Visit to St Kilda

[RobSutton]

As well as photographing the Machair on Berneray (Berneray - Machair magic) the other reason I recently visited the Outer Hebrides was to visit St Kilda. It really was a “trip of a lifetime”. It must be one of the most iconic Wild Places in the UK (it’s 70km further west than the outermost pioint of the Outer Hebrides). It is hugely important as a sea-bird colony and culturally - both recognised in its status as a World Heritage Centre. To get there, there was a three hour trip by fast boat from Leverburgh on Harris, we then got four hours to explore the island before departing for a tour around the offshore stacs and then the three hour trip back into Leverburgh. We were lucky enough to have good weather for our trip and even though it was quite expensive I think it really was well worth every penny of it. If you Google Kildacruises you’ll find the people who run the trips I went out on.

I found it difficult to catch the scale of the islands photographically. The cliffs around the island are immense. The cliffs at Conachair are about 400m (1200feet) high:


The lump at the right hand end is Soay which rises to about 380m:


This is Stac an Armin a tiddler in comparison at a mere 300m tall:


The whole expanse of coast-line is just breathtaking in its scale and dramatic appearance:


Photographing the seabirds was even more difficult.


These are Stac Lee (left hand stac) and Boreray which, together with Stac an Armin, make up the main Gannetry. About 60,000 pairs nest there, which I think makes it certainly the largest Gannetry in the UK and possibly the whole Atlantic. The birds are like snowflakes wheeling constantly above your head but they are a long way away and from a pitching boat not easy to photograph.


If you are lucky enough to land you do so in Village Bay on Hirta (the main island).

This relatively sheltered bay nestles under steep slopes leading down from the massive cliffs surrounding most of the island. The island was finally evacuated in 1930 and is now looked after by the National Trust for Scotland who have done a wonderful job in protecting the archaeological heritage of the islands. When inhabited the islanders lived along a single street that makes up the Village some of the houses have been re-roofed and are used by the resident NTS warden and one or two other seasonal staff or visitors..


Others are left in a more open state. The houses which are parallel to and face onto the street date from 1860, the ones at right angles are older blackhouse-style houses that date from much earlier.


The island was finally evacuated in 1930 when life on this precarious edge of Europe became just too difficult. Most of the cottage have simple slate or stone memorials naming the inhabitants of each house when they finally cleared the island:




Above the village there is a head wall and in between numerous cleits (the low drystone walled and turf roofed storage units).


These were used for birds eggs and seabirds collected of the cliffs that were the islanders stable diet (a visitor to the island in 1697 estimated that the 180 islanders consumed 16,000 eggs and ate 22,600 sea birds every year. From Stac Lee alone, he reckoned, they took between 5 and 7 thousand Gannets annually) They were also the islanders only source of income and rent to the . They were probably also used to store potatoes, hay, peat and anything else.

They are everywhere, must be hundreds of them and they occur pretty much all over the island – including some really inaccessible ones that you can see from the boat as you circle the island.

The other very obvious feature of the island are the Soay sheep




These are probably the closest we get to our ancestral domesticated sheep. They were left behind by the islanders on Soay when they finally left St Kilda in 1930 and were then brought back across onto Hirta. They now run feral and are the subject of long term population studies undertaken by zoologist from various universities (chiefly I believe Cambridge University).

If you get a chance - jump at it, it was one of the most breathtaking trips to a Scottish island I've ever been on.

[Stewart J]

Never landed but have been around them several times onboard ship and the Gannetry is indeed an awesome spectacle as is the noise from the birds.

Would love to visit.

Stewart

[diggleken]

More great pics Rob.
My pal Dave went ealier this year - I am sooooooo jealous, so your thread helps to live it a bit more too.
Cheers
Ken

[Jim Ford]

Great trip and great images. St Kilda is a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. The book 'Island on the Edge of The World' is well worth reading.

Jim

[RobSutton]

Originally Posted by Stewart J

Never landed but have been around them several times onboard ship and the Gannetry is indeed an awesome spectacle as is the noise from the birds.

Would love to visit.

Stewart

The sight, noise and smell of the gannets is quite awe inspiring, I can certainly recommend going if you get the chance.

Originally Posted by diggleken

More great pics Rob.
My pal Dave went ealier this year - I am sooooooo jealous, so your thread helps to live it a bit more too.
Cheers
Ken

Sorry Ken if it makes you even more jealous - save up the pennies and go for it, I might just have to do it again.

Originally Posted by Jim Ford

Great trip and great images. St Kilda is a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. The book 'Island on the Edge of The World' is well worth reading.

Jim

Thanks Jim - I've dreamt about visiting for the best part of twenty years and finally managed it this year - it was so worth while going, an absolutely fantastic place.

I think it was reading the books "Island on the Edge of the World" and "The Life and Death of St. Kilda" by Tom Steel that got me interested in the first place and then I found that I could just about see it when I've been visiting North Uist and Harris and then I just had to go.

[ron1863]

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

[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!

[LynM]

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

[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.

[RobSutton]

I found this quote about the smallpox outbreak:

In 1726 a St Kildan visited Harris, caught smallpox there, and died from it. His clothes were returned to St Kilda in 1727, and brought the disease with them. Most of the islanders died – only one adult and 18 children survived the outbreak on Hirta. However, three men and eight boys escaped the disease as they had been left on Stac an Armin to collect gannets. The disease spread while they were there and nobody could go to fetch them. They were eventually rescued by the Steward nine months later. The owner of St Kilda had to send people from Harris to repopulate St Kilda.

and this one from James Fisher:

'Whatever he studies, the future observer of St Kilda will be haunted the rest of his life by the place, and tantalised by the impossibility of describing it, to those who have not seen it.'

Sounds about right to me.