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St Kilda: Life before the evacuation
Transcript
Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Roger Hutchinson [RH]; archive recording [AR]
[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.
[JB]
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Love Scotland. The archipelago of St Kilda is one of the most remote parts of the British Isles. A dot in the Atlantic Ocean, 41 miles west of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. Today it’s home to hundreds of thousands of seabirds, but it’s most famous for its human story: the evacuation of its native population in 1930, which brought to a close an extraordinary story of survival.
Today we’re going to focus on that tale of resilience in the face of disease, war and great hardship. It’s the tale of what happened to a community who relied on each other for survival. Journalist and writer Roger Hutchinson has long been immersed in this fascinating story, and his book St Kilda: A people’s history reveals the lives of those who called the island home. Roger, welcome to the podcast.
[RH]
Hello Jackie. Nice to be here.
[JB]
As I said, we’re going to focus on St Kilda’s last years, but to understand the greater history can you tell me, when do we think people first arrived there?
[RH]
We don’t know exactly, obviously. But in prehistory, which is to say in the Stone Age, not long after people arrived in the Outer Hebrides, we can conjecture, because the St Kilda islands, the biggest one Hirta is visible from the west coast of Lewis and Harris and North Uist. So, we must assume that the people that built the Calanais stones in the centuries BC went over to St Kilda, probably initially for hunting purposes in the spring and summer, and eventually somebody settled there.
[JB]
When did people outside the islands begin to become interested in St Kilda?
[RH]
St Kilda has probably been the most visited, and certainly the most written about, of all the Hebridean islands. It’s never really been a secret. In the early 17th century the Skye man Martin Martin wrote about St Kilda in his famous travelogue; ever since then, it’s been known. It really sprang to attention though in the 18th century when people like Captain James Cook were exploring the Pacific Ocean and reports were coming back to the UK, to Britain, of these extraordinary civilisations in places like Tahiti and Hawaii. And it suddenly became obvious to people, it became clear to people that we didn’t have to go to the Pacific to find this. There was such a settlement actually just a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of Scotland.
[JB]
They were called the islands on the edge of the world.
[RH]
It was a book called The Islands on the Edge of the World, yes, which pretty much summarised the way that they were painted. They weren’t of course on the edge of the world; they’re on the edge of Europe. It’s best to look upon St Kilda as a very distant and remote Hebridean island.
[JB]
Learning more about what it was like to live there, tell us about that. They ate seabirds?
[RH]
They ate seabirds alright. When the census began to be taken in St Kilda, which is roughly the same time as in the rest of Scotland and the rest of the UK, they described themselves initially as cragsmen, the men that is. And that’s fair. Up to modern times, adult men and even lately women and children were scaling the cliffs. It’s the highest cliffs in Europe, some of them, and they were scaling them to pluck young gannets and puffins and all sorts of other birds off the cliff sides, initially to eat. And always to eat; they never stopped eating seabirds. Latterly an export trade in feathers was developed for soft furnishings in the rest of the UK.
[JB]
I’ve seen photographs from the late 19th century/early 20th century, and it was so brave and so physical. As you say, these were men scrambling down cliffs to reach the birds.
[RH]
This is true and to us, it seems unfeasible; to them it was actually just a way of life, something they’ve been doing since they were young.
[JB]
When I was doing some research for this, Roger, I saw an old black and white photograph of two feet, side by side – one belonging to a visitor to St Kilda and one belonging to a local lad. The foot from the visitor looked very much like a normal foot, but the foot of the young man had sort of evolved. I mean, the toes were almost like claws.
[RH]
Yeah. I know those photos and they wouldn’t have been faked. Certainly St Kildans will have had different feet to us because ever since they were children, ever since that young man could walk, he would have been clambering up the sides of stone buildings, of cleits and barns and byres and houses, because it’s what they did. And then not long after he could walk, he’d have been cramping up and down cliff sides. If you do that from the age of two, three, four, your feet will look quite different to the feet of you or I by the time you reach adulthood. I don’t think it was a Darwinian evolution. I think it was more like the gnarled hands of a manual worker.
[JB]
So, the local people, they lived this very, very hard life and they were in isolation, but I believe it’s when more and more people started to come to St Kilda that the problems began, because the ships brought more than sailors and visitors; they brought disease.
