Torcuil Crichton

Even in the summer. The sea cliffs of St Kilda are among the highest in the UK. When you crane your neck up from the deck of what feels like a very small boat below those cliffs, it feels as if someone has dragged New York’s skyscrapers midway across the Atlantic. The sea stacks teem with bird life, giving an otherworldly atmosphere, and the power of that ocean, in summer and winter, below your feet—that relentless swell—makes you feel as if these islands are on the edge of the world. It is the surrounding ocean environment that gives it its UNESCO natural heritage status, but it is the human footprint—the two millennia of human inhabitation of the main island of Hirta, along with Boreray, Soay and Dùn, where people grazed sheep and hunted seabirds—that exert such a pull and give it its heritage status. People lived there for two millennia, eking out a very tough life harvesting seabirds and breeding sheep, but modernity, contact with the outside world, depopulation, emigration and illness brought that chapter of human habitation to a close. The final 36 St Kildans requested assistance from the British Government and were evacuated on 29 August 1930, bringing that chapter of inhabitation to a sudden and sad end. Although the community dispersed and the voices faded, you still get an echo of the human habitation and the people when you go there. I last visited with the late Norman John Gillies, the last of the male St Kildans. He left when he was five years old, but he still had an umbilical link to the island. To stand with him outside his family home in Village Bay, and to hear him switch from his English Norwich accent into what that place evoked in him—his native Gaelic voice—was to walk across the bridge of time. It was quite a privilege. The remarkable story of St Kilda has been told and retold, from Tom Steel’s “Life and Death” to Roger Hutchinson’s “A People’s History”. There are about 700 books on St Kilda. We know more about the St Kildans than we know about the kings of Scotland. That is why we go back time and again: because when we walk in their footsteps, we feel for ourselves what it was like to live in a pre-industrial, communal, remote and co-dependent community as our ancestors must all have done. While St Kilda remains attractive, tourist traffic is increasing vastly. Cruise ships now go there and the light-touch tourism that is essential for UNESCO world heritage sites is hard to achieve. Ionad Hiort, the St Kilda Centre project, aspires to construct a world-class visitor centre in Ùig, on the west coast of Lewis. It would offer visitors an opportunity to encounter St Kilda from afar. UNESCO has adopted the project as an exemplar of remote access to world heritage sites, many of which are already physically inaccessible or fragile. Funding is formidable, and a £7 million package has been put in place, but prices are increasing as time is flowing, and there is a considerable funding gap. I appeal to the Minister and the UK Government to deploy the muscle of Government to fulfil their obligations not just as a custodian of this double world heritage site, but by using projects such as Ionad Hiort to show the potential of remote viewing, contain untrammelled tourism and breathe new economic life into remote communities like mine. I urge the Department, the Minister and colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to take the proposal seriously, to show how the UK can inform and lead the rest of the world—from the edge of the world—when it comes to world heritage sites.