No Place Fit For Man

Windswept, remote and empty, the archipelago of St. Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, was once habitable. The story of its desertion was dramatically captured in Michael Powells first major film, The Edge of the World.

- Neel Mukherjee

IT LOOKS LIKE the Island of the Dead as we approach it, rising like an angled furl of black rock from the steel-grey sea, the dark clouds sitting so low and heavy on its head that one fears they’re permanently positioned there, like an irremovable and burdensome crown. The journey to St. Kilda has not been easy. First, there were three consecutive days of last-minute boat cancellations as I sat in Portree on the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland, around 250 miles (approx. 402km) northwest of Edinburgh, waiting for favourable weather conditions. They arrive, as if by magic, on the very last day that I can conceivably remain on the island before heading back home to London. Without that last-minute salvation, I would have had to return next summer to get to St. Kilda, which is another (nearly) hundred miles further west. And the phrase “favourable weather conditions” here means something more obscure than the absence of driving rain. It depends on two things — “wind speed”, which is obvious enough once it’s pointed out, and “sea swell”, a surface state of water that dictates whether a boat can make landing at the bay in Hirta, the main island in the small archipelago of St. Kilda. It rains all morning as I take a taxi to Uig, the port from which boats depart to St. Kilda, and increases in intensity for the first three hours of the four-hour ride.

The sea is choppy — the experience of riding it feels as if the boat is often being lifted up several stories high on a billow, then dashed down from that height onto concrete. Who would have thought that hitting water could be so rough? Our skipper, Derek Gordon, smiles coolly throughout, as if this is a leisurely walk in a manicured English garden on a balmy summer evening.