[RH]
Yes, to a degree. This never ended, although they were never completely insulated from the outside world. Every summer since the Middle Ages, the factor of the MacLeod estate in Harris, who owned St Kilda, would go out with an entourage. He would sail out to collect rentals and anything else the St Kildans … any other excess the St Kildans had produced. When the factor arrived, it was always recorded that the locals went down with a flu or cold, or something like that. People didn’t bring life-threatening illnesses to St Kilda. It’s not as if all the St Kildans keeled over and died the moment a sailor landed there. That didn’t happen. Sailors and people from the Outer Isles and from the rest of the world frequently ended up in St Kilda.
[JB]
Whenever those ships were arriving, with some regularity there, when are we talking about and how many islanders inhabited St Kilda?
[RH]
There was as much as 200 people at times. There was a large smallpox epidemic. Again, we assumed it was smallpox.
[JB]
When was this?
[RH]
300 years ago, and that wiped out almost everybody but a handful of young men who were actually out birding on the rocks. The whole of Village Bay and Hirta was killed, went down. And so, the place was repopulated from the other islands: from Harris and even Skye, and from Bernera and North Uist. Most of the people who were in St Kilda from about 1700 onwards, or from the early 18th century onwards, their families are actually from the rest of the Outer Hebrides.
[JB]
Were the people who lived on St Kilda seen as somehow different by those who travelled to these islands on the edge of the world?
[RH]
People from outside who visited the place, particularly in the 19th century when visiting got easier, did romanticise it. They saw St Kilda as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, that you could write anything on, and they did write anything on it.
[JB]
I read a horrifying fact that, at one stage, the infant mortality rate was something like 80%. When was that?
[RH]
It must have been one of the worst in the world. That probably dated back a long way into the 18th century. Word of mouth tells us that the great majority of newborn babies died within a week or two. It was such an an epidemic that St Kildan parents wouldn’t Christen their children until they lived for a month. It was typhus it seems, and not until the 1890s did it begin to be dealt with. More than anything else, it was this that kept the St Kildan population so low. Had there been a normal survival rate among the kids, among the infants, the population could have reached 200+ and been reasonably stable. As it was, from the 18th century onwards, it dipped to 100 or below 100, until they got a hold of the typhus, which was when nurses arrived in the island in the 1890s. The population didn’t grow normally. After the nurses arrived, the population first stabilised and then began to grow again.
[JB]
So, this was the resurgence then, in the late 1890s.
[RH]
There was an Indian summer of the St Kildan population and St Kildan life about 120/130 years ago, between the 1890s and the end of the First World War.
[JB]
Is this around the time that tourists started coming to the islands? Because there is lovely early footage of very well-dressed incomers mixing with clearly the local people.
[RH]
Tourists began to arrive in the middle of the 19th century, before then. Yes, I mean, it became quite the tourist destination. Boats were chartered by entrepreneurs and there were cruises to St Kilda. Loads of people familiarised themselves with the place.
[JB]
Why were they drawn there? Was it this Romanticism that you touched on?
[RH]
Yeah, the fact was here was this bizarre discovery, which supposedly had a royal family and supposedly had a parliament. It didn’t, of course. There was no royal family on St Kilda and the St Kilda Parliament was just a grazings committee, common among crofting areas. It was just a meeting of the men to decide what to do that day or that week.
[JB]
So, there was a sort of tourism boom then. How did the islanders react to this?
[RH]
Well, they adapted to it. They began selling things to tourists! They sold scarves and things that they made. They tried to sell keepsakes. The famous Margaret Fay Shaw, an American woman who just died at the turn of this century at a grand age, who came to these islands in the 1920s and eventually settled in Canna. Margaret actually went to St Kilda in the 20s, while it was still populated, as a tourist. When she came back, she had these lovely little keepsake souvenirs – a scarf and other things like that. So, they adapted; they tried to sell things to the tourists. And they sold them trips to the cliffs as well, which was inadvisable, but nobody died there.
[JB]
Can I just add something to your story about Margaret Fay Shaw? This is from one of her writings, and this just shows you how the islanders did indeed adapt to tourism. She writes: ‘I was asked by a Mrs Gillies to come in by her fire. She was wearing a tartan square about her head, which was most becoming. I thought she might have woven it herself, but when I asked, she replied, do you know Cowcaddens in Glasgow? That’s where they come from. I can give you a nice new one.’
So, it’s the equivalent of going off somewhere and then finding ‘made in China’ in the beads that you’ve just bought!
[RH]
That’s exactly right. That rings perfectly true!
[JB]
We’re into the early stages of the 20th century, and that is when the First World War comes along. Its impact, Roger, is not as we’d expect, which is, I think, a good time for us to take a quick break and then we’ll be back in a moment.
