I still have this ridiculous idea that I want to go to St Kilda. Even though I know it's unlikely and not all 'otters and primroses' as Kathleen Jamie would say, or quaint little cottages gathered around Village Bay and the voices of the departed residents echoing on the wind. Nice coloured aerial shots of the island on a sunny calm day...
You know me, I'm a sucker for all this, village children, women knitting on clifftops...
The chaps gathering barefoot...
And before you ask, no of course I'm not wearing it yet. This is slow-knitter-do-it-dreckly me remember.
I bought the music too, thanks to Carol S who told me about it here...
Hirta Songs, and now I see it features Robin Robertson whose latest book The Long Take I read recently, so I must listen to this one again.
But how often I've looked at those pictures of the women and children...the likenesses, the low-set hairline, the clothing, the headscarves, and then just wondered about the sheer toil of it all.
No matter that I'd probably be as a sick as a dog on the three hour sea journey to see for myself where they, whose 'way of life broke on the wheel of the world' (Kathleen Jamie) had lived. In fact Kathleen Jamie did go to St Kilda, as a gift for her fortieth birthday even though it took repeated attempts to land, and she did put me right about all this, the 'modern myth', in her essay Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda (Sightlines) . If you still don't know of Kathleen Jamie's writing then hie thee there instantly. Sightlines and Findings would be two books on my Desert Island list without a doubt.
None of it has been enough to stop me reading every book that comes along though, this was my last hefty investment...
St Kilda - The Last and Outmost Isle by Angela Gannon and George Geddes and exquisite and informative it is too. I've just checked the comments on that post from 2016 and I wonder if / hope Jane from Derbyshire is still reading here. Jane’s OH had a potentially very exciting opportunity coming up and I think we’d all love to know how that particular adventure went.
So when I heard about St Kilda The Silent Islands by Alex Boyd I was on it and had pre-ordered a copy from here in a nano second.
Alex Boyd, a landscape and documentary photographer, previously based in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and now living on the mainland. I'd been to the Hebrides on another armchair journey with Madeline Bunting in her far-reaching and deeply informative book, Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey; a book which explained clearly much of which I had never really had an understanding. In the preface to his book Alex Boyd is compared to Fay Godwin, ' that great seer of cultural landscape', Godwin a photographer whose work is synonymous with Ted Hughes, and with which I was very familiar.
The paradox of St Kilda, thousands of years of continuous habitation rendered unsustainable by the twentieth century, and to be replaced by militarisation and the need for Cold War surveillance, is a stark and perhaps uncomfortable reality for anyone nursing romantic notions about the island.
Making several trips to the islands Alex Boyd seeks a balanced view (and achieves it) aiming to dispel distorted and romanticised perceptions whilst incidentally using a camera that once belonged to Faye Godwin. To this end the book includes 'a hard hitting' essay on the myth and reality of St Kilda by Dr Kevin Grant who was the island's archaeologist. The series of monochrome images and commentary are compelling, arresting and quite beautiful. Radar stations and military installations juxtaposed with the more familiar scenes of wild landscapes, all brooding and desolate, and I have pored over them at length. There is an honest intensity to the images, a truthfulness that puts my imagined visit into a new perspective.
Images laden with mood, atmosphere and a narrative that all adds to my informed appreciation of this place, making this book an essential addition to my St Kilda shelf.
And, the thing is, yes, I still want to go.
With grateful thanks to Alex Boyd for permission to use the images on dovegreyreader scribbles.
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