‘Look at this,’ Donald said, and held out an oblong of black plastic the size of a domino. It was almost too small for his fingers to manipulate. He slotted it into a slot on a new instrument above the chart desk. A small green screen lit up, and the yacht appeared as a blinking cursor among contour lines.
‘There are fourteen charts on that little bit of plastic. Imagine! Trouble is, I find myself staying down here looking at screens. I deplore it in other sailors—it’s the sea you should be watching, not a screen, but these days I’m doing it myself.’
Next morning we put out from Berneray. As before it was dull, the sea steel-grey. Iain steered the yacht between flat green islands through the Sound, then we were out beyond the Hebrides, sailing due west. It was looking good, but Donald said, ‘We might not be able to get there, you know . . .’
‘Oh, I’m aware of that!’
‘But the forecast’s not bad. The wind’s veering southwest.’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘There are other places.’
‘Oh, I know there are other places. Wonderful places, but oh no—everyone wants to go to St Kilda. You want to go to St Kilda.’
By afternoon we were out of sight of land, doing about seven knots, with the sails rising into an overcast sky. Iain was on watch, in his red waterproofs. Iain was Hebridean, an engineer. I liked his calm presence, his measured Gaelic speaker’s accent. The skipper was in his cabin, resting. Unlike myself, scared to miss a moment of the sea’s nothingness, the skipper and mate were assiduous in their resting, because they never knew when they might have to stay up all night.
At length Donald came up into the cockpit, into the wind and light. He glanced at the compass, glanced under the sail at the horizon and, following some thought of his own, said, ‘You know, mariners have always known the earth was round.’ Then, to me: ‘Do you want to take watch? Why don’t you take an hour’s watch and call me at three. Iain can rest.’
‘Watch for what?’
‘Anything. Other vessels. Objects in the water, anything. And whales. Call me if you see any whales.’
He swung downstairs again, Iain followed. The yacht followed its preordained course and I was alone in the buffeting wind.
How rarely we stand still for an hour, watching. I say ‘stand still’ but there was a constant bracing and relaxing, a whooping in the belly as the boat pitched. I stood on a step behind the wheel, head to toe in waterproofs against the spray and, clinging to a wire, watched earnestly, like a child charged with a great task. But there was nothing to see but the sea. On all sides: waves, under a grey mist, and the sails. The sea took its chance to play tricks. Waves became just too bright and edgy, as though I’d taken some mild hallucinogen. Many times I rubbed my eyes. Other vessels. Objects in the water. Nothing broke the surface. No whales, but there were gannets passing alongside, necks outstretched. It was exciting to see them, to know they were intent on the same place as we were. Riding on the waves were rafts of guillemots, now visible as they crested, now lost in the troughs.
Later in the afternoon four or five spikes of land appeared across a grey sea. Iain was on watch by then, and I kneeled in the cockpit. Ever more birds passed alongside, and St Kilda was defining itself as we neared. It should have been thrilling, except that by then I was throwing up into an orange plastic bucket. In the long fetch between bouts of vomiting, I could see that each island was tall and mysterious, and capped in its own private cloud. When he saw me looking, Iain shouted the litany of the islands’ names: ‘That’s Hirta! That’s Stac Lee. That one’s Boreray. Stac an Armin.’
And then we sailed slowly into a deep bay, Village Bay, surrounded by high hills. Puffins scuttered over the surface ahead of the yacht, or dived away. But the cloud was down, a dank sort of cloud that obscured the island. Hills, smooth, treeless, khaki-coloured, with scree slopes, rose a few hundred feet, then was mist. There was a jetty and, on the shore, left of that, some flat-roofed prefabricated buildings which gave the place an air of desolation. A curious line, like the strand line of a very high tide, scratched along the hill-foot, then petered out halfway round the bay. I realised with a start that that was the famous village itself, the forlorn, abandoned street.
Iain came and stood beside me and together we looked at this sorry outpost as the boat rocked. For a minute neither of us spoke. Then he said, ‘Do you know, in Gaelic there is a phrase: “Nach du bha’n a Hirst!”—“I wish you were on Hirta!” You say it when you want rid of someone.’