[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to our Love Scotland podcast where author Roger Hutchinson is telling me all about St Kilda, dubbed ‘the islands on the edge of the world’. Before we pick up our story, let’s have a listen to some archive of the islanders themselves. I’m reliably informed that this song is about an angry sheep.
[AR]
[Gaelic singing from several women]
[JB]
The women of St Kilda – what an evocative recording. So, Roger, we’d reached the First World War in our story, and although devastating for much of the world, its impact on St Kilda was surprising.
[RH]
Sure, sure, sure. Well, after the defeat of the typhus bacteria in the 1890s, the population stabilised and began to grow, in that newly born children began to survive. And so, by 1900/1901, the population was beginning to grow a bit, and it got back up from 70 or 80 up to about 100. And that included young men and women, which is all very optimistic for a Hebridean island, as it still is. They were just getting on with their lives as cragspeople and crofters, and doing what they could. Some people going away; others staying – the usual.
And then war broke out in August 1914 and a military base, a spotting base, a reconnaissance base, a military unit was established in Village Bay in Hirta. The effect that had was dynamic really. Because, apart from the fact that there were now several or dozens of young men hanging around the place, they built a barracks with a canteen. Local women were employed to cater to them, and as cleaners and all the rest of it. Local men, particularly the younger men of course, were employed as spotters and they went up to the hill tops around St Kilda and Hirta to keep on the western approaches along the North Atlantic Ocean. Look out for German ships, in other words.
And so, that brought not only company and fresh people (mainly young men) but also money. For more or less the first time, St Kildans were on wages, and it was good money. And also, there were naval boats going in and out of Village Bay, and they were hitching a lift on them and so were experiencing Glasgow – having weekends there, even weeks there. So, life was very interesting and exciting. The excitement reached a height I suppose when a German U-Boat pulled into Village Bay and began to shell the telegraph station. They actually spent ages trying to hit the pole, which would have been like shooting a matchstick. They failed to knock over the pole but they destroyed a couple of houses and a couple of byres. Nobody was hurt luckily, let alone killed, and the U-Boat went away again.
So, for those four years, St Kilda had what we might call now a Western economy of employers and employees, and local people on a wage and with opportunities, and the ability to travel. Doors seemed to be opening to them, which they’d never previously glimpsed through.
[JB]
What happened when the war ended?
[RH]
Well, that’s it. When the war ended, the army unit was taken away, removed and the army presence just disappeared. The women no longer had any work, nor did the men. There was no need for them to go spotting from the hilltops. The trips to and from the mainland went away too, and suddenly they were left in what must have been a very quiet and empty island, after four years of relative excitement and busy-ness. Young men and young women after that began to go away at quite a rate of knots. The population fell from over 100 down to just over 30, in the space of ten years.
[JB]
Gosh. And when did those remaining islanders realise that things just were not tenable?
[RH]
The sort of life that they led, even without depending on birds to eat, even just living on the sheep and the cattle and what they grew as most other crofters did; the life that they led wasn’t really sustainable without young people, and particularly young men.
[JB]
To hang off cliffs.
[RH]
Yeah, or to cut peat, carry it back 2 miles to the village, which the women did of course. But older women and young children, which was the bulk of who was left, and old men, couldn’t do this. They couldn’t sustain that lifestyle without younger generations; it was just physically not possible. And this dawned on them throughout 1928/29. And then there were a couple of particularly sobering deaths of young women in St Kilda.
[JB]
There’s a woman in particular called Mary Gillies. Tell us that story.
[RH]
Well, there were two actually. Both oddly enough … One died in hospital in Glasgow, having been gotten to Glasgow, but she died there. The other one died in St Kilda itself. Both early in 1930. This was discouraging to the point of trauma to the people there. In consultation with the nurse and the minister, they prepared a petition which they sent down to the Scottish Office, pleading with the Secretary of State to be evacuated that summer, stressing that they just couldn’t see how they would survive the winter. They were probably right.
[JB]
This sort of evacuation had never been done before. Why did the government agree? Did the islands’ fame perhaps play a part?
[RH]
I think it’s more because they came across a particularly interesting and sympathetic man at the Scottish Office. The Under-Secretary of State who was assigned the St Kilda case was a man called Tom Johnson, who’d become famous earlier as a young, radical Labour politician. He was in the first Labour administration and would later be known as the father of the Highland Hydro schemes in the 1940s and 1950s. Tom Johnson was obviously a decent bloke, as well as a good organiser.
And he promptly went to St Kilda. When this petition arrived, he didn’t waste any time before getting on a boat and going there, and he spoke to all the people. It wouldn’t have been difficult – there weren’t that many of them. The minister and the nurse and everybody, and he was convinced that they were right. That they were left in such dire straits that they would basically have to be sent meals-on-wheels throughout the winter or they would have to be evacuated.
