Island on the Edge

by Anne Cholawo

  A few years later we were offered another croft, which gave us the opportunity to purchase our own goats for fresh milk. Now, as well as producing our own eggs and milk, we started to expand our two available vegetable gardens. The vegetable plot above Glenfield that I used when I first came to Soay was now within the boundary of our croft, so we fenced it properly and created a bigger growing area.

  When I first came to Soay it was rabbits, sheep and cattle that needed to be kept out of the vegetable gardens. Since then the situation has changed quite radically. The rabbits have totally disappeared. The last time I saw a rabbit was about 2001. This could be explained by the fact that mink have infiltrated the island in the last twelve to fifteen years. They probably swam over from Skye and gradually multiplied over time. American mink were introduced to Scotland for fur farming in 1938 but escaped or were deliberately released many years ago. They have significantly increased in numbers in recent times and are spreading fast. I suspect that there is hardly a corner in the UK free of them today. The trouble with mink is that they kill far more than they need. It may well have been a good survival tactic for them in the huge expanses of North America where there are natural predators to keep them under control. However, on a tiny island such as ours it has been nothing less than a disaster. The mink are almost certainly responsible for the tragic decline in numbers of seabirds and ground nesting birds on Soay. Our once thriving tern colony in the north harbour has gone and eider ducks are a rarity. We can only assume that the rabbits have gone the same way. We were unaware of the mink until they began to attack our hens and geese. We now use a humane trap, which is constantly set and bated. In the last eight or nine years we have trapped and shot twenty-one mink all told. We like to think this will help to give a little more chance to the local wildlife too.

  Deer are one of the other major changes to Soay’s eco-system. The first time I saw a deer was when I was on board Petros in the harbour helping Tex with some repairs. I saw what I first took to be the branches of a tree coming into the mouth of the harbour. Then I realised that the tide was going out, so it could not be following the current. As it got closer I saw that there was a head attached to the branches. It was a big stag swimming with purpose toward the far shore. It got out and ambled off into the trees. Tex was very excited. He liked the thought of deer on the island. That was probably October 1994. Ten years later it was becoming far more common to see not only stags but also does and calves out on the hill. Beautiful as it is to see them, they are very fond of vegetables and are pretty good at getting over or through any fence less than eight foot high.

  It had become increasingly important for us to produce our own vegetables for the winter months. With our relatively small boats, we cannot make regular trips to Broadford to buy in supplies through the wintertime. The weather is too unpredictable and daylight hours are far too short to make trips in safety to Skye. It was no longer easy to order enough perishable goods via the mailboat so we were forced to be more self-sufficient in fresh food. We deer-fenced the vegetable plot in the garden of Leac Mhor and also the top garden as best we could. We built a polytunnel using recycled hoops from Jill Fitzgerald’s old one to start seedlings and to grow tomatoes and courgettes. Growing areas are at a premium on Soay, so we were grateful to have benefited from the hard work of past residents: Jill’s garden in Leac Mhor, and the Gilbertsons who began the top garden before selling Glenfield to me. By growing only essential crops such as potatoes, carrots, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale and (if there is room) turnips, we can produce enough vegetables to meet our needs for six months on the island without having to do any shopping.

  Self-reliance requires careful planning. It takes the whole summer to gather in all the tins, bags of flour, cooking oil, dried food and other non-perishable foods, not to mention toilet rolls, toothpaste, soap, washing powder, washing-up liquid and household cleaners that we need. We have to make very sure we have enough of everything to keep us going for the whole winter. We have become accustomed to doing it and enjoy the luxury of not having to go off at all for six months of the year. We buy in our entire hen and goat feed requirements too. Then there are at least three tons of coal to bring over and Calor gas bottles for the cooker. We also make our own hay, in a very small way.

