Authors: Amy Liptrot
Around the north of Scotland lie many uninhabited islands, abandoned in the mid-twentieth century when the forces of depopulation reached such strength that the last residents could
no longer cling on. People had lived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years on those islands but the struggle to maintain life, combined with the potential of better prospects elsewhere, brought the communities to an end. Usually there was a trickle of islanders moving away but in some cases, such as on St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, the whole community was taken off at once. HMS
Harebell
sailed with the last residents of St Kilda in 1930.
Orkney’s abandoned islands include Cava, Faray, Fara, Eynhallow, Swona and Copinsay. Now on these lonely isles, left to the elements, empty houses fall into disrepair and farmland is reverting to moor.
Eynhallow – associated with the stories of vanishing islands Hether Blether and Hildaland – is a ‘holy island’, with an important part in the history of Orkney and the Norse Orkneyinga Saga, which recounts the history of Viking kings and earls in the Northern Isles in the ninth and tenth centuries. The landowner moved all the crofters off the island in 1851 after an outbreak of typhoid. When the thatched roofs and wooden partitions of the houses were burned to control the disease, the structure of an ancient monastic settlement was revealed. The church had been used as a dwelling place for generations.
On Swona, the descendants of the cattle left by the last inhabitants in 1974 have gone feral, the young bulls fighting for dominance of the herd. Meanwhile, parties from environmental groups go out for days castrating wild cats on uninhabited islands, trying to control the feline population, descended from domestic cats, which preys on birds and their eggs. On Cava, two women,
Ida and Meg, were the only inhabitants from 1959 until the early nineties.
I had passed another abandoned isle, Stroma, which is not actually part of Orkney but Caithness, on the ferry from Orkney to Gill’s Bay near John O’Groats, and was taken aback by the number of houses, all now unoccupied, on its east side alone. At its peak Stroma had a population of five hundred but, after a gradual decline, the last residents left in the sixties to work on the construction of the Dounreay nuclear-power station just over the water. The island still has much of the structure of a community – pier, church, school, lighthouse – relatively intact but with no one in year-round occupation.
Copinsay is a mile long and half a mile wide to the east of the Orkney archipelago. Its population reached a peak of twenty-five in 1931 but the last residents left for the Orkney Mainland in 1958. Spending more time in Orkney than I’d planned, I take the chance to explore its edges and travel to spend the night on Copinsay with seabird researchers Juliet and Yvan, who are going there to study the fulmar, shag, kittiwake and razorbill. The island is now an RSPB reserve, home in the summer to thousands of nesting seabirds. There are no scheduled ferries to it, of course, and we make the forty-minute journey on a small vessel with local boatman Sidney, leaving from a jetty outside his house on the East Mainland.
Sidney moors the boat at Copinsay’s crumbling jetty, overlooked by a derelict farmhouse. In an upstairs bedroom I pitch my tent, deciding to sleep in there for warmth, rather than outside in the wind. The house is startlingly similar to the one
I grew up in, a late-nineteenth-century Orkney farmhouse built on the site of previous steadings. The history of people on the island stretches back to the Iron Age, and Copinsay was known to the Norsemen as Kolbeinsay – Kolbein’s island – perhaps named after a Viking chief due to its command of wide ocean views.
The Groats were the last family on the island, and had thirteen children. Under the decaying stairs, I find coat pegs marked with their names: Bessie, Isobel, Alice, Eva, Ethel . . . There are still beds and other furniture in the house that the family left. One room was used as a school when a teacher was employed for the Groats and the children of the lighthouse keepers. The lighthouse, the only other dwelling on the island, was automated in 1990.
Exploring the uninhabited buildings, I imagine the children in the schoolroom and playing on the small sheltered beach in front of the farmhouse and feel sad that no one lives here any more, but it’s clear what a raw existence it would have been. The island provides the minimum needed to survive: it is a wedge of rock, faced on the north-east side with high cliffs, exposed to the wind, the salt-lashed land only enough grazing for a few livestock. There was not enough to keep the children here and, with ageing parents, they all gradually left. A lot of people in Orkney are now descended from the Groats, and the tale of the Copinsay Brownie, an ugly yet helpful sea beastie, has gone down in local folklore. A farmer tried to kill the Brownie but it evaded his attack and explained that, in return for being allowed to stay on the land, it was willing to work on
the farm. The Brownie no longer wanted to live in the sea, tired of gnawing the bones of drowned men.