So, Johnson very imaginatively began arranging not just accommodation for them on the mainland but also work for those that wanted it. Luckily the state had just acquired several Scottish estates as forestry land. And one of the bigger ones was in Morvern, a Gaelic-speaking part of the West Coast, opposite St Kilda on this side of the Minch. And so, he arranged for them to have cottages for anyone who wanted them, and work with the Forestry Commission for the younger women as well as the men.
[JB]
This was 1930 and we’re talking 36 islanders. It became a big media story of the time, didn’t it?
[RH]
Huge. This is where Johnson also stepped in. He was very aware of that. The fact of St Kilda being evacuated, it’s the news from New Zealand to the United States, all across the English-speaking world and beyond it. Obviously, journalists flocked to St Kilda to cover the evacuation. Johnson ordered two big ships into Village Bay for the day of the evacuation. One of which was a naval vessel, which would take away the islanders; and the other was a merchant ship, which would take away their livestock, their sheep and their cattle. The day before Evacuation day, he sent the sailors ashore to pick up every single journalist. And there were several who were trying to hide on St Kilda – they picked them all up and put them on the merchant vessel with the livestock and sent them back to the mainland. So, the St Kildans had 24 hours of peace and silence and solace with their minister and their nurse, their Bibles.
[JB]
And do we know what they did in that 24 hours?
[RH]
They prayed and they spoke and sat quietly about, and they left an open Bible in each house in each room. And they left peat on the hearth. And when they were ready in the afternoon of departure day, the early afternoon, sailors came ashore and helped them carry their belongings, and helped the elderly onto the ship. And they cruised out of Village Bay. The women were invited to take tea in the captain’s mess, which is rather sweet. And some of them sat at the rail; stood at the rail and watched St Kilda disappear behind them.
[JB]
So, they were reluctant but they were pragmatic.
[RH]
Most of them. It depends on the age, Jackie. Let’s be frank here. If you’re a young person – and some were teenagers – you’re not leaving all your life behind; you’re going off to something new and possibly exciting. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. If you’re older in your 60s and 70s, you’ve got more to regret and more to leave behind. And this was routinely the case – people of middle age tended to be gone by that time anyway.
[JB]
There are a few documentaries on YouTube, and if anyone listening to this wants to find out more, then I thoroughly encourage them to source them, because there are first-hand accounts by those interviewed years later who were evacuated. And they still seemed to be mourning the loss of almost a way of life, the older ones?
[RH]
Well, it was a way of life. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Any Hebridean of any age actually, who’s left any Hebridean island, will look back to it fondly, whether they came from Barra, Lewis, Skye, Raasay or St Kilda.
[JB]
The last evacuee, she died only a few years ago?
[RH]
Actually, I think the last evacuee to die – wasn’t that Norman Gillies, who died about three years ago? There were infants and kids. Not many, but there was a handful of school-age kids who were taken off in 1930 who survived right into our time. And they didn’t all go to Morvern. Some of them went on to Oban and Glasgow; some of them settled further north, near Kyle of Lochalsh, in that area.
[JB]
As you’ve said, the story of St Kilda has been widely romanticised but what do you think the biggest misconception about St Kilda is?
[RH]
That they were different to anybody else.
[JB]
They were just like us. They just had a different way of life, a harder way of life.
[RH]
Because of the bird population, St Kildans were never in danger of starving. You couldn’t say that in Harris or Uist even – there were many other places where people did go hungry in certain seasons. St Kildans always had their birds. That’s why they first went there, and it’s probably what sustained them at the very last. There was always wildfowl to eat.
[JB]
If we went today – and we can – what would we find? Would we find evidence of that life that’s long gone?
[RH]
Oh certainly. They were inveterate builders with stone. They never really came out of the Stone Age. They continued building and building and building, and the remnants of their storage cottages called cleits – storage byres – and their homes are all over the island. Their walls – these gargantuan, complex wall systems like something out of the Minoan culture in Crete. Just remarkable. It’s another world there. It’s like Machu Picchu but on a vast scale.
[JB]
A huge thank you to Roger Hutchinson for telling us all about St Kilda, past and present. And a reminder that Roger’s book is called St Kilda: a people’s history.
Of course, there’s lots more about the World Heritage Site of St Kilda on the National Trust for Scotland website, including how to arrange a visit there. Lucky you!
Well, that’s all from this Love Scotland podcast. It would be great if you would subscribe to the series – it’s all free – and never miss an episode. Until next time, goodbye.
