Life and Death of St. Kilda (A Fontana original)

by Tom Steel

Paperback, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

900

Genres

Collection

Don

Publication

Harpercollins (1988), Edition: 2nd, Paperback, 297 pages

Description

The extraordinary story of the UK's most gruelling and spectacularly beautiful islands. Tom Steel's acclaimed portrait of the St Kildan's lives is now updated in this reissued edition. Situated at the westernmost point of the United Kingdom, the spectacularly beautiful but utterly bleak island of St Kilda is familiar to virtually nobody. A lonely archipelago off the coast of Scotland, it is hard to believe that for over two thousand years, men and women lived here, cut off from the rest of the world. With a population never exceeding two hundred in its history, the St Kildans were fiercely self-sufficient. An intensely religious people, they climbed cliffs from childhood and caught birds for food. Their sense of community was unparalleled and isolation enveloped their day-to-day existence. With the onset of the First World War, things changed. For the very first time in St Kilda's history, daily communication was established between the islanders and the mainland. Slowly but surely, this marked the beginning of the end of St Kilda and in August 1930, the island's remaining 36 inhabitants were evacuated. Newly updated to include the historic appointment of St Kilda as the United Kingdom's only UNESCO Dual Heritage site, the ongoing search for information about the island and the threats that it continues to face, this is the moving story of a vanished community and how twentieth century civilization ultimately brought an entire way of life to its knees.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member adb42

A good overview of the history of the community on St Kilda, 45 miles west of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland and 100 miles west of the Scottish mainland. It was evacuated in 1930.

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LibraryThing member jrbeach

A fascinating history of the now abandonded Scottish island St. Kilda. Very readable. Everyone I lent it to agreed.

LibraryThing member wendyrey

Engrossing book about the history of this remote island. A human tragedy well told. I didn't realise how much evidence there was about Hirta and its people.The island lost its population not just because of people leaving the island for work and a better life (it was a very hard place to live) but

also because of a worse than third world infant mortality probably due to contamination by tetanus of materials used by traditional birth attendants.

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LibraryThing member john257hopper

This book focuses on the causes and aftermath of the evacuation of the residents from the remote Scottish island of St Kilda in 1930. It looks at the reasons why the shrinking community became unviable from the middle of the 19th century when a third of the population emigrated to Australia, and

the economy declined as there was less demand on the mainland for the seabird oil and textiles previously exported, and the spartan life of the inhabitants became ever harsher. Eventually, the last remaining 36 islanders more or less willingly requested evacuation - the young families were poised to leave anyway and had faced near starvation the previous winter. The latter part of the book recounted the later history of the island, in particular its use by the army as a radar base to support a missile station built in the 1950s in the Outer Hebrides, while the rest of the island has become a nature conservation area. There was a little too much detail about matters such as injuries suffered by members of the armed forces on the island, and when buildings were re-roofed, or aerials blown down in gale force winds, that was a bit tedious - I would have preferred a bit more about the history of the island, though much remains unknown before the first account of a visitor - that of Martin Martin in 1697. For the sake of the latter part, I would have to say I enjoyed this a bit less than Charles McLean's Island at the Edge of the World. 4/5

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