by David Yeadon
Unfortunately, the use of windows, square-cornered and thinner walls, and less sturdy roofing materials meant that these well-intentioned structures often failed to offer the same solid protection as the black houses against those furious island storms. We could see that five of the newer dwellings had been reroofed. One of them, so Angus told us as we edged our way toward the shore, was now a small museum. The remainder provided accommodation for the National Trust warden and itinerant researchers who had spent years visiting here and studying the breeding patterns, survival abilities, and other quirks of the unique Soay sheep.
At the western end of the old village is the more substantial Factor’s House, once home to the laird’s tax collector when he came over on his annual summer trip to collect the rent from the crofters. As money was virtually unknown on the island, this was usually paid in the form of bird feathers (for bedding and ladies’ hat decorations), bird oil, and bolts of homemade brown “murrit” tweed that were kept in the store, still standing today at the top of the landing jetty. Close by we could see the small austere stone church built in the late 1820s, the adjoining school room and minister’s manse, and something else that caused a sudden gasp of surprise among the passengers.
“I thought this was supposed to be a peaceful little community,” one young man called out to Angus. “What the heck is that great cannon doing here over by the store? It’s enormous!”
It did look rather idiosyncratic—a huge, twenty-foot-long, black artillery gun pointing directly toward our gently wallowing boat that Angus was in the process of anchoring prior to our disembarking by inflatable dinghy.
Angus laughed. “That’s no old cannon. It was put there in 1918 after a German submarine had shelled the village to destroy a radio mast used to guide our Atlantic ships.”
“The Germans came all this way just to attack little St. Kilda!?” asked the young man.
“Aye—but they were lousy shots. Used up seventy-two shells trying to hit it and damaged the church and the manse—but they were very polite about it all. They explained to the villagers why they’d come and suggested they find shelter well away from where they were going to shoot! And look—we’re safe now too! We’ve got the army here,” said Angus, pointing to an aesthetically discordant huddle of gray-painted Portakabin-type structures by the jetty.
“Those buildings really spoil the place,” said another passenger. “What are they here for?”
“Ah well, they’re a bit secretive about it all,” said Angus, “but it’s got to do with tracking missiles from the rocket range on South Uist. Oh—and maintaining that early warning station or something like that way up there on top of the ridge.”
We all looked, and there indeed, hundreds of feet above the arc of the desolate village, was a cluster of aerials and radar devices perched all too obviously on Hirta’s highest point. Despite its splendid isolation, the island is now irrevocably a part of Britain’s ultra-sophisticated national defense network.
“Why would they come and spoil such a beautiful place like this,” asked one young girl sadly.
“Well”—Angus was obviously going to have to answer this question on each one of his Interceptor voyages, and he seemed to be trying to find a reply that would restore a little levity to his obviously disappointed audience—“at least they’ve got a pub here!”
“A pub!” Eyes widened, smiles appeared, and salty lips were licked.
“Yeah, tha’s right. A nice little pub—the Puff-Inn, where drinks cost half price and they’ve got darts and billiards and—”
“What time’s it open?” asked another young man, obviously delighted by the prospect of a long liquid interlude.
Angus decided honesty was the only policy.
“Well, now, if we’d been camping here, which we can’t do now because of that storm that’s coming up, we’d have been havin’ a fine old time there…this evening.”
“Evening?! What about now! It’s getting on for eleven. Almost opening time…”
“Aye well, y’right. On Harris they’d be openin’ up but here they don’t start ’til five o’clock…long after we’ll be gone.”
Murmurs of dissent and disappointment rumbled through the huddled passengers preparing to disembark.
“But,” continued Angus, “y’can still go in and see the place. It’s a cozy little pub. It’s just that you won’t be gettin’ any cheap beers today!”
Despite the disappointment, as soon as we’d made the brief crossing in the dinghy to the jetty, almost everyone in the group headed straight for the Puff-Inn, which was indeed quite cozy—almost clubby in its colorful informality. It possessed a distinct atmosphere of “eclectic mélange”: large, humorous murals of puffins; a couple of battered guitars and a tiny ukulele leaning by a massive speaker amp; two large TVs; memorabilia-strewn walls; a message board full of cryptically worded flyers and in-joke cards; photos of the spectacularly labyrinthine underwater tunnels and caves found all around the island; a large sign celebrating the fact that St. Kilda was now “twinned” with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; a huge stuffed teddy bear sitting atop a miniature upright coffin labeled with some cryptic reference to island shenanigans; a handwritten menu for the evening dinner delights—steak Diane, honey-roasted ham, and pork stir-fry (not bad for a handful of residents here that barely exceeded twenty at any one time)—and, of course, the bar itself, grills down and locked, with its long, tantalizing list of alcoholic delights at 1960s prices.
Finally, Anne and I were on our own. Following a brief welcoming introduction by the National Trust warden, the group quickly dispersed to explore the strange skeletal remnants of this once almost utopian (according to some commentators) community. We watched as our elderly gentleman-friend, with his brown trilby hat and elegant cane, made straight for the stern little church and vanished inside to do whatever he had to do in memory of his great-grandfather’s rescue and recuperation here.
