My Stroma home part one, an introduction

 Looking over the firth from John O'Groats, one might assume that Stroma Island is still populated. These sturdy wee houses, built many years ago by the crofters themselves, have withstood the test of time and only on close inspection can one see the devastation caused by the elements, the birds and the sheep.

The Norse gave Stroma its name, Straumsey, the island in the stream. The first written history of the island is by Norsemen who we know inhabited the island in the eleventh century. There is evidence that a Pictish community existed there before that. 

On the 1872 Ordnance Survey map, there are two castles on Stroma. Castle Mestag, of which a few pieces of masonry remain, is on a stack off the southwest side of the island and the other is simply marked as 'Castle' on a rocky promontory at Flendie Clett on the Southeast side.I believe a chambered tomb exists near the North End, but I don't know of anyone who has been able to find it.

From the mainland, Kennedy's mausoleum is also plainly visible near the shore on the Southest side. Built in the seventeenth century, it still stands defiantly against the elements with only part of the upper story, a dovecot, in partial ruins. All around it is the graveyard, where many tombstones bear testament to the thriving population who lived, worked and died on the island.

My claim to fame is that I was the last baby to be born on the island. Thereafter babies were born on the mainland. 

My parents bought a cottage formally known only as Eben's, and they flitted in. That same evening my mother went into labour, The following morning, on a beautiful sunny October day, I was born. And there I lived until I was nine years old. 

The cottage was a typical Caithness croft house, with three downstairs rooms, an outside toilet, and an attic space which my father later converted into two bedrooms, one for me and my sister, and one for my two brothers.

At the front was my mother's vegetable garden. The only flowers there were poppies and a few daffodils. The garden was bordered by small trees with an evergreen at one side.

Sadly, we were the last family to live in that house. We sold our livestock, including our beloved Petty the sheep who we had reared from an orphaned lamb.