The Gravity of Feathers by Andrew Fleming review: a 'magnificent' new history of St Kilda

The second half of the Victorian Age was a time of rare prosperity, when St Kilda became a tourist attraction and the its hand-loomed Tweed was a high quality cloth, sold in fashionable shops in Glasgow and Edinburgh, London and Paris.

St Kilda was at this time a brand, the name given to streets and squares, hotels and boarding-houses, even to a number of Girls' Schools, and, with more reason, to a tune for the 51st Psalm. There were popular novels with a St Kildan heroine. Quite an achievement, especially since - as Andrew Fleming remarks in this book - there was never, to our knowledge, a saint called Kilda.

It was a young native of Skye, Martin Martin, who had first made St Kilda famous with his 1698 book, A Late Voyage to St Kilda. With their "singular chastity" and “contempt of gold and silver", the islanders were almost the only people in the world, he wrote, who knew "the sweetness of true liberty". Islanders often oppressed by their laird might have questioned this, but the idea of this remote Eden delighted readers, among the the young Samuel Johnson. More than half a century later, making his tour of the Western Isles with James Boswell, he longed to visit St Kilda. Alas, no crossing was then possible.

Of course St Kilda was no such paradise. There may have been that "singular chastity", for adultery in a closed community is dangerous, but girls were often pregnant when they married. The islanders' diet did not make for good health: no green vegetables, no fruit. Crops were meagre. Sea fowl, gannets' eggs, mutton and potatoes were the staple diet. The rate of infant mortality was dreadful; infantile tetanus was endemic. One reads of mothers whose children, especially boys, rarely survived the first week of life. There was no doctor in the community, and a qualified nurse or midwife only intermittently from the mid-19th century, inherited from immigrants from Skye.

It was an intensely religious community, especially after the Disruption of 1843 saw the islanders accepting the Free Kirk. Ministers, who might also be schoolmasters, had great authority, though - as is to be expected in a small community - they sometimes also provoked opposition. Fleming offers a keen account of the quarrels between one minister, Mackay, and a least one of the leaders of the community; fun to read about, but, one supposes, grim for all concerned. The Kirk’s readiness to denounce and seek to penalize fornication made St Kilda often an unhappy place. There were frequent arguments; one minister's housekeeper was feared and hated as a spy.

There was emigration to Australia from St Kilda (via assisted passages) early in the 19th century, but its last inhabited decades were a time of greater prosperity, as steam boats and yachts brought tourists. The islanders themselves soon learned like people in other previously remote communities to make a good thing out of tourists, not least by selling them local crafts.

At the same time, however, this incursion of the wider world also provoked young and ambitions islanders to leave. There had always been difficulties with successive lairds, but now adventurous journalists publicised the lairds' iniquities. Eventually, more young people left the islands and the declining population made the continuance of traditional life ever more difficult. By the late 1920s there were only some 30 residents remaining, and there were no longer enough active men to run the island boat, so the government acquiesced in the request for evacuation.

Fleming has written a magnificent and completely engaging book, the result of long engagement with St Kilda and its people. It is full of fine stories, acute character sketches, information about how the islanders lived, what they did, even what they thought. It makes for a compelling and thoroughly enjoyable read. It's a book to read through once and then return to, dipping in here and there.

The Gravity of Feathers, by Andrew Fleming, Birlinn, £25