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On the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides, with its colonies of seabirds and overhanging cliffs, nestles the Isle of Mingulay. For 2,000 years the island was inhabited by Vikings, Norsemen and early Christians in turn, who fished the rich waters for white fish, herring and lobster. But after a terrible fishing accident killed all the young men on the neighbouring Isle of Pabbay, the last few families vacated Mingulay in 1912 in search of an easier life. Now, it is just the puffins, razorbills and black‑legged kittiwakes who sit perched atop some of the highest sea cliffs in the British Isles, looking down upon rough seas and the island’s abandoned village.
Robert Moyes Adam (1885-1967), described as “Scotland’s greatest landscape photographer”, made two trips to Mingulay, once when it was still inhabited in 1905 and then again in 1922, a decade after it was abandoned. When Craig Easton stumbled across the photographs in the St Andrews University Special Collections, where they hold Adam’s original glass plate negatives and handwritten ledgers, he decided to follow in his footsteps.
As a photographer, Easton is usually drawn more to exposing society’s injustices than to the wild, windswept beauty of the nation’s northern isles, but he points out that: “I do love songs as well as protest songs, and I’ve always made work in the landscape and in particular in my native Scotland.”
After his first attempt had to be aborted due to the weather, Easton finally landed on Mingulay in September 2021, almost a century on from Adam’s last visit. “The lack of a harbour means that alighting requires a leap of faith from a chartered boat on to slippery rocks,” Easton says. “Not easy with a large-format camera, tripod, film, tent, food, et cetera. I slept under canvas for the few hours of darkness each night and made photographs each day of the landscape and remains of the village that once stood there.”
Looking at these landscapes now is like stepping back in time. Not just decades, or even centuries, but millennia. It is easy to imagine the longboats and oarsmen singing and swaying as they navigate their way around the rocky cliffs in search of a place to dock, or to picture fishermen’s wives worriedly peering through the haar (sea mist) for signs of their returning men.
The Mingulay Boat Song
Originally composed in 1938 by Hugh Robertson, founder of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, the verse takes the form of a Hebridean work song, inviting the listener to imagine the boatsmen singing in time to the pulling of their oars. The lyrics have been reinterpreted and rewritten over the years, and having been composed two decades after the island was abandoned, it was never sung by the islanders themselves.
Heel ya’ho boys, let her go, boys
Bring her head round now all together
Heel ya’ho boys, let her go boys
Sailing homeward to Mingulay!
What care we tho’ white the Minch is
What care we for wind and weather?
Let her go boys, every inch is
Wearing homeward to Mingulay!
Heel ya’ho boys, let her go, boys
Bring her head round now all together
Heel ya’ho boys, let her go boys
Sailing homeward to Mingulay!
We are waiting by the harbour,
Weeping, waiting since break of day-o.
We are waiting by the harbour,
As the sun sets on Mingulay.
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