‘Kilda ranger!’ said the radio, brashly, making me jump. It was a young man with an English public school accent. ‘Rainjah’, he pronounced it, through the radio’s fizz. ‘Kildah rainjah, just wanted to know if you intend to come ashore?’
Iain had said that Hebridean people don’t come out here now. His own swift Gaelic phrase would be the only words of the native language I’d hear.
The ranger was waiting alone on the damp concrete jetty to greet us. A cheerful young man with binoculars round his neck, he said he was employed by the National Trust for Scotland, and was new to the post. He’d been there three weeks. He was welcoming, but he was obliged to read some bylaws.
‘Been here before?’ he asked. Donald was kicking stones, as though to indicate he’d been coming here since this lad was in his pram. The warden duly warned against harming birds’ nests or removing artefacts or jumping on walls or damaging anything, anything, anything at all.
‘There’s a little shop I’ll open for you if you like. Cottage four is a museum; just go in. Staying tonight? Maybe see you in the Puff Inn later, for a drink . . .’
The warden turned and headed back along the jetty and up a grassy slope toward the assortment of prefabs. No one else seemed to be around.
‘What is all that?’ I asked Donald, nodding toward the buildings.
‘The radar base, of course! The missile-tracking base! Some people are horrified by it. Remember I told you how some folk have got this romantic idea of St Kilda? What do they get? A radar base. Wardens and bylaws. A souvenir shop.’
Donald was untying the dinghy, ready to go back out to his yacht, which rocked back and forth, tall and white in the bay. The plan was that I’d have an hour or so, then we’d eat on the yacht, then come ashore again, and tomorrow and tomorrow to explore, really to be on St Kilda.
And that was pretty well that. The island was semi-conscious under a peculiar, oppressive atmosphere; cloud like damp wool obscured its hills. Of the village I saw nothing but a chaos of stone, or what looked like chaos. In the little museum were nineteenth-century photographs of bearded men assembled in the village street, and women sitting on the ground, preparing to pluck a mound of dead fulmars. I looked at those, then wandered back to the jetty. Snipe called, and I heard waves and the drone of the diesel generator. No matter, I thought, maybe the cloud would clear. There would be tomorrow for all the breathtaking clifftop views.
Donald didn’t say much as I clambered down from the jetty. The yacht was rolling hard, though the saloon smelled wonderfully of moussaka.
‘Told you the good news, has he?’ called Iain, from the stove.
‘What’s that?’
‘We can’t stay. The coastguard’s just issued a revised weather forecast.’
‘Revised . . . ?’
‘As in, contradicting this morning’s one. East winds. We’ve got to leave.’
Donald ate in silence. After seven straight hours’ sailing, he was looking at another seven hours back again, through the night, in worsening weather. He ate, then pushed his plate aside and went to attend to the anchor, saying, ‘It’s the forecast, and we’ve got to act on it.’
‘Ach well,’ said Iain. ‘Maybe it’s better to see St Kilda this way.’
‘What way?’
‘Fleetingly!’
They laughed when I got home. Wild, remote, famous, oft-imagined St Kilda, so theatrically abandoned . . . Did you get there? Yup, but not for long. In fact, I’ve spent longer standing at bus stops.
&
nbsp; 3.
TWO OR THREE YEARS PASSED. There were, as Donald had so rightly said, other places, wonderful places. During that time, something unforeseen began to happen. Through my work, and in the way of small countries, my path began to cross with those of other people engaged with, familiar with, such places. People who’d began as I had, scruffing around lonely shores in their teens, but were older now, and who had even made careers of it: naturalists, archaeologists, artists. I was welcomed into a group of friends whose winter conversations were always planning sessions. As the new kid, I heard a lot of derring-do and anecdotes. I had to bone up on history, and quickly learned the names of islands and lighthouses and birds and boatmen, especially boatmen, because none of us could sail. There were maps and charts to pore over. Who could take us where, and when? We spoke of the fabled outliers, St Kilda, North Rona, Sula Sgeir; of gannets and puffin colonies and bothies and brochs; we drew up shopping lists of pasta and instant custard. Over the next few years we made summer trips to the nearer but depopulated places: Mingulay, Pabbay, Stroma, the Shiant Isles. Places with such long human histories, I soon came to distrust any starry-eyed notions of ‘wild’ or ‘remote’. Remote from what? London? But what was London?
