OUTER HEBRIDES

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1935, Page 2

OUTER HEBRIDES

BRITAIN’S LONELIEST PEOPLE. I have returned from a land where fairies still exist, where ghosts are always green, where people possessed of second sight are feared, where there are no cinemas, no telephones, and no hospitals. I have returned from the Outer Hebrides. Living in sophisticated London or hard-headed Manchester, or even in rural Buckinghamshire, you may regard the British Isles as one of the most highly civilised parts of the world, says a writer in the “Sunday Express.” . You would probably find it difficult to believe that within sixty miles of the mainland there are communities living in conditions almost as primitive as those of the early Britons. Come with me to Scarpa, to Sealpay, to Eriskay, or one of the other desolate Hebridean isles, and you will see and hear astonishing things. Were it not for the calling of mail steamers at some of the larger isles, these people would be veritable modern Robinson Crusoes. Sometimes they are cut off. for weeks by raging Atlantic storms.

Can you conceive of villages where Greta Garbo is simply the name of an inanimate figure that looks out from the pages of magazines, where the telephone is unknown, where the nearest doctoi* may be sixty miles away across a raging sea, communities of people who have never seen a railway train, who'have never listened in to raido programmes, who have never seen a motor-car, and to whom what we regard almost as history is red-hot news?

There are more than sixty islands in the Hebrides. At least forty of them are wild, trackless wastes with a combined population of, perhaps, 15,000. Some of them have only a handful of inhabitants —Mingulay, for example, with only three inhabitants, Kfilegray with five, and Leiravay with eight.

They are the hardiest and hardestworking people in the world. They have to be; otherwise they would perish. Life jn the outer, unknown isles of Britain is a constant battle against Nature —and only the fit survive. \ Scarpa is a typical example of the "forgotten.” Hebridean isle. It is little more than, a rock which erupted from the bed of the Atlantic. It is three miles long, tw oand there-quar-ter miles wide. To the visitor it appears nothing more than a barren mountain rearing 1000 feet out of the sea. Yet it provides the means of livelihood for ninety-five people. In winter, when the wind is seldom below gale force, it is dangerous to walk along the cliffs. A sudden gust might easily hurl one over the unprotected cliffs into the boiling sea. A visitor to Scarpa is so rare that he receives as much attention as a museum piece. Mental note is made of everything he wears, and he is the sole topic of conversation for days, even weeks. If Scarpa were suddenly completely cut off from intercourse with the mainland, life would not alter one whit.

There are four industries, each with its own season. Agriculture is practised on land which would make an English farmer shudder. There arc also the cutting of peat, the manufacture of famous Harris tweeds, and fishing. Years ago, iodine used to be made in quantities from the kelp (seaweed) found in profusion on the seashore. But synthetic iodine has killed this industry. There are no roads to make work easier. Everything has to be hauled by bodily strength over the rough moors.

The women work as hard as the men. They play the chief pari in the manufacture of Harris tweed. It involves seven different processes, some of which are back-breaking tasks. Finally the tweed is packed into bales weighing anything from a quarter to a half-hundredweight, and women carry them on their backs to the man authorised to give the official Harris tweed trade mark. The women are the real heroines of the outer isles. How many mainland women would care to have a baby knowing there was no midwife or doctor within .30 miles? That is what the women of tho isles endure.