  When I’m walking round the island, I’m often aware how history repeats itself on Soay. Some aspects of life have hardly changed, at least according to the stories Tex told me when I asked about people who used to live here before the evacuation. Nearly every household seemed to have owned a boat of some kind, used mostly for lobster fishing. In those days the nearest port where they could sell their live lobsters was Mallaig, twenty miles away. This continued to be the case right up to the days when Tex and Duncan began fishing. Most of the men on Soay owned a rifle and it was common practice for a group of them to nip over to Skye by boat occasionally to poach a stag or two off the Cuillin hills. By the 1950s Soay received mail and supplies from Mallaig every fortnight if weather was permitting. Although the islanders were able to order almost any commodity that they required, the uncertainties of the weather meant that they still had to be as self-sufficient as possible. All the householders kept cattle for milk, cheese and butter and to sell the young bullocks at market.

  However, changes on the mainland were forcing us to try new ways. Once we had decided to live on Soay together permanently, we both agreed we needed an alternative energy system for our electrical power. Paraffin had become prohibitively expensive and was almost impossible to buy in bulk. It was no longer viable to use oil lamps through the winter. A generator is noisy, smelly and hungry: feeding it means carrying a lot of diesel drums up the beach. Very early on we discovered that the generator Robert had inherited with the house had various mechanical issues. Every so often it had a tendency to run amok. On several occasions the engine screamed out of control and the only way we could turn it off was to stuff rags down the air intake to stop it before it blew itself up. Even though I managed to find and fix the fault in the governor linkage that controls the amount of fuel passing through the injectors, we never really trusted the generator again and one of us always had to be on standby when it was running.

  It took nearly all year to perfect, but by our first Christmas on Soay together our new alternative power system was up and running; quiet, clean and relatively reliable. We were now proud-possessors of a micro-hydro generator running off the loch that supplies our water. To celebrate, I hooked out my old childhood Christmas lights from the loft in Glenfield House and hung them on our little Christmas tree in the sitting room. I plugged them in and they came on straightaway, much to my delight. It was seventeen years since I last used them.

  I could write a whole chapter just dedicated to alternative energy. Our original plan was to have a windmill and use hydro as back-up instead of the generator. We were not sure whether we could generate enough power with hydro alone and it did not get our full attention until the windmill (wrongly put together by a ‘home-energy expert’ with too thin wiring and not strong enough to cope with Highland weather) got shredded to bits in a violent storm about three months after it was put up. (The storm came in the night and it seemed too dangerous for us to try to bring the windmill and pole down.) We have a fifty-metre drop from a loch about six hundred metres from the house and plenty of volume, but we have to take into account that the fifty-metre fall is actually an uneven gradient so a lot of energy is lost through friction. We also wanted to make sure that we did not upset the balance of the loch as red-throated divers, newts, a small primitive kind of fish and various aquatic insects live in it, not to mention the occasional otter.

  Eventually we came to what we think is a happy compromise and can run a 3kw inverter from a bank of six batteries. It runs all the lights, computers, a microwave, bread maker plus Robert’s power tools (not all at the same time!) and numerous other small electrical devices. It will not run, say, a washing machine or a fridge (although we toyed with the idea of setting up
a smaller system just to run a small chest freezer, but in the end we decided against it; if we lost power for any reason it would be an expensive waste of food and we are both used to the way we do things now). I still marvel at it; we have been fortunate to have both the right volume of water and height. Also, because of the way the house is situated, we have a very good way of releasing the excess water which runs out of the hydro, down a pipe to the bottom of the garden and into a pond (for the geese). From there it runs down a natural gully past our cesspit, on to the beach and into the sea. Unless we have had a severe drought for a month or so, the level of the loch never seems to drop. We have put a marker just off the bank into the loch so if we think the water level is getting too low (this has only happened once in about eight years) we resort to using the generator again until the loch is back to a safe level. The system does require maintenance. Pipes need regular cleaning because they fill up with peat and slime (which slows down the water flow) and we constantly check the batteries as we cannot afford to let them either go too flat or become over-charged. The hydro is a 200W Chinese make, small and very simply constructed. It has only needed one set of new bearings since we installed it over nine years ago. I think they have improved a lot since we bought ours, but the price has also increased significantly.