[MV]
This episode of Love Scotland is a Think production in association with the Big Light Studio, presented by Jackie Bird. Post-production by Brian McAlpine. Producer for the Big Light is Cameron Angus McKay. Executive Producer is Fiona White. Research by Ciaran Sneddon.
For show notes and more information, head to nts.org.uk
The tale of the evacuation from St Kilda in Scotland is legendary – but what of the ordinary people who had called the island home for generations?
In this episode, Jackie sits down with author and journalist Roger Hutchinson to unpack the final years of the archipelago’s population. She discovers the alarming death rate among St Kilda’s children, why the archipelago can be considered like Machu Picchu, and traces the rise and fall of island life that led to the 1930 evacuation.
You’ll also hear about how seabirds were eaten by the islanders, the impact of war on St Kilda, and what life was really like on the UK’s most remote inhabited island.
This podcast was released in September 2022.
Saving St Kilda
Transcript
Five speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Susan Bain [SB]; female voiceover [FV]; Roger Hutchinson [RH]
[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.
[JB]
Today we’re going to go behind the headlines to take a closer look at the threats facing one of the Trust’s most treasured places: the islands of St Kilda. As the UK’s only dual World Heritage Site, prized for its natural and cultural value, a recent study sounded alarm bells when it quantified for the first time the specific impact climate change could have on this fragile environment.
St Kilda is a group of five remote islands, the biggest of which is Hirta. They’re little lonely dots in the North Atlantic, about 100 miles off Scotland’s West Coast mainland. The last residents were evacuated in 1930, but there’s something enduringly compelling about a community surviving in such a harsh and lonely environment that it makes a trip to St Kilda a dream for so many people.
Well, a woman who’s been lucky enough to spend more than 20 years working to protect St Kilda’s natural and manmade environment is Susan Bain, the Trust’s manager for the Western Isles, who joins me now. Hello, Susan.
[SB]
Hello, Jackie.
[JB]
Now, you’re not on St Kilda at the moment, but you are heading there soon. I suppose the weather conditions mean that nothing is certain until you actually set foot on the island.
[SB]
Absolutely. It’s always a challenge. I seem to spend quite a lot of my time making travel plans and then unmaking them and rearranging. I think I know CalMac ferry timetables – I don’t need to look them up anymore, I just know them in my head. So, it’s a real challenge.
[JB]
Well, well worth the trip when you eventually get there, I’m sure. Tell me about the background to this study that’s thrust St Kilda into the headlines once more.
[SB]
It was something we were very keen to do – to evaluate the impact of climate change – because we were looking around and we were seeing changes. We’ve been monitoring just about everything on St Kilda, but particularly seabirds, for decades now. And we could see that they were declining, and we knew sea temperatures were changing. But we really wanted to give that an intensive survey study. And I think it’s a good thing to do, because you have to know what the problem is before you can start to do something about it.
[JB]
How did this actually work?
[SB]
So, this is a very rigorous model where it’s almost like a step-by-step process that we look at –there’s a lot of jargon in here – the attributes of St Kilda. What is it that has made St Kilda a World Heritage Site? That can be seabirds, landscape, the sheep, the buildings, the sense of isolation – and we go through each one of them and then look at the stressors that have been pre-identified in effect. So, this is a process that has been applied to World Heritage Sites but can be applied to any site.
[JB]
I think even in Scotland it’s been used, or is being used, on places like the Antonine Wall, Edinburgh’s Old Town, New Town; sites like that.
[SB]
This was the first time the method had been applied to a dual World Heritage Site. St Kilda is inscribed for both its natural heritage and its cultural heritage.
[JB]
I was looking on the UNESCO site about the documentation as to the criteria and let me read this.
“The poignancy of the archipelago’s history and the remarkable fossilised landscape is outstanding and spectacular. Its natural beauty and heritage, its isolation and remoteness leave one in awe of nature and of the people that once lived in this spectacular and remarkable place.
The cultural landscape of St Kilda is an example of land use resulting from a type of subsistence economy based on the products of birds, cultivating land and keeping sheep. The cultural landscape reflects age-old traditions and land uses.”
And that’s just a fraction of the description. So, from that you can see why it’s so very special.
[SB]
Absolutely. And that statement is called the Statement of Outstanding Universal Value. Each World Heritage Site has a description that lists basically what is it about that site that just makes it so special, not just to the people that live there or to the nation, but globally?
[JB]
So, what this model did then, Susan, was that it looked to the future and modelled a scenario.
