Saturday, 29 December 2012

Book 2 - St Kilda: A Portrait of Britain’s Remotest Island Landscape

St Kilda: A Portrait of Britain’s Remotest Island Landscape by Colin Baxter (photographs) and Jim Crumley (text) – first published 1988
This isn’t a chronological history of the islands but rather a poetic description of the landscape and wildlife interwoven with snippets of what life used to be like on St Kilda.  The text is interspersed with beautiful photographs of the natural wonders of the islands – sea stacks, dramatic cliffs, arches, seabirds – and the stone remains of hundreds of years of human occupation.

Much of the text is worthy of quotation but here are my 3 favourite ones:

"It matters that a place like St Kilda exists and that within it there should be places left to their own devices, wild for their own sake."

Referring to the west coast of Hirta: "You cannot tramp such a coast and feel indifferent, or emerge from the experience anything other than a gladder and a wiser man."

"The sound and the sight and the smell of the world's oldest and largest gannetry amount to an experience to rival anything which might occur in a lifetime's explorations of the wildest places on earth."  

7/10

Islands covered - St Kilda Archipelago - Hirta, Soay, Dun and Boreray

First glimpse of Boreray
 
Soay in the distance across Glen Bay and An Cambar
 
 Looking south east towards The Gap and Oiseabhal
 
Dun across Village Bay
 
Village Bay from The Gap
 
Boreray, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin
 
Stac Lee, Boreray
 
Stac an Armin, Boreray

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