St. Kilda
We live in an age where nothing is considered certain, where our only constant is that everything must change. A night’s sailing beyond the Outer Hebrides saw the National Geographic Endeavour approaching Hirta, the main island of the St. Kilda group, owned since 1956 by the National Trust for Scotland. This year friends of St. Kilda around the world will commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the evacuation of the island on 29th August 1930, an event that ended a period of continuous habitation on the island that reached back thousands of years into the mists of prehistory. For most of that time, until the early decades of the nineteenth century, change on the island had been incremental, slow enough that had it been possible to move a given inhabitant forward or backward a century he or she would have found little difficulty in recognizing the village structures, the island’s way of life or their place in it. Most remarkable, in terms of continuity, were the islanders’ homes. Known as cleits, these corbelled dry-stone structures, show marked continuity with building styles from the Neolithic period. Intrusive contact with the outside world from the nineteenth century onwards, brought accelerating change to the islanders’ way of life that culminated in its disintegration.
The first contact came with the introduction of schooling, first by Protestant missionaries then, following the introduction of compulsory state elementary education, by schoolmasters from the mainland. Although the islanders were Gaelic in speech, it was the language of Empire – English – that was inculcated. A severe Calvinist faith, imposed by minister and dominie alike, imposed an alien regime on the islanders that denied them the flexibility they needed to maintain their lifestyle. Greater knowledge of the island community on the mainland shamed its laird, Macleod of Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, into providing new accommodation on the islands, first as larger ‘black houses,’ then in the form of a terrace of houses that were the most modern in the Hebrides when they were built in 1860. Unlike the earlier structures, built at right angles to the contour and protected from the prevailing wind, the latter houses (pictured, with a black house in the foreground) were built with sea views in a style that the new seaside tourist industry might have favored. The islanders lived less than comfortably in them, watching for the arrival of tourist ships from Glasgow, another nail in the coffin of the islanders’ lifestyle. With the tourist ships, came payment for posing for photographs, the sale of “craft” goods and a taste for tinned foods. Disease and emigration also took their toll, so that within a century of the first intrusive contact from the mainland the community had declined to the point of non-viability.
Today, thanks to the efforts of the National Trust for Scotland, buildings from all periods have been carefully excavated, recorded and restored. Some of the terraced dwellings are now occupied on a seasonal basis by naturalists and volunteer conservation workers dedicated to the preservation of the natural and built heritage of one of the most remarkable island communities in the British Isles.
We live in an age where nothing is considered certain, where our only constant is that everything must change. A night’s sailing beyond the Outer Hebrides saw the National Geographic Endeavour approaching Hirta, the main island of the St. Kilda group, owned since 1956 by the National Trust for Scotland. This year friends of St. Kilda around the world will commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the evacuation of the island on 29th August 1930, an event that ended a period of continuous habitation on the island that reached back thousands of years into the mists of prehistory. For most of that time, until the early decades of the nineteenth century, change on the island had been incremental, slow enough that had it been possible to move a given inhabitant forward or backward a century he or she would have found little difficulty in recognizing the village structures, the island’s way of life or their place in it. Most remarkable, in terms of continuity, were the islanders’ homes. Known as cleits, these corbelled dry-stone structures, show marked continuity with building styles from the Neolithic period. Intrusive contact with the outside world from the nineteenth century onwards, brought accelerating change to the islanders’ way of life that culminated in its disintegration.
The first contact came with the introduction of schooling, first by Protestant missionaries then, following the introduction of compulsory state elementary education, by schoolmasters from the mainland. Although the islanders were Gaelic in speech, it was the language of Empire – English – that was inculcated. A severe Calvinist faith, imposed by minister and dominie alike, imposed an alien regime on the islanders that denied them the flexibility they needed to maintain their lifestyle. Greater knowledge of the island community on the mainland shamed its laird, Macleod of Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, into providing new accommodation on the islands, first as larger ‘black houses,’ then in the form of a terrace of houses that were the most modern in the Hebrides when they were built in 1860. Unlike the earlier structures, built at right angles to the contour and protected from the prevailing wind, the latter houses (pictured, with a black house in the foreground) were built with sea views in a style that the new seaside tourist industry might have favored. The islanders lived less than comfortably in them, watching for the arrival of tourist ships from Glasgow, another nail in the coffin of the islanders’ lifestyle. With the tourist ships, came payment for posing for photographs, the sale of “craft” goods and a taste for tinned foods. Disease and emigration also took their toll, so that within a century of the first intrusive contact from the mainland the community had declined to the point of non-viability.
Today, thanks to the efforts of the National Trust for Scotland, buildings from all periods have been carefully excavated, recorded and restored. Some of the terraced dwellings are now occupied on a seasonal basis by naturalists and volunteer conservation workers dedicated to the preservation of the natural and built heritage of one of the most remarkable island communities in the British Isles.
