Hirta, Soay, Boreray and Dun… These are the four main islands in the remote North Atlantic that form the awe-inspiring archipelago of St Kilda. Remnants of the rim of an ancient volcano, millennia of being weathered, glaciated and carved by fierce Atlantic storms have chiselled the dramatic landscape into what visitors describe as the ‘most inhospitable’ of its kind.
Yet, just as the strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell, the extraordinary vertical cliffs and sea stacks of St Kilda could never have been without the toughest of elements beating them into shape and this is just as true of the St Kildans; the archipelago’s native population.
According to the National Trust for Scotland: “A community existed here for at least 4,000 years, exploiting the dense colonies of gannets, fulmars and puffins for food, feathers and oil.
“The final 36 islanders were evacuated in 1930.”
tongue that may have been influenced by Old Norse. Alas, the people that bore this distinctive culture and way of life have since been lost to time, never to return to what was as the islands are under new ownership.
For this reason, St Kilda holds the profound title of being the UK’s only mixed UNESCO World Heritage Site as a national nature reserve and important cultural landscape. This year marked the 93rd anniversary of the evacuation of St Kildans – seeing many off to the mainland where they experienced running tap water and other novelties for the first time.
For a Scot-inhabited skerry of untold generations certainly occupied by humans for millennia, how can it be that in a historical blink of an eye this society was suddenly no more?
This is an exploration of the life and death of St Kilda; a people who lived life on the edge in every sense of the expression
