Skomer from the mainland at Wooltack Point across Jack Sound
The idea for this project originated from a visit
to the Haverfordwest Public Record Office with a genealogist, who
had become interested in the 19th century families who were
attracted to live on Skomer island despite its difficulty of access
and economic isolation from the mainland agricultural
system.
Up to that time my own experience of Skomer had
been focused on unravelling the cultural ecology of the island's
old field system that was dominated by the grazing and
burrowing of rabbits. This work was undertaken each year with
a small group of my students from the University of Wales at
Cardiff. In those days, the 1970s, living on Skomer was much
more of a wilderness experience than it is today. In
particular, there was no reliable boat service and it was
commonplace to be marooned for days beyond the scheduled
two-week booking. The radio telephone was only to be used in
an emergency and portable radios were banned. In many ways a
stay on the island was a kind of pre-industrial experience and on
coming off the island, the drive to the nearest market town
of Haverfordwest involved the real trauma of joining
mainstream consumerism once again. In this context, you couldn't
avoid speculating on the lives and thoughts of those who really
lived an island life controlled by winds and tides before the age
of the outboard motor.
The idea of putting together an account of the
island was developed by a team of teachers in the St Clears
Teachers Resource Centre (the Going Green Directorate), the aim
being to produce a teaching resource as a celebration of the
fortieth anniversary of Skomer being declared a national nature
reserve. It was to be a compilation drawn from
books, reports of scientific research, documents and
maps held in the Pembrokeshire Record Office, the archives of the
local Wildlife Trust and the island's draft management plan. It was
created to demonstrate the new interactive possibilities for
producing 'hypertexts' in the form of computer community
share- ware.
It was originally formatted as a Help file for
distribution through SCAN, the Schools and Communities Agenda 21
Network based in the National Museum at Cardiff. This work
involved the European Schools Network, based in Portugal exchanging
ideas, using the EU Olympus communications satellite links through
the teacher's centre at Llangefni, on how to integrate sustainale
development into school syllabuses.
Denis Bellamy, Editor
January 1999