The St Kilda that Maclean describes is a tiny world, which never numbered much above 200 inhabitants. They spoke their own dialect of Gaelic littered with Norse archaisms. They lived off the fruits of the island, most notably the teeming seabirds - puffins, fulmars and gannets - that nest in the 1,000ft-high sea cliffs that fall away from the backless hills of Hirta, the main island in this tiny archipelago. Indeed, to be a good cragsman was the acme of any male St Kildan; and to prove himself worthy of a woman's hand in marriage, he would have to perform a dangerous rite that involved balancing on the edge of a cliff face. Maclean's book abounds with descriptions of the odd harvesting of seabirds, every part of which was used locally or exported to the mainland - their oil for heat, light and medicinal purposes, their feathers for mattresses, their carcasses for food. The St Kildans even made primitive shoes out of the necks of gannets. And the demise of the community was also intimately bound up with the birds. The economy collapsed when the oil was no longer in demand, and Maclean hypothesises - with some evidence - that it may have been an ancient pagan ritual, whereby the navels of newborn babies were anointed with fulmar oil, that led to a devastating infant mortality rate in the late 19th century and the eventual depopulation of the island. The last St Kildans were evacuated in 1930.
With its own communistic political system centred on the "Mod", or parliament, which determined work according to each family's abilities and divided up the resources according to their needs, its own literature and mythology (necessarily oral because the islanders were illiterate until the 20th century) and its own unique subspecies of wren and mouse (Maclean even suggests that the St Kildan men were adapted for climbing with prehensile toes), the island was truly a world unto itself. It was reported by one earlier chronicler that when a boatload of St Kildans went to visit their laird, McLeod, on Skye, they all spoke in unison. Maclean doesn't suggest that St Kilda was a paradise; life on the island was harsh and uncompromising. Nor does he cling on to any illusions that its fate could have been avoided. None the less, he does paint a chilling and pathetic picture of the depredations that came with civilisation in the 19th century, particularly in the form of a virulent strain of Presbyterianism and boatload after boatload of gawping tourists.