  You have probably noticed that we throw very little away. Waste is a problem of our consumer society. On my first day on Soay the only question I could think to ask Anne was what islanders did with their rubbish. While she and Gordon took some waste to bins on the mainland, I discovered that others often burnt or buried their rubbish, or dumped it into the sea in weighted bags. Not so shocking as it sounds. If the rubbish is mainly tins or biodegradable, it quickly corrodes or decomposes in salt water. Over time, I favoured burning tins until they could be crushed and left to corrode into tiny bits of rust. I broke any unwanted glass during low spring tides, on the rocks below my house. The action of the waves rolled, crushed and smoothed them until you would never know there had been any glass there at all. All things combustible ended up in the Rayburn or in a bonfire and organic stuff became compost, until I got my own hens and it was cooked in a mash for them. Managing everyday rubbish became a routine chore. It taught me over time to be very frugal with what I considered to be waste. Soon I found that my day-to-day throwaway items had reduced by a considerable amount. It would take weeks to fill up a sack and not days.

  There is irony in all of this. Neither Robert nor myself had ever intended or thought that we would lead a life of virtual self-sufficiency. My earlier dream of coming to Soay to paint pretty pictures and admire the view was shattered many years ago. Instead, I think, together we have found something far better and much more rewarding. People often ask us how we fill our time. Unless you actually live on Soay it is impossible to understand what is required to maintain a decent and comfortable lifestyle on an under-developed island. It’s a bit like constantly spinning plates on poles. You have to run from one to another to keep them going before they fall off. Once you stop, all the plates will crash to the floor and break.

  I never did get a new bath fitted in the bathroom of Glenfield House. I can’t understand why I ever imagined that I needed to. It looks perfectly acceptable to me today. I still play my piano occasionally. I made a tool and taught myself how to tune it. Soay teaches you how to teach yourself if you are willing to take the time to listen and learn.

  Soay is a very different island to the one that I found in 1990. Twenty-six years ago I could never have imagined that I would be one of only three full-time residents. Friends, neighbours and the powerful personalities who lived here before my arrival are all gone.

  Today, as I write this on a cold, blustery evening sitting by the wood-burning stove, I think of how privileged, blessed and lucky we have been to have had the chance to live out so much of our lives on such a magical and peaceful island. Even if it had to end tomorrow, we could not have asked for more.

  Postscript

  An island on the edge

  In the year of 1953 Soay was no longer considered suitable for habitation, neither by the government nor its indigenous population. After the evacuation, Tex and Jeanne Geddes fought tooth and nail to retain the official mail run and to keep the telephone link from the island to the mainland. Both were to be axed as soon as the last of the Soay residents left for Mull. Without these two vital services, Soay would almost certainly have ceased to be habitable.

  By great tenacity and with an ability to adapt to the variables of an abandoned and underdeveloped island, the Geddes family managed to make Soay their home for over forty years. This continuity helped to hold together a small but lively community.

  Unfortunately the issues that prompted the evacuation of Soay over sixty years ago still remain. Accessibility and the difficulties of earning a regular income apply as much today as they did over half a century ago. The island is physically demanding and a long way from the nearest doctor so it is essential to be fit, healthy and preferably young. However, finding solutions to the logistical and practical challenges that Soay generates can also be very rewarding and satisfying. It is not a way of life to be taken lightly and if anyone truly wants to make the island his or her home it must be a total commitment: Soay does not allow half-measures. I also believe that Soay’s extraordinary unsullied peace and beauty is reward in itself.

  Since writing this book, Soay schoolhouse has recently been sold by the school authorities to a young couple and we would really like to believe they might be able to make a permanent life on the island. A few crofts have been taken on at the south end of Soay too, but without homes to live in and a sustainable income, it has been virtually impossible for the newcomers to make a settled life. Like myself when I first came to Soay, they must have imagined that it would be no time at all before they had built their new houses. As the years slip by, the realities of the physical limitations of this very remote island come to the fore.

