This brought them new clothes, equipment and food, but it also destroyed their self-sufficiency. They came to depend on imported fuel, provisions and building materials. It wasn’t just skills they lost, but also the will to continue making the huge effort necessary to live on St Kilda; their morale was waning.
The lack of regular communication with the rest of Scotland led to some trying times. A food shortage in 1876 got so bad that the islanders had to call for help. The only method open to them was sending out a message in bottle: a letter begging for food was sealed in a small wooden casket and a sheep’s bladder attached to act as a float. This was then launched into the waves in the hope that it would wash up on the mainland, and be found, before the situation got too much worse.
There was another famine in 1912 and the following year influenza savaged the islanders. The First World War might have seemed remote, but it affected even this lonely island. The islands were in a strategically useful position, and a naval detachment came to the island to run a signal station. Their presence meant frequent landings of mail and food. Unlike nearly everyone else in Europe, for the St Kildans the war was a time of certainty, security and relative plenty.
At the conflict’s end the regular deliveries dried up. It must have laid a heavy sense of isolation on the islanders, because most of the able-bodied young islanders emigrated. There were 73 islanders in 1920; by 1928 there were only 37. The years of regular communication with the mainland had shown them that there was an alternative, easier, life to be had there. The island’s once smoothly functioning society was irreparably broken; its days were numbered.
Influenza returned in 1926, killing four men, and there were frequent famines from crop failures throughout the 1920s. When a pregnant woman died from appendicitis in January 1930, after being unable to be evacuated due to bad weather, the islanders had had enough. The thirty-six remaining islanders unanimously decided to leave and asked the British Government for homes on the mainland. On 29 August 1930, two millennia of human habitation on St Kilda came to an end.
Most of the refugees who left here in 1930 settled in Argyll. The younger men were given forestry jobs, which was a strange choice, as most of them had never seen a tree.
Exploring today
The entire archipelago is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. It is a World Heritage Site and one of the few places to be so honoured both for its natural and its cultural qualities. There has also been a missile tracking station here since 1955, which brought with it a few permanent military residents. Several conservation workers and scientists come to stay every summer.
There are no ferries to St Kilda, so visiting is a matter of hiring a vessel and a skipper. The journey over in a little boat can be ‘lumpy’ (as one captain memorably described some enormous waves) but it makes the arrival all the more impressive.
As the islands get close it becomes clear how enormous the cliffs are. The huge sea stacks erupt sheer out of the waves and tower endlessly above you. It’s as if the great crags of Ben Nevis had been scooped up and dropped into the ocean. The cliff face of Conachair rises 427 m (1,401 ft) straight up out of the waves.
All the time the puffins and gulls wheel and swarm above the boat in a kaleidoscope of coloured feathers. The noise of their thousands is multiplied into a cacophony by the rock walls.
The village itself is modest, lying in an arc of flat land between two curving rock headlands, as if being embraced by the island itself. It has just one street, with a dozen or so single-storey stone cottages facing the endless sea. A cluster of stone sheep-folds and the tiny jetty are just about the only other structures here.
One thing the island does have in abundance is peace. Standing here past the far west of our everyday world as the sun sets further west still, it is plain to see how hard it was to live here; but also, how hard it must have been to leave.
Sixteen new two-room cottages were built in 1860; they are now mostly roofless shells.
DATE ABANDONED: 1940s
TYPE OF PLACE: Colonial resort
LOCATION: Cambodia
REASON: Political
INHABITANTS: Seasonal guests and staff
CURRENT STATUS: Abandoned
LOST IN THE MOUNTAIN MISTS IS A HILLTOP REFUGE OF INDOCHINA’S COLONIAL OVERLORDS. ITS RUINED CASINO, BALLROOM AND APARTMENTS OFFER A GLIMPSE BACK IN TIME TO A VERY DIFFERENT ERA OF SOUTHEAST ASIA’S HISTORY.
Ghosts on the mountaintop
When the mists shroud Bokor Hill Station, which they frequently do, the decaying buildings take on an almost supernatural aura. The balconies built for views of the plains far below now look out into a spectral grey emptiness and the silence in the long-empty rooms becomes almost palpable. It’s easy then to imagine the elegant, dinner-jacketed ghosts of the colonists who built this little outpost of French civilization in the forested wilds of Cambodia.
The cool retreat in the hills
Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1867, and then part of French Indochina, a federation of colonies that included territory in Vietnam and Laos.
Phnom Penh may have been known as the ‘Pearl of Asia’ for its beauty, but it was also hot, humid and full of the noise and dirt of a capital city. For half the year it was deluged by torrential rain. The colonial French settlers wanted a bolthole in the hills where they could enjoy a more temperate climate, much as the British had at Darjeeling in India.
Bokor Hill was built as just such a resort in 1921. Perched on a mountain-edge at a lofty 1,048 m (3,438 ft), the site offered spellbinding views to the Gulf of Thailand. The resort’s largest and most magnificent building was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel and Casino. There were also shops, a post office, a Catholic church and the grandly named Royal Apartments.
However, the mountain is remote and the surrounding landscape is unforgiving: 900 workers died during construction of the resort.
The empire crumbles
Colonial rule in Cambodia was interrupted during the Second World War; France itself was invaded by Germany in 1940 putting it in no position to defend its colonies. Despite General Charles de Gaulle’s determination to re-establish French Indochina after the war, Cambodia moved ever closer to independence, which it finally won in 1953.
The French left Bokor Hill during the war and never came back. It was then occupied by various local anti-French resistance groups before being taken over by the Khmer Rouge, the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. In 1979 the Khmer Rouge used it as a military fortification, holding out in the former casino against the invading Vietnamese forces. The brutal regime was ousted from power, but a pocket of Khmer Rouge fighters kept possession of Bokor until the early 1990s. Since then it has been completely abandoned.
The site is government-owned but has been leased to a development group, which plans to repair