Scotland Back in the Day: The high cliffs, deep seas and fathomless mysteries of St Kilda

People worldwide are fascinated by the island group that was evacuated of its diminishing population in 1930. Nowadays it is home only to some military personnel and researchers, but remains a truly intriguing place that captures the imagination of tourists quite readily.

The archipelago is volcanic in origin and consists of four islands – the main island of Hirta, Boreray, Soay and Dun – plus islets and sea stacks such as Stac Biorach, Stac Levenish, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, all of which soar above the sea to varying heights.

St Kilda’s geography of high cliffs above roaring seas make it home to hugely important seabird populations – half of Britain’s puffins nest on the islands and it has the world’s largest colony of gannets and Britain’s largest colony of fulmars. Apart from that, there’s very little on St Kilda – no trees, no domesticated animals, and no natural resources, though its position guarantees that Scotland would “own” most of the UK Continental Shelf, extending far into the Atlantic Ocean, should this country become independent.

The history of St Kilda emphasises its isolation, and there are precious few written accounts of the islands until the 18th century. Even the name is a mystery – there was no Saint Kilda, and the best guess is that a 17th-century Dutch cartographer misunderstood the significance of a well on Hirta and made “tobar childar” – the two Gaelic words for a well – on an old map into St Kilda.

Archaeological discoveries have shown that the island was visited and possibly even colonised by people travelling west from the Scottish mainland in the Neolithic or new Stone Age era – between 4000 and 2000BC. True colonisation did not take place until the late Bronze Age, possibly around 800 BC. From then until 1930, the island was inhabited by a population that never got above 180. Archaeologists have shown that around 2000 years ago, Hirta was home to people who lived in earthen houses burrowed into the ground, and indeed the Earth House is one of the island’s modern-day tourist attractions.

We don’t know what happened to these early St Kildans or how they lived, though there is some evidence that they had a druidic religion followed by early Christianity – druid altars were recorded by a 19th-century visitor, but these have been lost.

Like many places on the west coast of Scotland, St Kilda was not only subject to Viking raids but eventual Norse rule, as shown by the names of places on the islands – Soay itself means Island of Sheep in Old Norse and the Soay breed are prized for their hardiness.

The Vikings appear to have used St Kilda as a stopping off point on their various trips around the North Atlantic, and again they did not settle on the archipelago in any great numbers and there is no evidence of any long-term habitation. Though ancient records mention islands to the west of Lewis, the first written account of St Kilda did not appear until the late 14th century when John of Fordun mentioned Hirta being “on the margine of the world”.

The MacLeods of Harris claimed the islands as their own from early in the second millennium, but St Kilda was so remote that King James IV, the loser at Flodden Field, did not include the islands in his otherwise exhaustive account of his kingdom.

In the 16th century, the MacLeods’ steward would visit the islands to collect rent and Church of Scotland clerics would also try to visit and minister to the people. It is thanks to one of them, Donald Monro, the so-called Dean of the Isles, that we have our earliest description of the islands and their inhabitants.

Monro was not impressed. Writing in his magisterial Description of the Western Isles of Scotland in 1549, Monro noted: “The inhabitants thereof ar simple poor people, scarce learnit in aney religion, but M’Cloyd of Herray, his stewart, or he quhom he deputs in sic office, sailes anes in the zear ther at midsummer, with some chaplaine to baptize bairnes ther.”

We can deduce from the fact that rents were paid in wool, fish and especially the eggs and meat of seabirds, that the inhabitants did indeed have a simple way of life in which barter and not money was the way in which they conducted trade among themselves. Each islander had a strip of land on which they grew barley and oats in the main, and there were a few cattle which grazed on land near the main settlement, the Village, on Hirta.

The Gaelic-speaking natives enjoyed their communal way of life, and a visitor in 1697 recorded that they loved music and games. By the 19th century, however, the islanders were all adherents of the Free Church of Scotland and consequently led more sombre lives.

That 1697 visitor was Martin Martin who wrote A Voyage to St Kilda. He was a big fan, prefacing his work with these words: “An ACCOUNT of the very remarkable Inhabitants of that Place, their Beauty and singular Chastity (Fornication and Adultery being unknown among them); their Genius for Poetry, Music, Dancing; their surprising Dexterity in climbing the Rocks, and Walls of Houses; Diversions, Habit, Food, Language, Diseases and Methods of Cure ; their extensive Charity; their Contempt of Gold and Silver, as below the Dignity of Human Nature; their Religious Ceremonies, Notion of Spirits and Visions, &c. &c.”