  I don’t know what the future holds for Soay as an inhabited island, but I like to think of it as an island in remission. Over sixty years ago Soay’s future looked like a closed book, but there were still a few more pages to turn. The other Small Isles, all of which have jetties, roads and communal power, have long since left Soay behind as far as improved infrastructure goes. To me the very lack of facilities gives Soay those special qualities and challenges that I hold so dear. Very selfishly I would not like to have it any other way, but what that means for a possible future community on Soay I can only guess at. Unless there is some sort of sustainable livelihood on the island, it is hard to imagine a very significant change in the present situation.

  Gavin Maxwell made a gloomy prophecy at the end of Harpoon at a Venture: islands like Soay are destined to become deserted. ‘Only a few of the thousands of Hebridean islands can hope for development and then only by the State and public funds. The many such as Soay will remain untouched with a dwindling population until at last they are empty and deserted.’ Even as he was writing those words Tex and Jeanne Geddes were planning a future on Soay. In an odd way Soay’s very remoteness nurtures a hardy resilience in those souls who are prepared to take on the challenge of living here. Islands enjoying state-subsidised ferry services gain economic and social benefits of easier contact and communication with mainland services. But at the same time they are more vulnerable to political changes on the mainland which might threaten those benefits. During my time on Soay the wider world has gone through immense changes, not least the technological revolution and the increasing challenge of climate change. While the global economy crashed, life here continued virtually unchanged. As long as crops grow and there is fuel to burn we maintain the quality of a simple life that we enjoy. Fluctuating oil and coal prices have affected our cash flow but our hydro-generated electricity has helped to reduce the fuel bills.

  You may think that our lifestyle here on Soay has made us immune from changes in the outside world, but you would be wrong. We are as reliant as everyone else
on consumer commodities (the stuff we can’t grow, make or improvise on the island), and, like everyone else, we depend on the stability of an external infrastructure; the vital framework of services and physical networks that supports and maintains civilised society. A global economic collapse, destroying both infrastructure and commodities, would be just as disastrous for us as for those on the mainland.

  Adaptation is essential for survival and, as I have learned during my time on the island, Soay teaches us to adapt, but there always has to be a viable alternative available for us to implement. I have also learned that it is possible to run out of alternatives and this realisation has given me an acute awareness of the vulnerability of our lifestyle here on this small, almost insignificant island. I believe that these same vulnerabilities can be applied to the rest of the planet. My life on Soay has opened my eyes to the precarious and untenable state of modern civilisation in the twenty-first century. To heedlessly and recklessly exhaust resources that can never be replaced is nothing short of madness, yet I fear too little has been done too late and we are already too far down the line to turn back and put it right. Unfortunately, we are still almost totally dependent on the resources that we are so busy wasting and we have found no certain long-term workable answers to the problems we have created.

  In both our local environment and weather systems, I see the impact of human actions in microcosm on our island. The tiny ecosystem that I once knew on Soay has changed radically since the arrival of deer and mink. Bird populations have been much reduced, and although there is still an abundance of wildlife, the island’s heathland and crofts have become reed-filled and moss-choked due to the absence of cattle. Climate change is bringing a dramatic change in our seasonal weather too. We experience hurricanes far more frequently than before. The first significant hurricane that I remember was in January 2006 which swept across the island producing a huge ‘super spring tide’. The sea destroyed part of the main track and swept away the smaller of the two bridges. Rock-filled waves smashed through the door of the old goat shed at Soay House (unimaginable twenty years ago) and left a bank of seaweed at the door of the Carn cottage, and a sixty-foot pine tree on the roof as a calling card. Luckily the biggest branches of the tree dug into the ground before the trunk crushed the house. The wind almost lifted the front roof off Glenfield House too. Since then the winter storms have become ever more frequent. Two years ago Sally B was almost destroyed for a second time even though she was pulled up high upon the beach and tied down with ropes above the stone jetty in the harbour. A northwest hurricane pushed the sea level about seven foot higher than a normal spring tide. The combination of wind and driving seas threw Sally B up to the top of the beach. She broke nearly all her holding ropes and was washed up into the trees on the bank there. Luckily, Oliver Davies was passing to check his own boat that morning and was therefore able to secure her safely before the tide dropped, otherwise I would have lost her for the second time, probably for good.