I pinned the sea chart—a paper one, not the tiny plastic domino of the autopilot—on the wall of my room at the university. Few students gave the chart a second glance, and fair enough. At their age, and without responsibilities, they wanted the bright lights and adventures that were truly far away. But one day I came in early and found the cleaner in her blue overalls, Hoover at her feet, studying the chart closely. She was a smart and lively woman about my age. We spoke for a while about places we’d like to go. What surprised her, she said, was everything else the chart disclosed: firing ranges, tanker lanes, lights and beacons, submarine exercise areas. She pointed to the smudge of islands farthermost west. ‘St Kilda,’ said Liz. ‘I’d love to go there.’
I told her how it had eluded me and she laughed, saying, ‘It wouldn’t be the same if everything ran to a timetable, would it?’ Indeed no. But whenever I saw pictures of the abandoned street, or the great gannet colonies, whenever I heard my friends talking of St Kilda, it rankled with me. I said I hankered to go to Rona, too, which lies so far in the north I had to stand on a chair to show Liz where it was.
Then, one winter’s day, in Edinburgh, I met my new friend Jill Harden for lunch. Jill is an archaeologist who worked then for the National Trust for Scotland. She was often on St Kilda, to my chagrin, and she’d laughed when I’d told her my ‘fleeting’ tale. But she had something up her sleeve.
Over our lunch—I believe mine grew cold on the plate—Jill told me that, in the coming May, a party of surveyors from RCAHMS—the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland—would be going to St Kilda to begin a big project. Over several visits across three years they intended to plot the entire ‘cultural landscape’ of the archipelago. Every last man-made structure on the islands would be surveyed with the latest GPS satellite equipment.
‘It’s because it’s a World Heritage Site. Really, they’re bringing Mary Harman’s work up to date.’
I must have looked blank, because Jill went on to tell me that in the late 1970s a pioneering archaeologist called Mary Harman had gone to St Kilda. She had been the first to appreciate that, when they left, the St Kildan people had left behind a complete expression in stone of a unique way of life—a way of life that had lasted centuries. Maybe longer. Maybe thousands of years. Working alone, and in gruelling conditions, Mary Harman had compiled the first record of the islands’ structures.
Jill went on. ‘You know the army wanted to bulldoze the village?’
‘Bulldoze it?’
‘In the 1950s, when they built the radar base. You know the road that goes up the hill?’
Again I shook my head. In my fleeting visit I’d barely seen the hills, never mind a road.
‘Well, they wanted to bulldoze the village and put the road there. You can see their point. No one lived there any more.’
‘But they were dissuaded?’
‘And now it’s a World Heritage Site.’
The first trip would last a fortnight. Jill was going with the surveyors in her professional capacity, to assist and advise. She said there might well be space on the motorboat, which was being chartered specially. There would certainly be space in the ‘Ladies’ Boudoir’—one of the old cottages now reroofed and turned into a dormitory, more usually used by volunteer work parties. She said if I petitioned in the right quarters and offered to pay my costs, I might well be in luck.
* * *
We left Harris one blustery blue morning in early May and this time the journey was fast and direct: three hours’ sail due west, if ‘sail’ is the word, in a powerful motorboat that left a straight wake over the water. Noise and salt winds and spray, and soon, like raised wings, the extravagant St Kilda cliffs again appeared on the horizon.
It was exciting, but I was glad to have made the journey before, more slowly, by yacht; to have gained some small sense of the distance and seas people endured in the olden days of open boats. Else you might think—what was the problem?
When the boat engines cut, the silence seemed preternatural. Then there were birdcalls, and waves washing on the shore, and the same low anonymous buildings of the base. I could follow with my eye the trickle of ruins, house after roofless house, brown hills bearing down on them. Everything that day was sunlit, the sky high and pelagic. Then it was a matter of hefting ashore all the surveyors’ equipment: out of the hold and into the dinghy came strongboxes containing satellite receivers, laptops, batteries, chargers and digital cameras—the wherewithal of the scientific gaze. And a fortnight’s worth of food, plus extra, in case we were stormbound.
