Return to St Kilda

 

The BBC have uploaded a documentary onto YouTube. It is called Residents Return to St Kilda After 50 Years and was first broadcast on TV in 1980. It charts the voyage of a number of people who are taking a trip to the remote islands of St Kilda. They are the survivors of a group of thirty-six people who were evacuated from the islands in 1930, at their own request, because their community had become too small to sustain itself. The visitors were all now elderly and were young when they were taken away from their island home. The forty-eight minute documentary gives an informative history of the abandoned archipelago, one also covered very well in the book The Life and Death of St Kilda by Tom Steel. The visit takes place exactly fifty years after the evacuation, the 29th of August 1980. It's a strange feeling to watch these aging former islanders walk around the derelict dry stone walls of their former homes. They appear unfazed by it though, perhaps because they were children at the time they left. None of them regret the evacuation, although some of the older generations did. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB2SQuHAJoQ. Steel describes in very moving words the grieving of the last thirty-six as the ship carried them away never to return. They had a difficult time adjusting to the very different life of the Scottish mainland, as one would expect. The last St Kildan passed away in 2016. Rachel Johnson took part in the documentary and was 93 at her death. She was eight when evacuated and she settled in Clydebank where she lived for the rest of her life. The reason I took such an interest in this story is because St Kilda features heavily in my second novel Rockall (The Aldyth Press 2004), especially in the first chapter, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html. In the story a fictional surviving St Kildan, Fiona, returns to the island with her children and grandchildren to resettle the land. This has never happened in real life and now the last native link is broken with the death of Rachel Johnson. A transient human population began again on St Kilda in the late 1950's and that continues to this day. They are mostly scientists from the National Trust for Scotland; and the military garrison from the Outer Hebrides Missile Range. Typical of governments, the establishment of the Range almost resulted in the remaining buildings being broken up to build their roads. The Trust happily stopped them and organized stones being imported. I included the St Kilda story as a fitting prelude to the subsequent discovery of the Erk-Dwa-La on Rockall. I'm enthralled by examples of what happens when modernity meets isolated peoples; as well as being filled with melancholy, which comes out in my novel. I think this is what draws me to the eventuality of St Helena Airport, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2020/02/st-helena-airport-portal.html. It is possible to visit St Kilda as a tourist and the Scottish travel vlogger Ruth Aisling has done so, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uar6xdpRxpc.