From the edge of the world 2021 – part 6

I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of weather before I went out to St Kilda. It is influenced by the Gulf Stream and is considerably further north and west than Newcastle – the place I know as ‘home.’ I had read that the climate was milder than the mainland, but with less of a temperature difference between the seasons. Talking about the weather has long been considered a favourite pastime of the British but taking an interest in the way it is changing has never been more important.

For over two decades the St Kilda archaeologist has been responsible for carrying out monitoring programmes that inform seasonal repair and maintenance and capture invaluable data about how the archaeology of the islands is changing. Erosion along the coastline of Village Bay is recorded annually, including the rate at which land is being lost to the sea. The condition of the turf roofs are checked, along with the stonework of enclosure and boundary walls, blackhouses, cottages and, of course, the cleitean. Cleitean are structures that have parallels in other countries, but the St Kildan form – drystone with a turf roof – is entirely unique to the archipelago. They were built to withstand the violence and vagaries of the climate on the ragged edge of a continent. Where the land rises steeply from the sea, protection from the elements is minimal.

It is our aim to offer some protection from the changing climate, if we can. The data we gather helps us to identify trends in the rate of decline; it allows us to observe how hotter summers are drying the earth cores of blackhouse walls and increased winds are eroding the edges of turf roofs, making the walls more vulnerable to collapse. We hope this will allow us to better predict where the threats are escalating. We can then adapt and develop our methodologies so that we can continue to protect this most eminent and precious landscape. But we are all too aware that structures which have stood for centuries, and repair methods that have changed little in that time, may not be enough for the difficult years to come.

Each season, contractors arrive to carry out work for the National Trust for Scotland. This year I helped Eland, a professional drystone dyker, repair an enclosure wall. The stones of St Kilda are volcanic, the oldest rocks forming the peaked skyline of Dun and the ridge of Mullach Bi and the Cambir. The conservation standard we use for drystone repairs requires structures to be put back ‘stone for stone’ as they appear in archive photographs (each structure has a ‘monitoring set’ of images against which they are compared for signs of movement or change). The hard granite rocks we attempted to place back in the enclosure wall are rough with small but sharp crystals. We picked them up and turned them in our hands, over and over, trying to match them to the photograph of the pre-collapse wall. At the end of the day, I was in the Manse and went to pick up a mug of hot tea, which scalded my fingers as they were somehow super-sensitive. I realised handling the rocks all day had stripped a fine layer of skin from each fingertip. How tough the St Kildans’ hands must have been. The next day, I wore my gloves.

Helping with this work makes me consider the relationship between the original builders and what would become their defining construction. We tend to view the past through a prism of practicality, yet I wonder if they were sad when a favourite or preferred cleit collapsed, or just frustrated at the lost work it represented? Did they feel a greater pride in some than others? I imagine them standing back after a hard day working the unforgiving granite, admiring what they have built.

Despite considerable variations in size, amongst other things, the construction principle of all the cleitean is remarkably similar. They typically have two ‘skins’ of stone, which are not keyed into one another. The outer face is random, uneven and has no apparent coursing. Externally they look crude, seemingly crafted by unskilled hands without reference to aesthetics or basic structural integrity. But this assumption is a falsehood that is immediately apparent when you look inside. Here, an internal stone skeleton, coursed and regular, rises with an even outward lean that transfers the weight of the huge roof lintels down and out onto those rough, irregular external walls. The roof is piled with soil and smaller stones beneath a turf cap (alone it may weigh several tons). This provides both weatherproofing and further weight to the corbelled arch of the interior. The external wall can collapse repeatedly, but the internal skeleton will remain strong as long as the damage is repaired in good time.