat) in spring 2005 to enthusiastic press accolades—even including a special feature in the London Times.
Some of the local skeptics, however, despite a series of highly successful “tryout” runs, predicted catastrophe for Angus’s project. Their scowling, pessimistic mutterings ran the gamut from excessive start-up costs and fares, huge insurance liabilities, and the calamitous Hebridean weather to spiraling fuel costs, the short tourist season, and, worst of all, “What’ll happen when they lose a dinghy-load of passengers tryin’ to land in one of those St. Kilda swells?”
Angus’s response was invariably a sly smile and a just-you-wait-and-see shrug. And his smile turned into ribald chortles over dinner one evening at his home down by Tarbert harbor. Anne and I had been invited over to celebrate the recent arrival of his family’s second child, and as Christina served up a superb prawn salad of just-caught langoustines and one of the most succulent pot roasts we’d ever eaten in Britain (with apologies to my late mother), Angus almost fell off his chair laughing at one particular local’s doom-and-gloom comments.
“This fella—can y’imagine—predicted that we’ll all end up massacred by the million or so birds out there for invading their territory!”
“Just like the Hitchcock movie!” said Anne.
“Well, since the islanders left in 1930 and stopped eating thousands of those birds every year, they should be very grateful!” chuckled Christina. “And now they’ve got World Heritage and National Nature Reserve status, they couldn’t be any safer.”
“Of course, they might be a little overenthusiastic in their displays of gratitude,” I suggested.
Angus almost toppled from his chair a second time. “Ah well, now, that’s true! ’S’best to have a hat on or somethin’ when they start to circle round the boat…their little droppings of thanks can be a wee bit on the overgenerous side!”
The image of a dozen bird-loving passengers being deluged by guano-gifts from appreciative gannets, fulmars, kestrels, puffins, and kittiwakes was enough to bring our pot-roast gorging to an impromptu halt.
“But it’s amazin’,” said Angus when the laughter finally subsided. “I mean, these little islands are Europe’s most important seabird colonies. The numbers are fantastic: sixty thousand pairs of gannets, the largest anywhere in the world; sixty-two thousand pairs of fulmars; a hundred and forty pairs of puffins—half of all Britain’s puffin population—fifteen thousand pairs of guillemots, and thousands more of Leach’s petrels, razorbills, kittiwakes, and skuas. Plus all the big migrations in the spring and autumn—graylag geese, whooper swans, pink-footed geese, snow buntings, redwings—well over a hundred different species during the year. It’s a fantastic place!”
“So—I assume just the bird-watchers alone are going to be enough to fill your boat,” said Anne.
“Y’know, you wouldn’t believe the response,” said Angus. “A’mean, even I was a bit nervous about all this…I wondered if all the doomsayers would turn out to be right what with our crazy weather and the cost of the trip and all their other jibes and whatnot…but so far it looks like we’re providing something that people really want. A chance to visit a place that’s almost mythical…to see the way that tiny strange community once lived…and then to sail around all those huge rock columns—the stacs—and watch the birds on those fourteen-hundred-foot-high sea cliffs—every ledge and nook and cranny crammed with them. Och, the sky’s almost black with wings.”
Angus seemed to run out of words in capturing the experience that Anne and I had been waiting for ever since we’d heard of his proposed venture months ago.
“So—when can we go!?” I said.
“Well, the trip this comin’ Wednesday is full…but there’s a couple of places on Friday. In fact, if the weather holds we might even stay over and camp on-island if you have the time.”
Anne grinned. “Oh yes. We definitely have the time!”
And so, on Friday at 8:00 A.M. prompt, Anne and I joined a small group of ten St. Kilda enthusiasts and left Leverburgh harbor in a great swirl of spray and the snarl of the Interceptor’s enormous diesel engine, off into the wide Atlantic.
It was a perfect Hebridean morning. Beyond the almost inevitable haze over the North Harris hills, the sky was cloudless and the sun warm. Angus’s young assistant, Duncan, handed out cups of fresh-brewed coffee and fat, succulent slices of Christina’s homemade banana and currant cake. A few of the passengers sat at the tables in the galley but most of us preferred to sprawl on the open deck, breathing in the cool salt air and feeling the frothy spume settling on our cheeks and foreheads like thistledown.
Behind us, Harris and the long swathes of the Uist beaches and hills faded and we peered westward way out into the Atlantic, waiting for our first glimpse of lonely St. Kilda and its cluster of islets and stacs.
For a long while there was nothing to see across the calm, almost silk-surfaced ocean.
“Keep y’eyes open,” Angus called from the galley. “It’s a wee bit early in the season but y’might see a few dolphins—mainly bottlenose—they like riding the bow waves…and maybe basking sharks and whales—y’get to see them too from time to time.”
An elderly gentleman was sitting beside us on the deck. He wore a brown felt trilby hat and nursed an elegant ebony walking stick with a ram’s horn handle between his thighs. We’d exchanged the usual pleasantries about the weather, the sturdiness and elegant design of Angus’s cruiser, and the excellence of Christina’s cake. But then he seemed to doze off until, as Anne and I continued to scan the horizon, he suddenly turned to us and half whispered, “This has been a dream of mine, y’know…ever since I was a young boy.”
