![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Armchair traveler
Dec. 13th, 2021 11:47 pmToday I read a NYT travelogue on the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda, which so intrigued me that I ended up following up with more reading on two things.
First: mailboats! The island (inhabited until the last inhabitants moved away in the 1930s) had no mail service, so by the late 1800s, the islanders had developed a unique way of posting mail. They would put them in a makeshift "boat," made of anything handy that would float, and set it loose on the water in the hopes it would make its way to a shore where someone would post the mail for them. (Which apparently happened surprisingly often due to prevailing ocean currents.) This article talks about it in detail. There was also a commemorative mailboat launch in 2010 that turned up in Norway 10 years later.
The other thing I was reading about was the feral Soay sheep, which have lived on the islands for perhaps as long as 4000 years and may represent the last relics of the small, shaggy, hair-coated Neolithic sheep that were first kept domestically on the British Isles. They are hardy and extremely easy keepers, much less delicate than most domestic sheep, and if I ever get sheep, I want these. I bet they'd do okay in Alaska.
First: mailboats! The island (inhabited until the last inhabitants moved away in the 1930s) had no mail service, so by the late 1800s, the islanders had developed a unique way of posting mail. They would put them in a makeshift "boat," made of anything handy that would float, and set it loose on the water in the hopes it would make its way to a shore where someone would post the mail for them. (Which apparently happened surprisingly often due to prevailing ocean currents.) This article talks about it in detail. There was also a commemorative mailboat launch in 2010 that turned up in Norway 10 years later.
The other thing I was reading about was the feral Soay sheep, which have lived on the islands for perhaps as long as 4000 years and may represent the last relics of the small, shaggy, hair-coated Neolithic sheep that were first kept domestically on the British Isles. They are hardy and extremely easy keepers, much less delicate than most domestic sheep, and if I ever get sheep, I want these. I bet they'd do okay in Alaska.