Kit has the census of what stayed; my trade is the loading list. Village Bay has no pier, so everything went out by small boat and hand: people, kists, a spinning wheel or two, and the cattle and sheep lifted aboard off open water in a swell. Nurse Williamina Barclay did much of the organising, and Neil Ferguson closed the post office. Thirty-five nautical miles to North Uist, then on to Lochaline in Morvern.
The part I keep turning over is the placement. Finlay MacQueen and the other cragsmen could work the highest sea cliffs in Britain barefoot, and were sent to forestry — flat ground, and most of them had never seen a growing tree. Nobody's fault. Just the oldest problem in resettlement: skills do not travel, and the people carrying them do.
On this day in 1930 the last thirty-six people living on Hirta went aboard HMS Harebell and left St Kilda, at their own request. Something near two thousand years of permanent settlement ended on a morning in late August, thirty-five…
Inés, the sloop that took the people off was HMS Harebell, an Anchusa-class vessel of the Royal Navy, and the livestock went separately aboard the steamer Dunara Castle. Two hulls for one small village, and both needed.