The county of Caithness often gets overlooked. Most people treat the far north of mainland Scotland as somewhere to drive through – a blur on the way to Orkney, or a box to tick on the North Coast 500 circuit – rather than somewhere to stop. That’s a mistake. The Lowlands above the Highlands, as the region is sometimes called, has some of Scotland’s finest neolithic stone structures, most beautiful clifftop walks and emptiest beaches. This summer there’s an even better reason to linger. The family who currently own the island of Stroma have just started taking visitors by boat from John O’Groats Harbour for half-day tours of this abandoned island.
Location and history
Lying two miles north of John O’Groats and four miles south of Orkney, Stroma has historically held a strategic position within the Pentland Firth, a treacherous piece of sea where the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea currents clash. Its name is derived from the Old Norse word straumey, meaning ’island in the stream.’ Archaeological evidence shows it has been inhabited from prehistoric times until the early 1960s, when the last families who had made their living from crofting and fishing moved to the mainland. In its heyday, however, it had been sufficiently populous to warrant two separate settlements, winsomely known as Uppertown and Nethertown. The island boasted three shops, a post office, and two churches: a Baptist chapel dating from 1877, and a Church of Scotland church established a year later. Prior to that, the islanders had rowed to the mainland for church services.
After reaching its peak of 375 inhabitants in 1901, the island’s population steadily declined throughout the first half of the 20th century. Even the building of a new harbour in the 1950s could not slow the exodus. According to our tour guide, a key catalyst for the decline was the growing convention that children attend not just primary but secondary school as well, the latter becoming a legal requirement in Scotland from 1945. Since Stroma only had a primary school, older children had to travel to the mainland for school, which effectively made them boarders there, given the unpredictable weather. During the winter, the sea could become so treacherous that the island was cut off from the mainland for many weeks at a time.
Traces of a forgotten past
Walking around the island today, it is hard to imagine the bustling place it used to be. Derelict single-storey stone crofts, in their familiar longhouse shape, litter the treeless landscape, but the flock of 300 Cheviot sheep who roam the land and the seabirds are in control now. A war memorial records the names and regiments of the 12 inhabitants who died during the two world wars, six in each conflict, and a solitary red telephone box, its glass panes long since smashed, feel alien and exotic within the silent and barren beauty that is Stroma today.
A working lighthouse is one feature which endured after the crofters left, remaining an essential warning to ships of the treacherous nearby whirlpool, the Swilkie, which sits at the meeting point of four, and at times five, competing bodies of water. The Old Norse root word – svalga, ’the swallower,’ tells you everything you need to know about the risk it poses to ships. The original lighthouse from 1896, and a separate tower for a pressured air foghorn, sit nearby. During our tour we saw two modern cargo ships, one returning home after unloading in Liverpool, and another travelling in the opposite direction en route from Germany to New York. Our tour guide was able to give us these coordinates from an app the locals use to track the tankers they see travelling along their coastline. These ships serve as a helpful reminder that the channel once formed part of the maritime Viking motorway connecting Iceland and the Norse lands to mainland Britain, the Hebrides and Ireland. Until astonishingly recently, travel by boat was far quicker and safer than travel by road in this part of the world, even accounting for such hazards as the Swilkie.
An abundance of wildlife
Birdwatchers will be thrilled to see many examples of British coastal birds on Stroma, as guillemots, fulmars, storm petrels and terns all live here. Our group even saw a flock of puffins on the water. Territorial skuas can divebomb visitors who stray off the designated footpaths next to the Gloup, a partially collapsed sea cave near Nethertown, where illegal whisky stills used to be hidden to evade the eyes of the customs and excisemen. Nothing so illicit happens there now, but the odd sheep or lamb needs periodic rescuing from the hole by the family who have owned the island since the 1960s, and who camp out here each lambing season. We also saw examples of Caithness’s county flower, the now rare Primula scotia, or Scottish primrose, hidden among the vegetation. This tiny plant can only be found in Caithness, its neighbouring county of Sutherland, and on Orkney.
Family connections
The majority of visitors on our tour were Caithness residents, here to see the island where their relatives had once lived. At the ruined cemetery on the outskirts of Uppertown, they were thrilled to discover the grave of a recent ancestor. To such locals, Stroma does not feel like a historical curiosity frozen in time, as it did for me, but the place where grandparents and great-grandparents used to live and work.
The Stroma island tours will appeal to fans of the flora and fauna of this area, to those interested in Caithness’s ancient and recent history, and to those trying to learn about their families. But what has stayed with me is the haunting beauty of the place. What the island lacks in size (it is only two miles long by one mile across), it more than makes up for in stark, quiet drama. Book a place on the tour while you can – Stroma doesn’t feel abandoned so much as paused, and that silence follows you long after the boat has pulled away.
