Hebridean stories
Inspired by a story of young boys being stranded on a sea stack, children’s author Geraldine Mccaughrean thought her way around the geography of St Kilda for her new novel for teenagers. Now she’d like to go there for real
The magic of St Kilda, by author Geraldine Mccaughrean
I’d like to sleep one night on the peak of Conachair – not because the clouds would be within arm’s reach; not because its cliffs plunge such a distance, or the fulmars nest there in spring, or because on a clear day you can see as far as the rim of the world. No. I want to sleep on Conachair because people who do reputedly wake blessed with the gift of poetry. That’s St Kilda for you: spectacle, wildlife and a lick of magic.
Though how would I know? I haven’t been there myself.
I rarely visit the settings of my books. I like to set them in exotic locations (Madagascar, Antarctica, Mongolia…) and usually in the Past. To go there would cost more than a book could ever earn. And my research usually discourages me with poisonous plants, razor ice, flies, cyclones, crocodiles or stench. Besides, the most intrepid recce could never take me to 19th century Oklahoma or 14th century France. So, I let my imagination do the travelling.
But such was the zeal St Kilda inspired in my daughter that she came home from there extolling its marvels and laden with books – which I naturally set about reading. So many stories and anecdotes that begged to be turned into a novel. But which to choose? What period in St Kilda’s history? Just where should I spend a year in the St Kilda of my imagination?
Should it be among the rocks of Clash na Bearnaich where Bronze Age man made his stone tools? In Village Bay, while the Viking boats were moored there and giant Viking field-mice were setting up home ashore? On the main island of Hirta or out on one of the others – perhaps Boreray where The Hermit built his subterranean mansion? Should it feature sheep-stealers, German submarines or dour missionaries? What about Lady Grange, “imprisoned” there for annoying her husband?
I particularly love places where myth and history collide – so the Amazon’s House appealed. The story goes that an Amazon Queen lived there who regularly drove her chariot over dry land to the Hebrides to hunt deer. Preposterous nonsense? Yes. The more extraordinary truth is that her “house” – probably Iron Age – is far too modern to fit the bill. Geology shows that St Kilda was once joined to the Hebrides. Antlers and deer grease excavated from the peak of Oiseval could well bear witness to some ancient tribe of hunters. The question is how, thousands of years later, was that myth known to the inhabitants of St Kilda?
So many stories and anecdotes. But I was most gripped by one scantly recorded event in 1727: a survival story which, though true, almost defies belief. A group of men and boys were taken out to the tallest of the sea stacks – Stac an Armin – on a fowling trip. Inexplicably, no one came to pick them up again. They were marooned, unable to escape a bleak spike of rock rising sheer from the sea, not knowing why, as the weeks turned to months and the summer died… The setting of Where the World
Ends was bound to become a virtual character within the novel. So I set about researching its moods, its features, its nature. Apparently, the surrounding waters are wonderfully clear and full of life (though the waves are unpredictable and not to be counted beyond eight, for the ninth serves up the black depression called the Kilda Gloom). Basking sharks cruise by. Seals swim through the perpendicular architecture of submerged rock archways. Sometimes forests of lightning stand between sky and sea – the only trees a St Kildan ever saw. I confess it would be good to see such things first hand.
And of course I’d like to see, in all its majesty, Stac an Armin rising out of the sea like a breaching whale, ledges and overhangs crammed with nesting birds, the gannets sitting with their big feet resting on their eggs, puffins by the million. The passing of the seasons are marked there by the coming and going of the different birds. And the wind never stops blowing.
I’ve seen, in a museum, a stormpetrel lantern – a bird threaded through with a wick, all set to be lit like a candle and burn down to its feet. My stranded boys would use such lamps as, little by little, their own lives burned down towards extinction… But, of course, I’d like to see a live storm petrel walking on the waves like St Peter. That would be a thrill.
I’d like too to hear the shearwaters underground making their strange music; to launch a “Kilda mail boat” (a sort of message-in-a-bottle) and see it ride the tides towards the mainland (or would that be marine littering these days?) I’d like to see (from a safe distance) the Kissing Rock where young fowlers were initiated, bending to kiss the stone jutting out over a deadly drop.
And I wonder: could I maybe learn
Perhaps it is that idea of a self-sufficient community that appeals so strongly to us mere urban wage-slaves
to read omens in the skies, flocking birds and shifting sea, as the locals used to do?
I told myself that, without its inhabitants, modern-day must feel empty – abandoned to Nature, memories, research and summer visitors. But there again, the devoutly Christian, part-pagan St Kildans would say that their souls still inhabit the rocks, streams, churchyards, roofs, the bottom of wells, the ledges of cliffs. They are snagged like sheep’s wool, in every crevice. They fly like banners from every crag. Could that account for the intangible magic visitors seem to sense?
Many of the last inhabitants evacuated in 1930 from Britain’s most remote archipelago (50 miles from Harris, over a hundred from the mainland) found themselves longing to go back, disenchanted by a mainland life where fuel and food and clothing had to be bought with money; where work meant working for someone else and being told what to do; where husband and wife spent the working day apart; where friends and family lived miles apart, not in a single street of houses. Perhaps it is that idea of a self-contained, selfsufficient community that appeals so strongly to us mere urban wageslaves eating food we didn’t grow, pestered by the internet and barely acquainted with the starry night sky or wild weather. Add to this an aweinspiring, volcanic seascape seething with birds, battered by the ocean and peppered with the traces of times long past, and it’s not surprising that so many people form a longing to go there, then get infected by the Kildan craving to go back. But me? Who gets sea-sick on the park pond? Even the St Kildans were wary of their particular piece of ocean. And in my imagination haven’t I frightened myself enough already, hanging from ropes, swamped by giant waves, attacked by blackbacks and clinging to sheer cliffs in search of eggs, omens or villains? Let the more intrepid walk the Great Glen, climb the swelling hills and sail by the foamringed sea stacks.
Ah… but I can’t help thinking what a person might achieve after sleeping one night on the summit of Conachair and waking up a poet. So one day, maybe… Where the World Ends by Geraldine Mccaughrean is published by Usborne at £9.99 and is out now.