We walked slowly together along the long grassy arc of the village “main street,” edged by the dual remnants of black and “white” houses. A dozen or so diminutive Soay sheep grazed on the long, narrow strips of arable land and pasture. Despite the generous land allocation for each croft, crop cultivation had invariably been meager here—oats, barley, hay, potatoes, and cabbages—with the gastronomic emphasis always on gannet and fulmar meat, lamb, and occasional fish.
Everywhere we looked were dozens of those sturdy stone drying-house cleits, once filled with dead birds morphing into wizened, jerkylike strips. Many of the thick turf roofs were occupied by nesting fulmars—noisily arrogant in their territorial declarations. If we came a little too close they would leap off their turf-perches, skim our heads with their broad white wings, drop gooey white discharges, and—so Angus had warned us—even spit at us if they felt threatened.
“Now tha’s not a thing you’ll enjoy ver’ much,” he’d said. “An’ you’d definitely not be welcomed back on this boat if you’ve been hit with a blast of fulmar vomit. It’s terribly oily stuff, stinkin’ of rotten fish and God knows what else, and if it hits y’clothes y’might as well burn ’em. You’ll never get rid of the smell!”
So we heeded his advice, steered clear of the nesting fulmar families, and explored the ancient graveyard set in a circular enclosure behind the houses. It was full of small, simple, and usually unmarked headstones. Apparently, the love and devotion of the last St. Kildans who left here in 1930 was such that many asked to be returned and buried in this quiet place, protected from the flurries of island storms by its sturdy stone walls.
Just above the graveyard we found the remnants of an underground house—the House of the Fairies—thought to date from around 500 BC. This is just one of the many ancient remnants of subterranean (souterrain) dwellings, domed “beehive” houses, fanks, folds, and Iron Age circles scattered around the village and up the long slopes of the caldera.
A second ruined remnant nearby is claimed to be the site of “Lady Grange’s House.” She was the wi
fe of a prominent Scottish gentleman who exiled her here for eight years because of her suspected involvement in Jacobite plots at the time of Culloden, and other “activities of questionable propriety.” Her reputation prompted a famous remark from the ever-quotable Dr. Johnson that “if MacLeod would let it be known that he had such a place for naughty ladies, he might make his island a very profitable venue.”
We peered into the walled remnants of the white houses and the far more primitive, round-cornered black houses. There was no one else around. The others from the boat seemed to have vanished mysteriously into the echoing emptiness of the place. And yet, in a strange way, despite all the ruins and wrecked structures, the old village still possessed an aura of occupancy, an edgy immediacy of presences.
Maybe it was the memory of old sepia photographs we’d seen in the little one-room museum of the village men, thick bearded, pipe smoking, and tough, grouped together around the low walls built in front of the houses to break the fury of southern winds blasting in from the bay. There they stood, gathered in their daily “parliament,” to discuss affairs of the village and decide upon their shared activities. According to some visitors, these parliaments could be lengthy, loquacious affairs, lasting in some cases so long into the afternoon that work was often postponed until the following day in pragmatic island mañana fashion (once labeled “licentious lethargy” by an outsider ignorant of the subtleties of the St. Kildan democracy).
Or maybe it was the photographs of the women in “traditional” dress, described by one nineteenth-century visitor as follows:
They all wore dresses of dark blue serge with a very tight bodice and full skirt, sometimes with an apron. The skirts were trimmed at the foot with a little strip of black velvet and they wore a little tartan kerchief or shawl over their heads. They had boxes of knitted socks and gloves to sell to us, blown seabird eggs, and rolls of St. Kilda “murrit” tweed made from the wool of the brown or murrit sheep on the neighboring isle of Soay…
Whatever the link to the island’s past, it had permeated our mood, and as we sat together on one of those low, wind-blocking stone walls, looking down along the long, slow arc of the street and its thirty or so skeletal homes, the place seemed to possess a quiet spirit of animation. In that still, late-morning silence, something was there. Some faint echo of life, of activity, of community, of that quiet, intense certitude that invariably infuses small, isolated settlements. Flotillas of benevolent ghosts, wafting by in the warm sunshine.
Then it came to me, as I looked again at the structure of the village, its radiating fields, and its aura of self-contained totality. This was a true physical expression of harmony. It reflected order, social equality, resilient simplicity, a sustained and regular rhythm of life, mutual cooperation and respect, a satisfaction of basic needs—and a certainty of spirit. And not an imposed certainty (with the possible exception of the Roderick era) but a jointly agreed certainty shared and participated in by each and every member of this small, homogeneous society.
Possibly too utopian an interpretation? I wondered. Maybe you should just sit quietly or lie on this low turf-topped wall and enjoy the sun, my more mellow self suggested.
So that’s what we did until a little later, when, much as we were seduced and intrigued by the tight, presence-rich intensity of the skeletal village itself, we suddenly felt a need to wander higher up this hill-girt world. We wanted to see its structure and layered origins from a higher—a more all-encompassing—perspective.
