Rock Dove Recon
On the Scottish island of Scolpaig, a local fight against the construction of a spaceport captures a wider resistance to capital's occupation of the land and air.
Seen through a 340-degree field of vision specialized for high-speed navigation, threat detection and foraging, Scolpaig, a small crofting settlement on the north-west coast of the island of North Uist, approximately 35 miles off the coast of mainland Scotland and part of the spinal archipelagic chain that makes up the Outer Hebrides, is an ideal habitat and home for the wild rock dove (Columba livia). This is the slate-grey feathered ancestor of the feral pigeon common to the Atlantic Fringes. In 1/75th-of-a-second flashes, the beach turns into cliff, then machair, loch and peat land as the rock dove flies, observes, scavenges, nests and mates.
Beside nesting grounds, the terrestrial environment of Scolpaig hosts grassy pastures, sheer cliff faces and sandy beaches, as well as a farmhouse and outbuildings made of uncoursed stonework. It is an island’s edge made of Lewisian Gneiss, the banded grey and black metamorphic rock that is synonymous with the Hebrides, and a site that gained its name from the Old Norse scolpvik, meaning “bay of large boats”, during the Viking raids. In the foreground of the farmhouse settlement, once occupied by a crofting family,[1] there is also an ornamental folly. While it lacks any contemporary function, beyond its existence as a local architectural curiosity, the Scolpaig folly (Loch Scolpaig Tower) was a central part of famine relief efforts on the island, its construction during the 1800s providing work for a local population then reeling from a potato blight-induced famine.
Beyond its human functions, Scolpaig also acts as a key sanctuary for the more-than-human. The area is occupied by diverse bird species, including colonies of cormorant and black guillemot, as well as countless numbers of sheep. All of this is to say that for many on the island it is no ordinary place.
On Scolpaig, even the sky itself tells a story. High above this rich flora and fauna are criss-crossing aviary flight paths and migratory routes. Indeed, across the Hebridean Islands, the sky once served as both calendar and compass, a living archive from which generations drew meaning: a kind of gléfiosa, or “bright knowledge” in the local Scots Gaelic. On another Hebridean island southeast of Uist, Tiree, Donald Sinclair, a bard who is widely regarded as one of the greatest Scottish tradition-bearers of the twentieth century, once explained to a fieldworker from the School of Scottish Studies how the “old people” could read the weather in the clouds, the stars and the moon—a kind of vernacular astronomy that bound daily life to celestial rhythms. Others, like Angus MacKay, a crofter and fisherman from Eilean nan Ròn, were said to possess an dà shealladh, the “second sight”, allowing them to divine changes in the weather through constellations long before modern forecasts reached the islands. On the island of St Kilda, meanwhile, the sun, moon and stars measured the passing hours from which villagers could tell the time by their ascent and decline, while elsewhere, in Shetland and Islay, the rising of the Pleiades (the “Seven Sisters” or “Lady’s Elbow”) marked the slow turning of the seasons, rising each evening a little later as an otherwise demanding winter drew on. The Hebrides are known for their capricious and harsh weather, producing in turn a need to seek solace and insight from wherever one can; the skies and stars reliable indicators of what was to come.
The heavens were not only practical instruments, but also a moral and imaginative terrain. Shooting stars might herald death, birth or renewal. In Islay, star counting became a folk act of resistance and wit. When two brothers, crofters both, faced eviction, one of them told the laird, the local landowner, that there were exactly 7,007,707 stars in the sky, bidding him to count for himself if he doubted it—an answer so deft that the year’s rent was forgiven over a shared dram. For centuries the Hebridean skies were mapped in such stories. Prophecy, and humour, a cosmos intimately observed and keenly felt.
Today, those same skies are being quietly folded into a very different project: the remaking of rural and island airspace, launch corridors and testing grounds for the global space economy, from small satellites to military surveillance. Scolpaig is one node in a rapidly thickening network of peripheral spaceports—in Scotland, Scandinavia, the US and beyond—through which governments and defence contractors are seeking not only new orbits, but new frontiers for investment, security infrastructures and atmospheric extraction.
Launching into a Future Perfect
Over the past decade, the UK government has made it its mission to establish itself as a prominent player in the global small-satellite launch market, with a network of regional spaceports to support commercial and defence-related space activities across the country. Within this national push to “level up” the space sector and extend aerospace infrastructure to remote regions, Scotland’s northern fringe has emerged as a key site of negotiation between local development aspirations and national space ambitions.
In 2018, the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the local authority responsible for the islands of the Outer Hebrides, attempted to secure UK Space Agency funding to build a spaceport on North Uist. The proposed spaceport would have, if successful, become the main site for vertical launches of small rockets carrying nano- and micro-satellites into polar and sun-synchronous orbits, used for Earth observation, communications and defence. The council hoped that North Uist’s pre-existing Ministry of Defence Hebrides missile testing range and the Outer Hebrides’ Atlantic orientation would help them win out over rival bids from Unst, in Shetland, and Sutherland, on the far north of the mainland. In the end, it was Sutherland that won the bid, with the agency citing environmental concerns over the Uist site, as well as its excessive remoteness and disagreements on the council in the decision.