[SB]
What we did, we looked at what climate change scientists were saying and modelled a scenario based on what would St Kilda look like in 2050. But we thought, well, let’s have a look at the worst-case scenario with the high emissions, that actually not very much changes in the next few decades. 2050 is not very far away.
[JB]
No, it’s not. So, what did it come up with?
[SB]
What it came up with was that the natural heritage, I suppose unsurprisingly, is going to be the most seriously affected. That is due to changes in temperature, in particular marine temperature (the temperature of the ocean), which is increasing and has been increasing. And that impacts on marine life, including seabirds.
St Kilda is one of the most important seabird colonies in the Northwest Atlantic. That’s why it was inscribed on the World Heritage List – for its importance of seabirds. And that scenario showed that some of the seabird colonies, some of the seabird species will certainly have a devastating impact if we continue to see temperatures rise.
[JB]
Tell me about the existing colonies of seabirds and how they will be affected. Did you go into detail? Did you even talk numbers?
[SB]
We’re very fortunate in St Kilda in that we have really good numbers and data going back decades. We could see that some species were declining. And we did a census last year in 2023, which looked at the cliff-nesting species – that is our fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills. On average, we’re seeing a decline of 60% since the last census was done about 20 years ago.
[JB]
60%, 20 years ago decline? And what was the model predicting then?
[SB]
The model is predicting that those species will continue to decline. Certainly, some species like kittiwakes, that was an average. We’ve actually seen a decline of around about 80% in kittiwakes. So, it may be that that sound will go; those birds will go. It’s been noticeable in my lifetime – it does seem quieter. And that data that we have absolutely supports that: that there are far fewer birds of some species.
[JB]
So, explain to me how that actually works? How do the changing sea temperatures lead to a decline in the birdlife?
[SB]
It’s to do with food supply; there just is not the amount of food out there. And climate change is one factor in this decline. There are other factors like pollution and overfishing, but a warming ocean means that some fish species that can’t tolerate warmer waters will move to deeper waters or they’ll move further north where the waters are cooler. So, a bird that has maybe quite a niche feeding zone just can’t exploit that. Maybe it can’t fly as far to get more fish or expending more energy. And so, they’re just not able to raise their young. Sometimes we see years where hardly any birds fledge.
[JB]
That’s the result of the rising land and sea temperatures. It also found that there could be frequent and more severe storms. What would be the impact of those storms?
[SB]
The impact on seabirds is, again, that they cannot feed. Although they’re quite robust and they are marine animals and they’re used to being in the ocean, if it is so stormy, they’re using a lot of energy to go out in high winds. One storm in a month, that’s fine – they can maybe sit it out and go fishing the next day. This year has been really unusual on St Kilda. We’ve been seeing really high seas for the time of year.
[JB]
And I’d imagine that would also have an effect on the built environment.
[SB]
Absolutely. I think the built environment is being affected by increased storminess, like higher winds, more frequent winds, increased rainfall on St Kilda. It’s not protected. It’s out into the Atlantic. It’s the first place that Atlantic gales hit.
[JB]
How high do they get on land?
[SB]
Well, the anonometer has been known to blow away! We certainly do record wind speeds in excess of 100 miles an hour. I would say every year we’ll get wind speeds of over 100 miles an hour.
[JB]
Alright. So, we’re looking at rising land and sea temperatures. We’re looking at more frequent and severe storms. What else did the model come up with?
[SB]
It also looked at, and this is perhaps more in the future, the changing ocean currents and a change in the warm water currents that come up from the Caribbean and keep Britain quite temperate. I’m not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that you’ve also got the melting of the Arctic ice. So, you’ve got a lot of cold fresh water coming into the ocean, and that is disrupting that cycle of warm water coming up. The whole ocean ecosystem has the potential to change quite catastrophically, I would say, for life in that ocean. It would change beyond all recognition if that happened.
[JB]
Alright, well, this is all pretty depressing. Having isolated the threats, can anything be done?
[SB]
Yes. I think the challenges for the natural heritage are more difficult because these are global changes. So, what we can do, as managers of the site, is try and take some of the additional pressures off. For St Kilda, we’re very fortunate we don’t have land-based predators for the seabirds. There’s not any rats or hedgehogs or stoats or anything that eat the young or their eggs. We absolutely make sure that those cannot arrive.
We’ve really upped our game in what’s called biosecurity, and that also includes things like pathogens. Some people may know there’s been avian flu recently that has had a devastating impact on seabird colonies. This year, we don’t have any, but we’ve introduced foot baths that you go through, disinfectant foot baths. Cargo is checked from ships to make sure there’s no rats, or signs of rats. Everything’s double checked to make sure that we can at least take that pressure off them.