I liked the four RCAHMS surveyors at once. Three men and a woman, they were robust, friendly people well used to fieldwork in faraway places. A lot of good-natured banter passed between them. They’d a deep knowledge of their country, but none had been to St Kilda before. That’s why Jill had come, and waiting on the jetty to greet us was another archaeologist, a young New Zealander called Sam Dennis. Like Jill, Sam worked for the National Trust for Scotland. She was spending the whole summer here on St Kilda. The whole group would make up two teams to do the survey work, two surveyors and an archaeologist in each.
We jolted all the gear up to the village in wheelbarrows: the valuable equipment, the coffee and bananas and potatoes and bread. May sunshine poured down between fast-moving clouds. Third time lucky! Whenever we passed each other, manoeuvring our wheelbarrows, Jill caught my eye and smiled. Little gangs of brown lambs ran about; they were of the wild, indigenous breed called Soay sheep. Across the steep-sided bay, there turned a constant carousel of puffins.
That evening, when everything was unpacked and the surveyors had checked and accounted for all their equipment, all the cables and leads, and every electrical socket in the common room had a laptop or battery pack attached to it, we all went for a stroll around town. Sam the archaeologist had offered to show us the village, and suggest why, after many centuries, life on St Kilda had come suddenly to an end. This was a brave move—when it came to ‘historical monuments’, she was an expert among experts. It was a slow walk: everyone had to pore over everything. We moved along the gaunt parade of roofless cottages, glancing through the gaps where the doors had been. Nettles and thistles grew out of their cold hearths.
Even I could see the cottages were pretty ordinary, architecturally speaking, like you’d find all over the country. What excited the surveyors were the buildings called cleits—cleitean in Gaelic, with a Scots ‘ch’ in the middle, though English speakers just say ‘cleits’, to rhyme with ‘meets’.
Sam led us behind the cottages, to the area confined within a long head-dyke, and we gathered by a particularly handsome example: a head-height oval building, made of drystone, which corbelled in a little, and was roofed with living turf. At one end was a low, dar
k, oracular doorway. It looked like a Neolithic Andersen shelter. That was the point, really. These buildings, unique to St Kilda, could have been prehistoric, or could have been built just before the people left.
‘That’s the problem here,’ Sam laughed ruefully. ‘The Stone Age went on till 1930!’
Cleits were stores. In the days when St Kilda was wholly remote and self-sufficient, these cleits had held grain, snared seabirds, seabirds’ eggs, peats: all the resources that stood between the people and privation. There seemed to be dozens around the village and, once you got your eye in, all over the hill, too—lumps and bumps on the upper slopes, like buttons holding down the land against the wind.
We looked at cleits, we looked at the well. We examined prehistoric mounds, we looked at enclosures and the wallheads of old blackhouses—those thatched and windowless buildings that were standard peasant homes. Then we were back on the street, so we glanced round the museum with its photographs of bearded, barefoot men, of shy, shawled women. Then Sam led us further along pavement, house after house. She wanted to say something about the evacuation, about why, after so long, St Kilda had become untenable.
Part of the reason was these ordinary cottages, the famous, much-photographed, ‘street’ itself.
‘It was “aid”, as we’d now say,’ she explained. ‘Early in the nineteenth century a wealthy Englishman had come here, a tourist if you like, and he’d been appalled at the islanders’ traditional blackhouses.’
Blackhouses were nothing unusual—they were common all over the highlands and islands in those days. Thatched and windowless, with a central hearth and a space for the animals at one end, they were hardly luxurious, but they worked.
‘So, this man pledged money to encourage the people to build better houses—“better” in his eyes—with a chimney for the smoke, and glass windows, and a separate byre for the beasts.’ The then minister encouraged the scheme and so did the laird and, by 1860, these cottages were the result. Modern, mainland-style they may have been, but they were not an improvement. They were damp and needy.
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