St Kilda Love Song
A hundred miles into the wilds of waves and mists and spray
Come home, come home, come home and light a fire in Village Bay
An ancient Scottish way of life came to an end when the 36 inhabitants of the remote island of St Kilda were evacuated in 1930, leaving behind centuries of traditions and beliefs amassed over 4000 years. That’s not all they left behind. The Banshee, Ban NIghe, Caoineag or Gwyrach, had been there before humans arrived. Once they left, she remained part of their lives.
The story of St Kilda has been with me for at least a decade. In 2016 I began work, under advice, for a musical theatre show based on the story of 36 islanders facing extinction because their home is so isolated from the mainland and developments in technology and medicine.
Their ancestors had lived on the Scottish archipelago for millennia, surviving by farming birds and cattle, paying their rents by selling feathers to their landlord. By the post-WWI period, as tourists began to visit the island and still villagers died of easily-curable diseases, the ageing population bowed to inevitability and left for ever.
The story of why and how is fascinating, and I thought the title “St Kilda Love Song” had a nice flow and several levels of potential interpretation. The problem is I’m not really into musical theatre. I don’t like the bit where, having worked hard to develop a character who’s about to perform some thought-provoking exposition, it has to be an effing song. So I didn’t get too far with the musical (two drafts of the plot and 14 song titles, I think) – and then I went to do something less boring instead (probably went to the pub).
The title, as all good ones do, never left me, though. Eventually, due to a conversation with my mercurial, maddening friend Shannon Gilchrist – whose life in Ireland doesn’t match mine in Scotland, but there are interesting junction points – I wondered if there was a poem in it. Turns out there was. Instead of the tale of a few St Kildans, it’s the tale of just one; long after his exodus from the land of his birth, his life is ending and he’s thinking about his past. He remembers how he used to be scared of the Banshee’s “blood scream” but now he realises the spirit was on the side of the islanders, as she comes to take him home.
Lovely! But not for YouTube, who had a problem with the scream – although there’s no scream in the story, just a reference to one – and also my inspiring, troublemaking partner-in-crime Kelly Phillips’ quite striking personification of the Banshee. I think she captured the character beautifully: a little sexy, very scary, but in the end she’s gonna get you, and actually it might not be too bad.
But YouTube “choked” the original video. I have to say, they have a history of choking videos with Kelly in them, but that’s another story…
After a struggle with YouTube’s AI – which told me what it didn’t like about the video, offered to help fix it, then couldn’t find the video – I gave up, on the principal that the story itself is more important than the video (no matter how long it took to assemble)…
And it worked, despite being declawed. It wasn’t an easy task for Laurie Glass to rejig his composition once I’d decided to get Shannon to voice the Banshee, but he brought it all together beautifully. (Shannon, who’d never done anything like it before, did it in one take. It’s almost as if she understands the concept better than I do, and actually that wouldn’t surprise me much…)
I think it’s safe to say this now: the reason these recent poems have been a little like sketches, and, it could be argued, might benefit from longer gestations, is that I set myself the challenge of releasing a new poem every month for a year, starting in December 2025. It looks like I’m going to get away with it too, so I can confirm that the roughness will continue.
And I like it. It’s honest; it’s real; and working to deadlines takes me back to my national newspaper era, and puts a bit of a fire under my toes. If there’s ever call for it, these things can be redone later.
St Kilda Love Song is a modern Celtic folklore story:
The Banshee: Kelly Phillips
Voice of the Banshee: Shannon Gilchrist
Story / The St Kildan: Martin Kielty
Music / Audio production: Laurie Glass
Videos via Pexels: Jozef Papp, Guidance Pillar Production, cottonbro studio, Berkalp Turper, Marianna Sigov, Egor Kunovsky, Perelman Nasich, Atypeek Dgn, Lies, Matthias Groeneveld, Luciann Photography, Matheus De Moraes Gugelmim, 小小 兵, Ahmet Kurt, Yaroslav Shuraev, Film Composite, Styves Exantus, Menteş, Poolside Creative, Sokolov, Kindel Media, Sergei Starostin, Jim Desautels, Marianna Sigov, Artyom Saqib, Artem Stoliar, Lay-Z Owl, Efrem Efre, Sergei Starostin, Luz Calor Som
Photos via Pexels: Pixabay, Jess Bailey Designs, Roman, Sinitta Leunen, PNW Production
A hundred miles into the wilds of waves and mists and spray
Come home, come home, come home and light a fire in Village Bay
It is many years since I last went home
But I think I’ll go tonight
I think I hear those solacing sounds
That locked and held me tight
The restless sea, the whistling winds
The cries of a million birds
And I think I hear a song I knew
But I’ve never heard these words:
A hundred miles into the wilds of waves and mists and spray
Come home, come home, come home and light a fire in Village Bay
Old graves aglow with happy souls who’ll greet you at the dawn
Fall off, fall off, fall off and bring your story to the song
The minister said we couldn’t see
the little folk who built the cleits
But the day I climbed the Lover’s Stone
I knew we weren’t here alone
The Lady was a prisoner here
But we were not the same as her
Our rock stood firm through snow and rain
A promise to protect maintained
The tourists told us we were poor
Perhaps we should have been more sure
But we’d believed the banshee’s call
Meant more of us were going to fall
We left much more than we could know
When we sailed away for mainland homes
Reassured we’d stay together
A lie that broke a bond for ever
I never should have wished away
The voice that’s sung through all my days
At last I listen, and I hear
The truth – and now my way is clear
A hundred miles into the wilds of waves and mists and spray
Come home, come home, and shelter from the storm in Village Bay
The roar from the shore is a chorus of souls
Whose names you’ve always known
Fall off, fall off, fall off and add your memories to the song
It is many years since I last went home
But I’ll be there by tonight
I know now the banshee’s cry
That scared me all my life
Is the oran mor, an anthem for
A life that’s never-ending;
Sung by those who went before
Who’ll keep me safe among them
A hundred miles into the wilds of waves and mists and spray
Come home, come home, and join the parliament in Village Bay
Forget you ever went away; the hardships are all gone
Fall off, fall off, fall off and live for ever in the song
