From the edge of the world 2021 – part 5

We have taken for granted having the time and freedom to explore the island, usually in the course of our work. We make repeat visits to different places, and each time they look slightly different as the light and weather change. Now, as we approach the end of the season, each visit becomes ‘… probably the last time for this year’. I walk up Oiseval on an unseasonably sunny October day to look at 16 of the several hundred cleits that dot the slopes. These 16 are part of a group of 311 across Hirta that form the ‘Cleit Conservation Programme’. They have been selected against a set of criteria for annual monitoring and repair as necessary when collapses occur. I am nearing the end of this work as I set out to look at the Oiseval group of cleits.

Few people speak fondly of Oiseval, as it presents to the Village what is easily its less lovable side. A rounded lump, the western slopes shimmer with natural springs that make for exceptionally waterlogged ground. A walk up this way will make your legs burn from the relentless gradient, while your feet slither about trying to find purchase on the boggy soils. Oiseval transforms though, as the gradient eases onto the summit. The Atlantic opens out across the distant horizon, where the Western Isles are often visible on a clear day. In the opposite direction, the Village curves round the bay far below, with the bowl of An Lag hanging above. The skyline to the east is a roll call of Hirta’s high points: Conachair and its towering sea cliffs; Mullach Mòr and Mullach Sgar; Mullach Bi rising like a rock fin on the horizon; then Ruaival and the craggy line of Dùn, which from this angle appears to fully enclose the bay.

From up here I watch as the supply vessel, the Maursund, leaves the slipway and makes for the open ocean beyond the bay. It is her final landing this season, having been back and forth as regularly as twice a week over the summer. She takes with her the final skips, accommodation cabins and plant from the work at the base. Another ‘last one for this year’ done. The beach has also begun to vanish, leaving the barren rocky shore behind. It seemed to take forever to arrive in May, eventually becoming a broad crescent of pristine golden sand at low tide. Now, as the storms blow in and out, the sea reclaims it a metre or so at a time, and the island’s edges become harder, more brutal.

I walk across the top of Oiseval, which is now a gentle, grassy plateau. The eastern slopes are as creased and folded as the western ones are smooth. Each small gully is green with grass and separated by the grey lines of outcropping rock. As I walk, I think: ‘this will be my last trip up Oiseval this season’. From here, I have watched the sunrise twice, sleeping once on the summit. Today the horizon is streaked with rain showers out at sea. Rainbows chase them along, seeming to hang in the air before melting slowly back into the blues of the sea and sky. It’s a fitting day to say farewell to a lovely little hill, one that rewards the patient traveller on its slopes.

By early October the visitors, boatmen and contractors have all left. The occasional lone seabird drifts idly above the bay, but they too have all but gone. In late September, our ranger Sue leaves as well. We wave her off until the boat is out of sight; it feels like she takes the soul of the season with her – perhaps even part of the island’s heart. The Manse is quieter, one of our desks cleared and empty. We all hope to return next year but it is an inescapable reality, now that the long days of summer really are over, that we too must soon say farewell.

But the island is never abandoned – St Kilda is not a place of the past. At the QinetiQ base, staff will be here on four-week rotational shifts, as always. They will spend Christmas and New Year here, once again bearing human witness to the full ebb and flow of 12 months on Hirta. Each summer, the community forms anew, and it is a privilege to be part of it, but they are the thread, the constant presence.

The other witnesses to this annual cycle of activity and calm stand mutely on the hills all around. As the island archaeologist, it was these silent grey stones that drew me here ... and what stories we learn from them of human life on these islands. I have spent 6 months walking amongst them; observing, recording, photographing, logging and repairing. I now know many of them by their numbers, but I confess I have also given one or two names. They are equal characters in this story – main actors rather than supporting cast. And they are also the St Kilda I know, my community, the physical legacy left to us by those most intrepid and tenacious of people.

Cleit 79 on the street is a towering presence: over 7m long and nearly 4m high. Like so many of the cleitean, 79 may originally have been something else, a dwelling even, a home. I know him as Tommy Turftop, a name I gave him to amuse Sue one day. He has become his name, I almost feel inclined to greet him as I pass along the street. Turftop is one of 1,300 cleitean on Hirta alone. When I arrived, this vast number was staggering – did they really need so many? Now they make sense, bringing a form of order to this wild, natural world, their position dictated by an island resource in need of harvest, storage and winter access.

I shall think of them often in the months ahead as I sit at another desk far away, processing data and writing reports – reducing them once more to numbers and statistics, images on a screen. But they are the lasting testimony of the effort it took to live, even thrive, on these islands all year round. Their presence is huge yet soon it will be time to say goodbye to them also, my stone friends.