Island Going is one of those books that are difficult to classify. This is part travel writing, part natural history and part social history.

It recounts the travels of Atkinson and his friend John Ainslie over the course of a number of summers in the mid to late 1930s. They are young (Atkinson is only 19 on their first visit) and from Oxfordshire, but have a yearning for isolation and a passion for ornithology. In particular they are keen to learn more about a reclusive sea bird, Leach’s petrel, that nests on only a few remote islands off the west coast of Scotland. They buy a car, that’s seen better days, and take the journey to the far north of Scotland to the Outer Hebrides.

However, this is more than an account of the seabirds and wildlife of the islands. It is as much about the journey to these remote islands, the people they meet on the way and a snapshot of this part of Scotland in the late 1930s. In particular this is a snapshot of life in the Hebrides in a period just before the onset of war, and before the modernisation of life got going from the 1940s onwards.

Many islands are visited in the course of the book, most of them abandoned and uninhabited. There are short visits to the Shiants, Monarchs, North Uist, Handa, Canna, Eigg and the remote gannetry Sula Sgeir. But at the heart of this book there are two long stays on the remotest islands in the British Isles that are at the heart of this book. The first is North Rona, a small island lying over 40 miles north of the Scottish mainland. The visits here were primarily to study the petrels, but the book details the history of this extraordinary place and the lives of the people that lived here up until the mid nineteenth century. It also shows how, even in the 1930s, this remote outcrop was still in use by Hebridean crofters for grazing sheep, despite its remoteness.

The second are the world famous islands of St Kilda, sitting in the Atlantic, 40 miles west of the Hebrides. This is undoubtedly an important account of the island, experienced only eight years after the island’s population was evacuated. In the late 1930s, former residents still returned to stay during the summer months. Atkinson recounts the decay of the island’s homes only a short period after permanent residence ceased and the resulting haunting feeling of a place built for and by humans, but where no humans live.

The writing is accompanied by some excellent photographic plates, that bring the whole experience to life. There is as much history in these pictures as in the writing itself. Well worth reading if you have an interest in this part of Scotland. ( )