St. Kilda
The eastern Atlantic archipelago of St. Kilda is not an easy place to get to. The Orca brings a small number of visitors over from Harris in the Outer Hebrides when weather conditions permit and the limited places on board the small motor vessel are booked for at least two years in advance. National Geographic Endeavour made it out here effortlessly but the Captain thought it prudent to wait for a passing front to blow through before venturing back out of Village Bay.
Nothing about St. Kilda has ever been easy. Nevertheless, a small close-knit community, Gaelic in speech, survived here at the margins of subsistence from the Early Christian Period - what elsewhere in Europe (other than in the Celtic west) is known as the Dark Ages - into the twentieth century. A cooperative way of life ensured survival: small parcels of land were planted with oats or barley, sheep reared on the hillsides and the cliffs that so dramatically encircle the main settlement were harvested for puffins and fulmars. With a peasant economy lacking money, the rent to the Macleods of Dunvegan Castle on Skye was paid with feathers, tediously plucked from fulmars in the cottages and stored near the harbor for periodic collection by the factor. Life expectancy was short and the islands were subject to frequent bouts of illness.
Yet what finally proved fatal to the life of this community was contact with the outside world. A schoolmaster and minister of religion introduced an industrial discipline based on clock time rather than the vagaries of the weather. Tour boats brought visitors from Glasgow to gawp at the natives who found that that they could earn easy money posing for photographs, money that enabled them to buy tinned food and confectionery. It is a familiar tale, oft repeated: how to keep a younger generation loyal to a traditional lifestyle after it has learned of a more enticing one elsewhere.
By 1930, the island community had reached the point of collapse and petitioned the government to be removed from the island, thereby ending a way of life that had stretched back over a millennium. Fortunately - although not without a bittersweet irony - the island has since passed into the care of the National Trust for Scotland who are actively conserving the landscape as a wildlife habitat and conserving the remains of a human community whose traditional way of life has passed into oblivion.
The eastern Atlantic archipelago of St. Kilda is not an easy place to get to. The Orca brings a small number of visitors over from Harris in the Outer Hebrides when weather conditions permit and the limited places on board the small motor vessel are booked for at least two years in advance. National Geographic Endeavour made it out here effortlessly but the Captain thought it prudent to wait for a passing front to blow through before venturing back out of Village Bay.
Nothing about St. Kilda has ever been easy. Nevertheless, a small close-knit community, Gaelic in speech, survived here at the margins of subsistence from the Early Christian Period - what elsewhere in Europe (other than in the Celtic west) is known as the Dark Ages - into the twentieth century. A cooperative way of life ensured survival: small parcels of land were planted with oats or barley, sheep reared on the hillsides and the cliffs that so dramatically encircle the main settlement were harvested for puffins and fulmars. With a peasant economy lacking money, the rent to the Macleods of Dunvegan Castle on Skye was paid with feathers, tediously plucked from fulmars in the cottages and stored near the harbor for periodic collection by the factor. Life expectancy was short and the islands were subject to frequent bouts of illness.
Yet what finally proved fatal to the life of this community was contact with the outside world. A schoolmaster and minister of religion introduced an industrial discipline based on clock time rather than the vagaries of the weather. Tour boats brought visitors from Glasgow to gawp at the natives who found that that they could earn easy money posing for photographs, money that enabled them to buy tinned food and confectionery. It is a familiar tale, oft repeated: how to keep a younger generation loyal to a traditional lifestyle after it has learned of a more enticing one elsewhere.
By 1930, the island community had reached the point of collapse and petitioned the government to be removed from the island, thereby ending a way of life that had stretched back over a millennium. Fortunately - although not without a bittersweet irony - the island has since passed into the care of the National Trust for Scotland who are actively conserving the landscape as a wildlife habitat and conserving the remains of a human community whose traditional way of life has passed into oblivion.