[JB]
What we’ll do is we’ll take a short break; and when we come back, we’re going to talk some more about those things that you can do, specifically about the built heritage. There is a more optimistic side on that, to the conservation on St Kilda, and what good old human hard work can achieve. We will be back in a moment.
[FV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. Susan Bain, it’s been a busy few weeks, has it not so far on St Kilda, in terms of what you’re managing to do for some of the really important projects?
[SB]
Yes, it has. Summer is absolutely our busiest season. We have quite a short working window, I suppose, for St Kilda because it’s inaccessible for quite a large part of the year. We can only get materials and people out really from the end of April, and we have to start thinking about getting everything back off by the end of August.
This year, we’ve done all our routine repair and maintenance over the summer and started on quite a large project, which is re-roofing the church.
[JB]
Now, tell me about the church.
[SB]
The church is a quite simple building, I suppose in keeping with the West Coast of Scotland. Very plain, no stained-glass windows – just a simple rectangular building built in the 1820s, actually by Robert Stevenson, of lighthouse fame. Yes, the only church he designed. It doesn’t have a big light on it! It’s just a simple church building. In some ways that makes it important, because he’s quite famous for designing and building lighthouses. But he was part of a society that was looking to build churches around Scotland in the remote communities that could not afford to build them themselves.
[JB]
I think, Susan, that we live in a much more secular society nowadays. And it’s very difficult, as you’ve hinted at, to overestimate how important a church was to islanders, especially islanders who were living in such a remote community that was so harsh and so self-contained. And the things they had to deal with, like the high infant mortality rates, for example, and how much the church, how much religion meant to them.
[SB]
You absolutely see through the historical documents just how important the Christian faith was in St Kilda, particularly in the 19th century. We don’t have a lot of documentation before that, but there was a sort of evangelical movement, I suppose, in the 1820s/30s. St Kilda was caught up in that, and you see them every day going to church or having some sort of religious instruction, but they’re also leading those prayers as well.
[JB]
I was looking back on my notes and on Sunday there was no work. There were three church services and no conversation.
[SB]
Yes, and that seems very strange to us now, although I recall growing up in Scotland in the 70s and there was no work done on a Sunday. Shops were not open. You went for a walk. And in some parts of Scotland that still continues. But Sunday is a day of rest and it’s not for, I suppose, frivolous talk. It’s about your spiritual advancement and reading the Bible. And that perhaps seems odd to many of us now, but not in the time and not in that place either. That was what Sundays were for.
[JB]
How many islanders were there then? About 100 or so, would that be fair to say?
[SB]
When the church was built, it was a little over 100 people. You look at the original designs and I think the pews can sit 109. It looks like everybody went, even children. And if you didn’t go, I’m pretty sure the minister would come up and visit and have a wee word. You weren’t expected to go if you were ill obviously; but yes, everybody would have gone. Now, we do see population decrease in the 19th century.
[JB]
Well, I read that in 1852, 36 of the islanders – and that was about 1/3 of the population – went off to Australia.
[SB]
They did, and that was partly to do with a change in religious practices in 1843 – it’s called the Disruption. You see the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. Before that, the established Kirk was the Church of Scotland. And then about 1/3 of the ministers basically left, walked out; and that was all to do with the right of the landowner to appoint the minister.
[JB]
There was a top-down approach, wasn’t there? They believed communities that moved to the Free Church (and this is a huge simplification) decided that they had the right to choose their own minister and caused an enormous schism. And as we see, it even reached St Kilda when 36 islanders thought, no, we’re off.
To go back to the renovation, it’s not easy to undertake any rebuilding work because we have to keep remembering that everything you’re doing there, you have to take with you. So, if halfway through the job you discover you haven’t got the right nails or you haven’t got a screwdriver that fits or you haven’t got a drill that works, you can’t get it really, can you?
[SB]
No! There’s a huge amount of planning, sometimes a year in advance, sometimes more than that. So yes, everything that you need has to get there. It’s not good on the nerves because we had to ship 8 tons of scaffolding out, all the slates, all the hand tools, wheelbarrows – just think, what do you need on site? I’m working with our contractor to make sure that everything was initially delivered to South Uist in the Western Isles, and then everything gets put on a landing craft. That’s a boat that basically you can put onto the beach and then drive things off.