I was intrigued by the green valley to our right—the Gap—which, we’d been told by Angus, led to a spectacular six-hundred-foot-high cliff-climax between the great soaring ramparts of Conachair and Oiseval. “You’re truly in the kingdom of the fulmars up there,” he’d told us. “Sometimes y’can see whales hunting the Atlantic gray seals right off the rocks.”
But just as we were about to embark on our mini adventure, we heard someone calling to us from a jeep on the track leading way up the mountainside of Gleann Mor to the radar station and the Cambir, the northernmost tip of the island, overlooking the smaller islet of Soay.
“You two want a ride?” the voice shouted.
“Where are you going?” I shouted back.
“To the top…some great views from up there…”
A quick decision. Walk or ride.
“Walk,” said Anne.
“Ride,” I said. “And then a walk back down.”
“Okay,” said Anne.
So we joined one of the young Soay sheep researchers in an ancient clapped-out Land Rover that somehow managed to grunt and growl its way along the rough track up the smooth grass slopes of Gleann Mor to the wind-buffeted summit. He was a shy fellow but offered one rather intriguing piece of recent research that suggested the more dominant Soay rams here often mate up to thirteen times in a single day!
We thanked him for sharing that impressive tidbit with us, tried to ignore the oppressive cluster of war-related structures and aerials and radar dishes up there, and wandered off together to see how our little isolated wonderworld looked from this dramatic vantage point.
We huddled, out of the wind, in a grassy dell. Tiny wild orchids frilled in errant breezes. Way, way below lay the three great arcs—the beach, the village, and the head dyke boundary wall. Then we looked at the land more closely, especially the greener, moist land along the tiny tumbling falls and sinuous curves of the stream known as Abhainn a Ghlinne. And it slowly became obvious that the subtly shadowed humps and bumps on the long slope down to the bay were not geological features but rather the ancient—very ancient—remnants of houses, sheilings, and fanks. And once again that sense of latent but intriguingly invisible occupancy and ephemeral presences whispered around us in a way that was both comforting and reaffirming.
Something about the tenacity and enduring spirit of man—able to survive and create communities in the wildest and most remote places surrounded by the scoop and soar of limitless spaces—filled me with a kind of pride in my own species. It’s not a feeling I’ve had too often, especially in today’s world, where our abilities to nurture harmony, cooperation, and certainty of purpose seem at best fragmented and illusionary, and at worst absent to the point of mutual self-destruction.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Examples of excellence and mutual generosity of spirit abound in our world. But here on this tiny island, as we strolled together back down the long slope of Gleann Mor, admiring the vast and massive power of the soaring cliffs, the peaked drama of the dun, the rock-bound bays thwacked by lines of surf hundreds of feet below us, and the nestled intensity of the ancient village circled around its beach—it all did seem so simple. And, without overromanticizing what must have been an extremely arduous existence here, as indeed it was throughout much of Scotland, I sensed something of the unique essence of place that had lured and nurtured people here century after century. And I envied them their certitude and their mutual harmony.
AROUND THREE O’CLOCK IN THE afternoon, we heard Angus ring his boat bell, signaling our time for reloading and the start of our second adventure of the day.
It was the silence I remember most about this next part of our journey. Although not in terms of the birds. They were a constant, full-throated cacophony of whirling, spiraling gannets dive-bombing the ocean or, in the case of the puffins, skimming the waves in hyperflighted flocks with their small, stubby, penguinlike wings barely keeping them airborne.
Rather, it was the silence of us all on the boat. Initially, leaving Village Bay after another frisky little dinghy ride through the wave-chop and a somewhat precarious clamber back up into Interceptor 42, there had been excited chatter and sharing of experiences and discoveries among the passengers. It was fascinating to listen to these exchanges, which suggested that while we’d all been exploring the same small place, each one of us had returned with a different take—a personal perspective—on the island’s significance and meaning.
But as we edged northward out of the bay and rounded the
soaring 970-foot-high cliffs of Oiseval and the point of Rubha an Uisge, that strange, almost eerie silence fell upon our boat and all its passengers. Without exception. We just stood together on the deck by the rail and gazed at the unfolding drama of guano-coated cliffs rising precipitously from a choppy ocean, and the cloudlike circlings of tens of thousands of gannets, guillemots, fulmars, petrels, kittiwakes, and gulls. We wondered at first if our intrusive presence had stirred up all these frantic patterns of flight, with shadows like circling vultures scampering over the boat. But as we sailed slowly on along the base of the cliffs, the patterns and the amazing volume of sound continued unabated and we realized we were mere observers to their timeless rituals.
Anne was standing at my side by the rail. At first, because of the strange silence of awe and admiration that seemed to have descended upon our little group, I was reluctant to talk. Eventually I pulled her closer and whispered, “We’re in another world here…this is no longer our planet…it’s another place altogether…we’re guests of the birds.”