As much as it is bleak, Copinsay is also dizzyingly beautiful. To the north is the even smaller, inaccessible Horse of Copinsay – the Norse liked to zoomorphise small islands – with cliffs rising straight out of the sea. A flock of more than fifty puffins is swimming near the coast, with more perched on the clifftop among the sea pinks. The view from the the clifftop, back down the steeply sloping island to the farmhouse, across a curving tidal causeway joining three low holms to the Mainland beyond, under immense skies, is one of the best in Orkney.
Until around 1914, brave and hungry islanders took part in ‘fowling’ on Copinsay, catching seabirds from the cliffs for their flesh, eggs and feathers – known as ‘swappin’ for auks’, in Orcadian dialect. These days, the birds are caught only for conservation research. I go out with Juliet and Yvan around Copinsay’s cliffs and geos, looking for birds. They catch shags by extending an eight-foot fishing pole down the cliff to their nests: Yvan loops the bird in a kind of noose, lifts it and passes it up to Juliet, who grapples it, flapping and honking, and puts a bag over its head. A GPS tag is carefully taped to the feathers on its back and, over the next few days, every hundred seconds the tag will communicate with satellites and plot the shag’s location. The operation is efficient and the shag is quickly released but they will have to catch the same bird again in the next week to collect the data – about how far and where it has been to feed – which will contribute to biological records and inform government marine policy.
Having a small island to myself brings a strange mixture of freedom and confinement. I have a pee on the edge of a cliff looking out towards Norway and feel like a Viking conqueror. A year ago I was in rehab in London. Now I’m lying star-shaped in the centre of the helicopter pad built to service the lighthouse, with its shadow over me, and bonxies – the Orcadian name for great skuas – above, on an uninhabited island in the North Sea. I walk back down the hill, fall asleep for an hour in a sheltered spot by the bay and dream of being a seabird on a high ledge.
I plan to walk around the whole island but my circumnavigation is thwarted by the birds. Near the cliff edge, bonxies launch a dive-bomb attack, protecting their nearby nests. I hear one repeatedly swishing just above me and cover my head with my hands, duck and move swiftly out of the area.
I cross the tidal causeway to Corn Holm and suddenly the cold farmhouse feels relatively civilised. I am the first human here in weeks and my arrival flushes gulls and greylag geese into the sky. Big, threatening black-backed gulls circle above; fulmars shift and squawk in their nests, some expelling foul vomit in my direction. Turning onto Ward Holm, I hear a noise like a sound effect for a B-movie haunted house – echoing moans and ghoulish howls – and it takes me a moment or two to realise I have come across a colony of grey seals basking on the rocks. At the sight of me, the huge mottled grey mammals slide into the water but don’t swim away. They turn around and every pair of eyes is on me.
I start to worry that the tidal window for crossing the causeway will close and I’ll be stranded. I cut my route short and don’t
venture to the ominously named Black Holm. Although I haven’t met the Brownie, I feel spooked. When the people left, Copinsay became the birds’ island. I am on their territory and won’t stay too long.
I want to find out more about life on uninhabited islands so I go to Westray to visit Marcus Hewison. Although he has always lived on Westray, Marcus farmed the abandoned island of Faray for thirty-nine years, renting the grazing of the three-hundred-acre island and its hundred-acre holm from the Stewart Foundation, part of the Church of Scotland. At his house, I am fed with home bakes as he tells me how he kept up to six hundred ewes on Faray, getting over to them in his own yoles. He is one of the few farmers, these days, with sea as well as land skills, which used to be the norm when Orcadians were known as ‘crofters with nets’. With the yole moored at a geo, access to the island, for both people and animals, was a scramble up the rocks. Marcus used to spend two or three weeks a year at lambing time on Faray, staying in the old schoolhouse with a couple of helpers.
Although there are eleven houses on Faray, no one has lived there full time since 1947. A few of the island’s past residents, now very elderly, are still alive on the Orkney Mainland. When Marcus first visited the island, the schoolhouse windows were broken and birds and sheep had been getting in. The five-hundred-strong black-backed gull colony had to be controlled
as ‘they were taking the lambs’ tongues before they were out of the ewes’.