Now, the beach disappears on St Kilda every autumn and it comes back over the spring, but a storm can take all that sand away. So, there’s that to deal with. And then this year we had good weather end of April, beginning of May, and we got a couple of sailings in and that was going great. And then the weather changed, and the scaffolding was still not there. Literally, it was the day before the contractors arrived that the scaffolding arrived. So yes, you’ve just got to hold your nerve sometimes and go ‘it will get there’!
And now, we’ve got to get it off. As soon as it arrives, I’m now going, ok, that’s great; everything’s there. When do I need to get the scaffolding off? When can I get that on the boat?
[JB]
You’re also working on the cleits on the island. Tell me about those and what you’re doing to them.
[SB]
Cleits are amazing little buildings. They are unique to St Kilda. They’re mentioned in that Statement of Outstanding Universal Value, as to why it’s a World Heritage Site. They are small – actually they’re different sizes, but generally small – stone-built, dry stone-built huts with a turf roof, and they were used for storage and they are all over the archipelago.
The main island of Hirta has over 1,200 of them, so they’re just scattered everywhere. If you see any pictures of St Kilda and you look at the hillside, it almost looks like little pimples. Those are all cleits. We know from historical records … Martin Martin was a Gaelic scholar that visited in the 1690s and he mentions them. He actually calls them pyramids, but he says they’re for storing their seabirds, seabird carcasses and feathers.
[JB]
And you just can’t patch them up in any fashion. They have to be repaired in the island style.
[SB]
Absolutely. They’re drystone; they’re constructed in a really unusual way. They’re quite open stonework because it has to allow the air to flow through, because some of them were used for storing peat or seabirds and the meat. So, you have to let that air flow through them. We’ve got a really skilled team of drystone dykers that we work with. We’re quite strict with them. We say no, it has to be done in the St Kilda style. Because to do it differently would just change something very imperceptible about St Kilda, but it would no longer be authentic.
And so, we try and replicate the style of St Kildans, which initially looks a bit random, but the closer you look at it, you realise that there’s a lot more skill involved in it. And the team we work with now, they absolutely get that. It’s almost like a language in stone, so that we’re keeping that authenticity throughout the stonework.
Before we even begin that though, we have photographed every single piece of drystone dyke work; every single cleit has at least six images and sometimes more, inside and out. Every aspect, every metre of drystone dyking – there’s at least a kilometre and a half of drystone dyking in the village alone. So, we’ve got record shots. When something falls down, we go to that record, we go to the historical record to check and go, ‘right, this is what it should look like’.
[JB]
What an enormous task and what a responsibility. But it is so worth it. As I said in my introduction, it’s on the bucket list of so many people. How many tourists do you get out there in that small window?
[SB]
We get just over 5,000/5,500 visitors.
[JB]
What’s their reaction?
[SB]
It’s lovely dealing with the tours because they are all so excited about finally getting to St Kilda; many of them, they’ve been trying to get there for years. Oh, it’s a bucket list destination for them. They just are so delighted to be there, and it's really lovely sharing that with them. It does remind, I think, myself and the team just how lucky we are actually to work in such an amazing place.
[JB]
Well, fingers crossed you actually get there, and fingers crossed maybe one day I will get there too. Thank you very much for your time today, Susan.
[SB]
Thank you.
[JB]
And a huge thank you to supporters of the islands for their donations, which have enabled Susan and her teams to carry out their work. If you would like to help, there is a Caring for St Kilda campaign, and all the details are on our show notes. And that’s it from this episode of Love Scotland. We will be back very soon. Until then, goodbye.
And if you’d like to learn more about St Kilda, the people who lived there and why they left, look out for a previous Love Scotland podcast: St Kilda – Life before the Evacuation.
[RH]
Here was this bizarre discovery, which supposedly had a royal family and supposedly had a parliament. It didn’t, of course. There was no royal family in St Kilda, and the St Kilda Parliament was just a grazings committee. It was just a meeting of the men to decide what to do that day or that week.
[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland, presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.
How do you restore a 200-year-old church on one of Scotland’s most remote islands? Jackie sits down with Susan Bain, property manager of St Kilda, to find out.
The dual UNESCO World Heritage Site sits on the edge of the Atlantic, and as such it is both hugely important and challenging for the Trust to care for it. Once inhabited year-round by a civilian population, the island now hosts annual maintenance, archaeology, conservation and bird monitoring projects. This year, that included the restoration of a building that was once at the very heart of the community.
The work on St Kilda’s Kirk was made possible thanks to our Caring for St Kilda campaign supporters. Thank you to all of them.
As a charity, we can only undertake work like this with your support. Please donate today and help us continue to carry out conservation work like this across St Kilda.
This podcast was released in August 2024.