By: Susan Fry

Susan Fry — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 18:51:37 +0000

Hi, I just stumbled onto this site and am enjoying it very much. An interestingly diverse range of topics — and a high standard of writing and information. Wonderful article — touching and bittersweet and factually informative. Reminds me of the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Kerry, which was also evacuated, and which I visited in 1988. And I worked as an archaeological excavator the summer of 1993 on Omey Island, a tidal island off the Galway coast, about 7 miles north of Clifden, which still has a few habitable cottages used in the summer, though the population was also evacuated to the mainland by the government, as it was less expensive than running water and electricity out to the lovely low-lying island. The Great Blasket is famous as the home of Peig Sayers, whose autobiography “Peig” seems to be uniformly hated by every Irish person who was forced to study it to get their Gaelic leaving cert. I have also visited a few of the Hebridean islands over the years (Mull & Iona, Lewis (3x, starting in 1983), Gigha and Colonsay (paying homage to ancestral MacPhee roots — though God knows where they were actually living at the time they emigrated to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s or earlier). I was in Colonsay at the end of May some 24 years ago…and the flag was blooming everywhere and Kiloran Bay was so blue and its beach so Caribbean-perfect that I feared Donald Trump might swoop in at any moment and ruin it. I found it hard to imagine how anyone could ever have chosen to leave – -I didn’t want to! Perhaps my view would have been a bit different, had I been trying to feed 7 children there in the winter at the end of the 18th c. I can imagine that their hearts must have longed for it, though…

By: vacation scotland

vacation scotland — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 20:07:47 +0000

We are all very familiar with the story of St Kilda and the famous evacuation in 1930 that we tend to forget that there were many other islands that were abandoned in the early part of the 20th century. Thanks for posting a very illuminating history of a very enigmatic island

David

Comments on: Mingulay: 100 years of abandonement.

By: Susan Fry

By: vacation scotland