Читать книгу Abandoned Places: 60 stories of places where time stopped - Richard Happer - Страница 15
ОглавлениеDATE ABANDONED: 29 August 1930
TYPE OF PLACE: Island community
LOCATION: Hebrides, Scotland
REASON: Hardship
INHABITANTS: 36
CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site/Military base
FOR 2,000 YEARS, A SMALL COMMUNITY LIVED ON AN ISLAND THAT WAS PART OF BRITAIN YET UTTERLY ALIEN TO IT. AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CAME KNOCKING, THEIR ANCIENT, MONEYLESS WAY OF LIFE SIMPLY BECAME TOO DIFFICULT COMPARED WITH WHAT WAS AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE.
The steep cliffs of St Kilda are home to the largest colony of gannets in Europe. There are more than 60,000 nests.
The island on the edge of the world
‘And I am come down to deliver them . . . and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey . . .’
The Book of Exodus
The minister finished his reading and left the Bible open on its simple wooden lectern. The people briefly returned to their houses to place small piles of oats in their hearths as tokens of faith, or gratitude. Then they gathered up the last of their belongings and let the minister lead them down to the jetty. There they boarded the ship that would take them away from the only home that they had ever known, and bring two millennia of human habitation on St Kilda to an end.
The westernmost isle
The archipelago of St Kilda is not just wild, it is beyond the horizon. Although part of the United Kingdom, it never appears in any road atlas. Firstly, that’s because it has no roads; but it also lies 64 km (40 miles) out into the Atlantic Ocean off the westernmost point of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. It is by far the most remote part of the British Isles ever to be anyone’s home.
The largest island of the group, and the only one ever to be inhabited, is Hirta, which also has some of the highest sea cliffs in the United Kingdom. There are three other islands: Dun, Soay and Boreray, and several spiky sea stacks rising like giant canines from the heaving swell.
A communal way of life
The islands were first inhabited during the Bronze Age and supported a population of up to 180 for much of that time. The St Kildans originally spoke Gaelic, not English, and were clothed in a similar style to people in the Outer Hebrides.
The islanders lived in various types of dwelling over the years, some of which remain. The crescent of cottages that we see today was built in the 1830s. Originally they were Hebridean black houses with a single room in which the cattle also slept in winter. Each house had its own strip of land for growing crops. New houses, which boasted a second room, were built in the 1860s.
There is only a little arable land, but there is an almost limitless supply of seabirds. The men would meet in a daily parliament to decide which tasks needed to be done and who would do them. Usually, this meant most of the men scaling the dizzy cliffs and collecting the birds by snare, fowling rod or by hand. Puffins, fulmars and gannets were the most commonly eaten birds, and their feathers and oil were also put to good use. Other jobs included mending fishing nets or collecting sheep from the outlying islands in a small boat.
Life was simple. It has been estimated that each person on St Kilda ate 115 fulmars every year. Puffins were a favourite snack. Food was unvarying, but it was nutritious and plentiful; the islanders did not starve. Every haul of eggs, fish and seabirds was divided out equally amongst the villagers. There was no need for money.
For centuries the only contact with the outside world were the occasional visits of whaling and fishing boats, and the annual visit of the rent collector. The islanders rented St Kilda from the Macleods of Dunvegan in Skye – a far-off landlord. As the islanders had no money, the Macleods’ rent collector accepted payment in oats, barley, fish, cattle and sheep products, and seabirds. He would also trade in goods that the islanders couldn’t make, such as tools and homewares. The rent collector was accompanied by a minister who performed any baptisms and weddings that had become necessary in the previous year.
As more frequent communication became established, the church on the mainland began to send ministers out more often. A church and manse were built in the early nineteenth century and a minister moved in full time. A school was added in 1884.
Oppressed by religion
A visitor in 1697, Martin Martin, noted that the people loved to play games and make music. However, the Victorian tourists often commented on how sad the people seemed. As if life here wasn’t tough enough, the minister who came in 1865 seems to have been a ‘fire-and-brimstone’ merchant of the first order, who ruled the people with a cross of iron.
He made attendance compulsory at three Sunday services, each two or three hours long. When a boat bringing vital food to relieve a near-famine arrived one Saturday, the minister told the skipper he must not unload the supplies until Monday: the islanders had to prepare for the Sabbath. The island’s children were banned from playing games, and had to carry a bible with them at all times. So much time was spent in observation of religious matters that practical matters became neglected.