“To come to St. Kilda?” asked Anne.
“My family called it Hirta—the old Gaelic name for St. Kilda. My grandfather had his own name for it, though. He called it Providence Isle.”
“Interesting name,” said Anne. “Did he come from here?”
“No—but he almost died here,” said the elderly man quietly.
“Really? What happened?”
The man sighed and then smiled. He seemed happy to be telling a tale that was obviously an important part of his family heritage.
“Well, he was a sailing man.
Very adventurous. Did a lot of solo sailing back in the late 1800s. And one of his journeys was a long meander up the west coast of Scotland. He was hoping to reach the Faeroe Islands—y’know, way up there toward Iceland—owned by Denmark. He said they were very wild and beautiful—‘like huge green pyramids rising out of some of the wildest seas in the world,’ was how he described them. Anyway, he decided he’d take a detour from his route and visit Hirta. He’d read a book that described the island as ‘an earthly paradise inhabited by people of unusual grace and integrity.’ Anyway, things went a little awry. A storm came up very quickly out of the southwest and when he entered the bay of Hirta—Village Bay, they call it—he lost control of his boat in a tidal surge—they’re deadly in that bay, so they say—and was beached very violently on the rocks below the village. He was almost drowned but the villagers rushed down and managed to get a line out to him and rescued him. The boat got a bit of a battering but they managed to save that too. My grandfather’s ankle was broken and he couldn’t walk, so he stayed with the islanders for more than three weeks until he was just about well enough to sail back to the mainland. And he said he’d never been treated with more kindness and respect and vowed that one day he’d return. Unfortunately, he never did…”
We waited for the old man to continue. It was obvious he was moved by the retelling of an important family tale. Way ahead, the Atlantic was millpond-mellow, barely a ripple on its purple-turquoise surface. A drowsy downland of barely moving wavelets. On a sailboat we would have been doldrumized by the lack of a breeze, but Angus’s engine growled with powerful pleasure as we cut through the ocean at a twenty-five-knot clip.
“No, he never did,” the old man began again. “He never returned to his Saoghal air leth.”
“His what?” asked Anne.
“Ah, that’s the old Gaelic again. It means—as far as you can translate Gaelic into a language like English—something like ‘a land apart,’ a special unique place, as he always told us it was. And he really had planned to return. He wanted to give something to their church. I don’t know what it was. Something he said they would understand…but he never said what…I wish I’d known. I could have carried it for him. Even though there are no people left now, they say the church is still there.”
St. Kilda
Another long pause. The old man seemed lost in his own thoughts again until, in a stronger voice, he finally said: “So—I’m coming here…for him.”
Anne smiled and touched his arm.
“Would you like another cup of coffee?”
“Oh…ah…thank you. Most kind. Thank you.”
Anne took his cup and vanished into the cabin.
When she returned, there was excitement on deck.
“There she is!” shouted a young boy. “I can see St. Kilda!”
Everyone on deck rushed to the rail, peering through the spray and spume, and, yes indeed, there the islands were—jagged cones of rock, silhouetted pale blue in the heat haze, rising like some Tolkienesque fantasy from the smooth ocean. Some journalist, in a rather dismissive mood, had described them as “like a mistake in the middle of nowhere.” But that certainly didn’t reflect the mood on the boat. I could hear the chatter and cheers from the half dozen or so passengers in the cabin. Even Angus, steady and stern at his wheel and focused on his welter of dials, switches, levers, and buttons, grinned as the excitement buzzed around him.
“’Bout another hour or so,” he said. “Time to read up on the islands if you need to.”
Duncan handed out colorful Scottish Natural Heritage brochures that gave, in English and Gaelic, a succinct introduction to St. Kildan geology, history, ecology, and anthropology.
There were a few surprises in the text too. Apparently these were not just islands in the traditional sense but the dramatic, fragmented remnants of a blown volcano active around 60 million years ago. Aerial photos showed the perfect caldera arc of Village Bay on the main island of Hirta, echoed in the curve of the original settlement set back a couple of hundred yards from the rocky beach.
Human occupation here on these “islands at the edge of the world” has been traced back over two thousand years, although unlike other island settlements off Scotland’s west coast, there were no saintly links with early Christian hermits. The name of St. Kilda is thought to be a corruption of the ancient Norse word skildir (shields). Certainly the island profiles, with their jagged ramparts and soaring, spearlike towers of rock, suggested a powerful defensive bastion.
Despite the abundance of a unique species of small, brown-fleeced Soay sheep here and a rich variety of fish in the bay and among the spectacular undersea caves and grottoes, the small community preferred to dine—and dine well—primarily on seabirds. The sheep were valuable for their milk and for cheese making, but gannets and fulmars were the meat of choice. They were caught annually in their thousands, lifted by hand or noosed off the ledges of the towering cliffs by intrepid male islanders belayed, often barefooted, on horsehair ropes. The birds were then stripped of their feathers, which were stored as trading barter, and then dried throughout the summer for winter use in scores of primitive oval stone-built and turf-topped cleits scattered across the steep slopes of the caldera, around and high above the village.
