Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

Product Information

The flora of the island is typical of the Outer Hebrides with heather, sphagnum moss, sedges, grass and bracken predominating. Probably, for me, the most nerve-racking things is the overriding sense that you shouldn’t be there. They get here, they walk around their house, they pick up a few things – and then they go back to the boat.

Almost 20 years on, the rubbish collection service has been a success, concentrating thousands of tonnes of waste that could have ended up littering the environment.One of the great strengths of this subtle and profound book is that it is also a quiet exploration of aesthetics in the natural world, of how we conceive beauty and value; not many books of nature writing cite Marcel Duchamp approvingly. Abandoned places are often fenced off, and for good reason: there can be unsafe buildings, unexploded munitions, open mine shafts, and all sorts of physical dangers. There is one large beach on the eastern side of the isle, where the only settlement of note ('The Village') was located, and a tiny cove at Skipsdale ( Old Norse: ship valley). A vivid reflection on the “post-human landscape”, Islands of Abandonment finds its author embarking on a series of bold expeditions to examine the marks left on our land after humans have retreated. Our mission is to try and remove [the scrap cars] from the homes and bring it to one place," he says.

It has been recorded by numerous artists including Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor [39] in 1971, The Idlers and Richard Thompson in 2006, [40] and by Kris Delmhorst on her 2003 “Songs for a Hurricane” album. In the Pleistocene era Mingulay was covered by the ice sheets which spread from Scotland out into the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Outer Hebrides.When a parent commits abandonment, it may give the remaining parent a big upper hand when it comes to child custody issues.

Sea holly, otherwise rare in the Western Isles, has grown on Mingulay since at least the late nineteenth century, and sea milkwort, normally only found at sea level is able to grow on the high cliff tops due to the ocean spray and seagull manure. Steadily rising sea levels since that time then isolated the island, which is made up of Hebridean gneiss interspersed with some granite. In terms of abandonment, ghost towns get all the love — these gaping remains of human activity departed are both unnerving and often beautiful. Cal’s writing has appeared in publications including Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others . Although it doesn’t always get the same level of attention as other reasons why people get divorced, the problems that abandonment can cause are very real.Elsewhere, she travels to Estonia and the land that was once the site of Soviet-era collective farms, and to Plymouth in Montserrat, a town entombed under 40 feet of mud and lava save for the tops of the buildings.