[RobSutton]

Originally Posted by ron1863

Cracking shots Rob, I particularly liked the Cathie Gillies one and wondered how she felt to be back.

Originally Posted by Hedera

That was so interesting, Rob. You certainly capture the essence of the places you visit in your pictures. I wonder how many of the villagers have gone back? Don't think I'd like to live on gannets!

Originally Posted by LynM

What a wonderful experience. Certainly a unique location. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Thanks for the comments folks.

I think there was an organised visit in 1980 as celebration (if that's the right word) of the 50th anniversary of the evacuation. There is a newspaper article about one of those people who returned here: The ghosts of St Kilda - Evening Star 24

I always come away from places like this with very mixed feelings. As a naturalist I can wonder at the location, the environment and all the wildlife and it's almost invariably good weather when you do these trips I end up with a very "rose tinted spectacle" type of a view. I can't really understand just how hard life must have been for the people living there.

We went out in an almost calm sea and it still took us three hours in a modern fast boat to get there, how wild can those seas can be in really rough weather and how difficult doing anything must have been then?

There's a story about how a group of islanders were marooned on one of the offshore stacks for months. They had been landed to harvest seabirds but before the boats could come back to pick them up there was a smallpox outbreak which killed most of the remaining able bodied men on the island leaving too few people to actually launch the boats to go and pick them up. I think they were actually stuck on this small stack for 18 months before a message got to the mainland and a rescue was organised (I could be wrong on the precise length of time).

I do actually almost feel guilty at treating these places as tourist locations but yes they are wonderfully evocative places.