‘The Sabbath was a day of intolerable gloom. At the clink of the bell the whole flock hurry to Church with sorrowful looks and eyes bent upon the ground. It is considered sinful to look to the right or to the left.’
A visitor in 1875
First contact with the wider world
The steam yacht Vulcan visited St Kilda in 1838. This was one of the first meetings between ordinary British people from the mainland and the islanders, but such interactions would soon become common. Victorians were fascinated by what they regarded as a primitive people living at the very edge of Britain, the most civilized nation on earth.
This was a defining time in their history: before then, the outside world must have seemed alien and unattractive to the St Kildans, if not downright terrifying. Now they had a greater understanding of what it could offer; particularly how much more comfort it was possible for people to enjoy.
Some inhabitants decided to make a complete break. In 1852, thirty-six – more than one third of the island’s population at the time – sailed for Australia. The ones who survived the arduous journey settled in Melbourne, where they named the suburb of St Kilda after their home island.
In 1877 regular summer cruises took curious tourists out to see the St Kildans. By 1889 the islanders were spending much of their time making things that they could sell to the visitors: tweeds, gloves, stockings, scarves and sheepskins. They also sold many of the birds’ eggs that they collected.
This brought them new clothes, equipment and food, but it also destroyed their self-sufficiency. They came to depend on imported fuel, provisions and building materials. It wasn’t just skills they lost, but also the will to continue making the huge effort necessary to live on St Kilda; their morale was waning.
The lack of regular communication with the rest of Scotland led to some trying times. A food shortage in 1876 got so bad that the islanders had to call for help. The only method open to them was sending out a message in bottle: a letter begging for food was sealed in a small wooden casket and a sheep’s bladder attached to act as a float. This was then launched into the waves in the hope that it would wash up on the mainland, and be found, before the situation got too much worse.
There was another famine in 1912 and the following year influenza savaged the islanders. The First World War might have seemed remote, but it affected even this lonely island. The islands were in a strategically useful position, and a naval detachment came to the island to run a signal station. Their presence meant frequent landings of mail and food. Unlike nearly everyone else in Europe, for the St Kildans the war was a time of certainty, security and relative plenty.
At the conflict’s end the regular deliveries dried up. It must have laid a heavy sense of isolation on the islanders, because most of the able-bodied young islanders emigrated. There were 73 islanders in 1920; by 1928 there were only 37. The years of regular communication with the mainland had shown them that there was an alternative, easier, life to be had there. The island’s once smoothly functioning society was irreparably broken; its days were numbered.
Influenza returned in 1926, killing four men, and there were frequent famines from crop failures throughout the 1920s. When a pregnant woman died from appendicitis in January 1930, after being unable to be evacuated due to bad weather, the islanders had had enough. The thirty-six remaining islanders unanimously decided to leave and asked the British Government for homes on the mainland. On 29 August 1930, two millennia of human habitation on St Kilda came to an end.
Most of the refugees who left here in 1930 settled in Argyll. The younger men were given forestry jobs, which was a strange choice, as most of them had never seen a tree.
Exploring today
The entire archipelago is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. It is a World Heritage Site and one of the few places to be so honoured both for its natural and its cultural qualities. There has also been a missile tracking station here since 1955, which brought with it a few permanent military residents. Several conservation workers and scientists come to stay every summer.
There are no ferries to St Kilda, so visiting is a matter of hiring a vessel and a skipper. The journey over in a little boat can be ‘lumpy’ (as one captain memorably described some enormous waves) but it makes the arrival all the more impressive.
As the islands get close it becomes clear how enormous the cliffs are. The huge sea stacks erupt sheer out of the waves and tower endlessly above you. It’s as if the great crags of Ben Nevis had been scooped up and dropped into the ocean. The cliff face of Conachair rises 427 m (1,401 ft) straight up out of the waves.
All the time the puffins and gulls wheel and swarm above the boat in a kaleidoscope of coloured feathers. The noise of their thousands is multiplied into a cacophony by the rock walls.
The village itself is modest, lying in an arc of flat land between two curving rock headlands, as if being embraced by the island itself. It has just one street, with a dozen or so single-storey stone cottages facing the endless sea. A cluster of stone sheep-folds and the tiny jetty are just about the only other structures here.
One thing the island does have in abundance is peace. Standing here past the far west of our everyday world as the sun sets further west still, it is plain to see how hard it was to live here; but also, how hard it must have been to leave.
Sixteen new two-room cottages were built in 1860; they are now mostly roofless shells.