Marcus was always trying new things on Faray and once introduced six red deer to the island. Although there are no longer any deer in Orkney, antlers have been found, so it was a reintroduction attempt. Deer are notoriously difficult to contain but Marcus thought putting them on a small island might be the answer. Not long later he got a phone call saying the deer were on neighbouring Eday – they had swum more than a mile across the sound. He describes how he went to Eday and drove the deer down to the beach, lassoed them and tried to get them into the boat. Not all the deer were caught and some later swam further to Green Holm; one was drowned.
There are no rabbits or rats on Faray, just mice, and once Marcus had a ‘notion’ to put a hare over there. For six months he didn’t see it again until he went over in the snow and found footprints: ‘I went around a corner and there he was.’ The hare survived for some years and was eventually taken back to Westray.
At an Orkney auction mart sale, Marcus sold lambs off Faray for the last time. ‘I’ve stopped Faray on a high,’ he says, ‘with the best price I’ve ever got for a pen of Suffolk cross lambs.’
Hamish Haswell Smith’s
Scottish Islands
, a hefty book with detailed maps, careful illustrations, and information on access and anchorages, is often regarded as the Bible for island lovers, or islomaniacs. I flick through it, cross-referencing with Wikipedia and Google
Maps. I also keep going back to the ‘Lonely Isles’ website, a catalogue of uninhabited and sparsely populated Scottish islands, and dream of visiting these places, wondering what life there used to be like.
Like Hether Blether, the abandoned islands are imaginary in a way, so seldom visited that they exist more in books, stories and memories than in daily life, when they are often just a blur out to sea. They have a powerful hold on the imagination. The film
The Edge of the World
was shot on the Shetland island of Foula but set on a fictional Hebridean isle under threat of depopulation. Here, catching sight of the Mainland meant bad luck and ‘The hills of Scotland!’ is an ominous cry throughout the film.
The true stories of depopulation are gripping. Often the Second World War was a turning point: some men left the islands for the forces and links to the outside world were opened up. As roads grew more important than sea transport for trade, the position of Scottish islands became more peripheral. This wave of depopulation is echoed in some of the problems that smaller islands have today. When communities can no longer sustain a school or shop, they become less attractive places for others to stay in or move to. There needs to be enough working-age people to carry out essential jobs and manage transport links. Like the Groat children, I left the island where I was raised. The temptations of the lifestyles elsewhere are still hard to resist.
On the smaller Orkney islands, you are limited not just by the coastline but in ways to earn a living, leisure pursuits, the weather and choice of friends. Lives are much more comfortable
than in the early twentieth century, when Copinsay and Faray were abandoned, and islanders have plenty of goods, services and communications at their disposal, but many island communities are still teetering on the brink of sustainability.
I had a great drive to leave and experience more elsewhere but, like many young Orcadians, I’ve returned. Now I’m back I’m seeing my home anew and wondering if I should join the effort to keep the isles alive. When I am in London, Orkney itself seems imaginary. I find it hard to believe that this life is real when I’m down there. And imagination is important here. These islands could be bleak, unpromising places if it weren’t for enchantments such as the porpoise, rising like Hether Blether in the offing, always just beyond our reach.
13
LAMBING
LAST WEEK DAD WENT
to check on a ewe he’d left to give birth an hour or so before, due to have triplets. He was surprised to find only one lamb with her, then realised the other two were under her body – she’d crushed the two larger ones to death, leaving only the runt. That day the tiny lamb began shitting blood and it became apparent that the mother had stood on him as well, damaging his insides in an unknown but terrible way that soon proved fatal. The sheep was identified as a bad mother and sprayed with a red X, meaning she will not be kept until next year.
Lambing season is the best time of year on the farm but is by turns delightful and grotesque, sweet and sour. I’m still in Orkney as spring approaches and decide I will stay a bit longer as Dad’s lambing assistant. The job applications I’ve sent with dwindling enthusiasm to London have been unsuccessful and I realise I’m also a little scared of returning. Being on the island,
and within that the farm, has seemed to help me stay safe and sober. By not drinking one day at a time, I have now been sober for more than a year, something back then I could not have believed would happen.