Nothing was wasted here.
Seabird eggs—preserved in the cleits under peat ash for up to eight months to heighten their flavor—formed a major component of the local diet. Lamp oil was extracted from the birds, their bones were carved into useful tools and implements, and their skins—particularly the throat skins—were made into shoes.
“It really was what my great-grandfather said—‘a land apart,’” our old man in the trilby hat told us as we sprawled once again on the deck. “Bit like the Galapagos, I suppose, a Darwinian place with its own type of sheep, its own type of wren—bigger than those on the mainland—even its own type of mice.”
“And the people too—the Hiortaich—they were almost like a separate species,” I suggested. “They created their own form of traditional dress—crude tweeds made from the brown wool of the Soay sheep. And they had no priests or ministers in the formal sense, so they even invented their own spiritual culture.” I told him the tale of Roderick the Imposter, who had imposed his unique form of “religion” on the islanders.
“That’s fascinating,” he responded. “Bit like Golding’s Lord of the Flies.”
“And also like that film—The Wicker Man. You remember that?” said Anne. “Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland. Some kind of thriller about human sacrifices on a remote ‘pagan’ island way out off the Scottish coast…an island like St. Kilda!”
“I remember the title—but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it…”
“Wasn’t there another film loosely based on St. Kilda?” I asked Anne, whose memory of films made during Hollywood’s Golden Age is bizarrely extensive. “Something like The Land at the Edge of the World?”
“Actually it was The Edge of the World—made in the thirties I think, with John Laurie. Very powerful film. Beautiful black-and-white images of a ‘lost world.’ Based on St. Kilda but they had to use some other island up in the Shetlands. Foula, I think. Apparently even then, after the people left in 1930, the laird owner wanted it preserved as a bird sanctuary.”
“And just look at the place,” I said, pointing at the islands, now much closer and even more dramatically distinct in character. “This is pure ‘edge of the world’ territory! I bet in a dark winter storm, this would seem like the end of all things—a black, lost world of loneliness and desolation…”
“Oh—very cheerful!” was Anne’s dismissive response.
Ahead of us, at the end of a mile-long, dragon’s back–profiled peninsula of bare black rock peaks and arêtes—a series of mini Matterhorns along the ridge of the ancient caldera wall—rose the formidable bulk of An Dun. One writer described it as “the least plausible place on Earth”—an otherworldly tower of striated, storm-gashed volcanic basalt. And it stands—or, rather, l
eans in a wearied way—as the guardian of the bay. A breakwater supreme. Yet it’s strangely, almost sadly, so gouged and holed and hollowed and pocked that you wonder how much longer this immense creaturelike pinnacle, hundreds of fragmented feet high, can withstand the ferociously destructive power of those Atlantic storms for which St. Kilda is renowned. In fact, folklore has it that the islanders suffered regular bouts of collective deafness due to the incredible sound and fury of the gales here and the chaotic smashing and crashing of the man-sized boulders that constitute the Village Bay “beach.”
Fortunately, on the day of our arrival, all was calm and benign as a duck pond. But those of us who had done a little reading about the island knew that such a deceiving tranquility could be eradicated in minutes by sudden force-12 hurricanes seemingly conjured up by their own sneaky malicious volition. Angus was fully aware of the fickleness of climatic quirks here and had already suggested to the group that weather conditions had changed dramatically to the south and a storm was forming and heading straight for the island. Not a concern at the moment, he emphasized. It was slow-moving and likely would not arrive until early morning, but he suggested, to our mutual disappointment, that an overnight camp would be “tempting fate a wee bit too much, I’m thinking.”
So we had no choice but to accept his decision, focus on our slow entry into Village Bay, and make the most of the few hours we could spend here exploring the mysteries and moods of the island.
First impressions are magnificent. A great arc of grass-sheened hills—part of the ancient caldera wall—rose up from the curved beach. Their slopes were dotted with those strange stone-built remnants of traditional cleit drying structures. Then came the long semicircular enclosure wall, or “head dyke,” that once defined the village pasture “boundary,” and below that were more cleits, larger and more substantial, with many still supporting thick, turf-topped roofs. Here the pasture grasses became greener—ideal grazing land for the Soay sheep still running semiwild on the island. And then came the remains of the village itself, its arc of dwellings echoing both the arc of the bay and the boundary wall. Radiating “wheel-spoke” fragments of walls linking the beach with the dyke indicated an almost medieval pattern of “long fields”—one for each croft. The old windowless, chimneyless, and round-cornered black houses, many built in the early 1800s and shared by the resident family’s livestock, had lost their ponderous, knobbled permanence and were now rubbled skeletons of huge rocks with foundation walls over four feet thick. Between these stood the roofless shells of the more recent stone “white houses” funded in the 1860s largely by the Royal Highland Agricultural Society of Scotland, which insisted that islanders deserved “more decent and civilized dwellings.”