I really hadn't meant to be distracted from projects in hand...
The tithe mapping...
The whole cloth quilting...oh I haven't told you about that yet...
The Silk Roads journey...
The garden and the burgeoning greenhouse...
But I just came across this book on Amazon and it was a Must Have.
My photo sadly doesn't do justice to the deeper than deep blue cover, or the islands up there top left, it really is a stunner and I don't even know how I found the book unless Amazon, with its mind-reading capabilities, knew of my strange attraction to the island of St Kilda. Or maybe they had drilled down and analysed my purchasing of books with blue covers or something, but it was love at first sight for me and St Kilda : The Last and Outmost Isle by Angela Gannon and George Geddes.
If you are a St Kilda obsessive than it may be pointless to resist this one so get it on the wish list.
Published IN 2015 by The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland this is a hefty fully referenced tome. Over 300 pages and production values are high with good quality paper along with excellent and copious images, including some previously unpublished photographs of the island and people. But this might also be the definitive book on the four islands of Hirta, Boreray, Soay and Dun, the one that successfully demythologises and provides a new context for the St Kilda story. Misunderstandings abound about life on what seemed like the edge of the world and I freely admit to buying into all of them in the past....here and here for starters.
St Kilda's is a popular story that focuses more often on the evacuation of the last remaining islanders in the 1930s from this remote and mysterious place whilst neglecting that the islands were steeped in a history that extends far back beyond that poignant moment. Connecting the islands to a 'network of communities scattered across the north-western seaboard and the Highlands of Scotland, The Last and Outmost Isle proceeds to explore and explain in depth.
It is in depth too and I have used every ounce of concentration whilst reading the early chapters on the archaeology and the landscape which is littered with evidence of ancient settlements, altars and much more. The research is rigorous and detailed and the chapter headings alone reveal that breadth and depth...
Antiquaries and Archaeologists
First visitors - 10,000 BC to AD 400
Clerics, Clans and Cultivars AD 400 TO 1600
From Chiefs to Landlords - 1700-1780
The Making of the Crofting Community - 1780 to 1930
Rockets Galore - 1930 to the present day
Apologies for skating over the academic content because I am still reading it but this is one of those books that repays the financial investment many times over. The images (130 pages of them) convey a real sense of island life, and I will get a great deal of pleasure from looking at these over and again...take this picture of the schoolchildren with their teacher (Photographer : Norman Macleod -1886)
The girls are looking deadly serious and somehow older than their years, like miniature versions of their mothers with the low foreheads and the severe centre parting in the hair, thick clothes, layers, and layers of them, shawls knotted tightly around their necks, the boys looking solemn. I'm tempted to say 'As well they might,' or ' How do they ever keep warm,' but this was their life, they knew no other and I can only begin to imagine what the freedoms and the great outdoors might have held for them when it is all too easy to focus on the deprivations. More pictures of more children, reveal bare feet impish grins and mischief in the eyes and I think 'That's more like it.'
Countless pictures which include women show them knitting and this has always been one of my favourites...
The climbing rope laying on the ground...
What are they about to do with that I wonder...
And what are they talking about...
If it was me it would be The Archers for sure (it might be time we all had another Archers Conversation actually).
The upshot of this book was that my thoughts suddenly flew north to the Scottish islands and you will be pleased to know that we do now have that Ruby Wedding Anniversary trip back to Orkney planned for September, so to the Northern Isles we will be bound though probably not St Kilda.
One day.
Meanwhile any more St Kilda obsessives out there...
Anyone else fancy knitting on a cliff...
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