This remarkable work contains a quite wonderful description of one Roderick, a local who claimed to have had John the Baptist appear and tell him to vary the islanders’ normal Christian religious practices. “Roderick so mixed the laudable customs of the Church with his own diabolical inventions, that it became impossible for so ignorant a people, to distinguish the one from the other,” wrote Martin.

He also described their houses in the main village: “Low-built, of stone, and a cement of dry Earth; they have couples and ribs of wood cover’d with thin earthen turff, thatch’d over these with straw and the roof secur’d on each side with double ropes of straw or heath, pois’d at the end with many stones: their beds are commonly made in the wall of their houses … to make room for their cows which they take in during the Winter and Spring.”

THE islanders became mainstream Christians again, but were visited by disaster in 1727 when one of their number died of smallpox and his clothes were returned to Hirta with the infectious agents still alive. Only three adults and 26 children survived the smallbox outbreak, and the MacLeod of Harris was forced to send people from his estates to repopulate the islands.

The Jacobite Uprising of 1745-46 briefly saw St Kilda at the centre of events as it was reported that Bonnie Prince Charlie had taken refuge there after Culloden. Not true, but someone who definitely did stay on the islands around that time was Lady Grange of Edinburgh.

Her husband was a prominent Jacobite but kept his activities secret. His wife had a serious temper and loved to gossip, which Lord Grange and his Jacobite friends decided to combat by exiling her to St Kilda.

Lady Grange spent several years on the islands, with her husband staging her funeral to ensure that people thought she was dead. He later relented and moved her to Skye where she died in 1745.

By the 19th century St Kilda was practically mobbed by its standards and many visitors were impressed by the egalitarian way of life – the men would gather in a “parliament” each day to discuss who was to collect eggs and birds, who was to look after the sheep and all the other tasks of their simple existence.

The greatest strength a man could show was in climbing as they had to scale vertiginous cliffs to fetch home the eggs and birds which were the mainstay of the islanders’ diets. An 18th-century record states “each ate 36 wild foul eggs and 18 fouls a day – an overall daily consumption of 3,240 eggs and 1,620 birds”.

The islanders may well have played up to their image, and they certainly enjoyed the benefits of trading with the tourists who came in increasing numbers. A church and manse were built and, in 1884, the island had its first formal school.

YET depopulation remained a serious problem. In 1852, some 36 islanders emigrated to Australia, several dying en route as they encountered illnesses such as measles for which they had no herd immunity.

The islanders had an ingenious way of seeking help. As the current owners the National Trust for Scotland say on their website: “In 1876, during a period of food shortage, the first St Kilda mailboat was sent out as a distress signal. A letter was sealed in a wooden container with a sheep’s bladder acting as a float. Subsequently, many of these mailboats were consigned to the sea, and most reached shore in Scotland or Scandinavia carried by the prevailing currents.”

Help often came, and a post office and shop was built in 1899, but the island’s population was diminishing fast and reduced again after bouts of influenza and especially tetanus infantum which caused an infant mortality rate of 80 per cent. The village was also shelled by the German Navy during First World War, though no-one was killed.

Eventually the natives could take no more. They gathered in a parliament and voted to leave in one group. They informed their landlord, Sir Reginald Macleod of MacLeod, who arranged their evacuation on board a ship called the Harebell which took them on August 29, 1930, to Morvern on the mainland where they settled.

The last native of St Kilda was Rachel Johnson who was evacuated at the age of eight with her fellow islanders and died just last year at the of 93.

St Kilda is now home only to a military establishment built to track missiles from the Benbecula testing range. The buildings include a canteen, known as the Puff Inn.

The archipelago remains a place of myth and legend, such as The Amazon, a female warrior who supposedly roamed the islands in bygone days. Remarkably there are a group of ruined buildings in Gleann Mór , north of the village, which have a unique horned structure. No similar buildings exist anywhere else in the world and no-one knows what they were used for.

St Kilda, it seems, has not given up all its secrets yet.