A story of rural extremes, out of Scotland

NPR's Celeste Noche reports today from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, a remote region in the northwest of the United Kingdom.  This lovely feature story, with fabulous photos, provides a window into extremely remote rural living by focusing on the importance of what, in the United States, we call a bookmobile.  Here's the lede:

In Stornoway, the biggest town in Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands, a yellow van sits on a narrow, one-way street. The Gaelic word leabharlann is painted on the front, back and sides, with its English translation, "library," on the front and sides. 

Driver Iain Mackenzie has loaded his books in the van, organized his customers' orders and is preparing for his last run of the week on the island of Lewis and Harris. The 16-year-old van runs three days a week, covering more than 800 miles of rugged roads to deliver books to more than 800 residents.

Many of the residents featured in the story are elderly and/or disabled, but the story also touches on the importance of the mobile library for serving children and youth, including with efforts to keep the Gaelic language alive.

The broader context, of course, is population loss:

As rural high streets — the centers of local businesses — begin to disappear, and schools, jobs and other opportunities have seeped away to large cities, villages across the isles are facing depopulation and a decrease in resources. A 2007 Outer Hebrides Migration Study reported a 43% population decline between 1901 and 2001, as well as a long-term decline in the number of women of childbearing age, resulting in more deaths than births each year. "The key drivers of population change are the limited job opportunities available," the study said.

Noche explains that, under salient U.K. ecological definitions, "73% of the Hebridean population qualifies as very rural remote, defined as 'areas with a population of less than 3,000 people, and with a drive time of over 60 minutes to a settlement of 10,000 or more.'"  Stornaway, the largest population cluster on the Outer Hebrides, is home to some 8,000 residents. 

One of the mobile librarians, Steven Bryden, who is quoted throughout the story, touches on the lack of anonymity that marks rural communities, while also defying that stereotype.

There's a perception in [small villages] where everybody knows everybody, but it isn't always the case.  There are a lot of people on their own who are just missed. It's just keeping an eye out on people.

Bryden also comments on the extreme loneliness of living so remotely: 

A man in the [Harris] bays once told me, "The last person I saw was you."

This reminds me of another recent story out of a remote corner of the United Kingdom, the Lake District, a story that also featured many elderly.  I blogged about that story here.  Like this story from the Outer Hebrides, the Lake District story also implicated services for remote populations, but the English story was one of services lost to austerity policies, while the Scottish story was one of a service preserved (two new library vans to serve the islands and save the service).