“The bird cliffs of the Hebrides are as impressive as any wildlife spectacle in the world” - Sir David Attenborough
Remote, stunningly beautiful, lashed by the weather and one of the toughest places in Britain to make a living, St Kilda’s remaining families finally emigrated and left the islands to the seabirds on 10 May 1930.
It was one of the earliest instances of a whole community voluntarily asking to be moved from their homes and resettled elsewhere.
A crofter’s life is never an easy one, but being on a small cluster of islands in the Atlantic, some 64 km beyond the Outer Hebrides, with poor communications, few opportunities for young people, largely eating what could be grown and caught, and paying rent to a feudal landlord, is probably about as difficult as it can get.
Surviving on St Kilda
There is evidence that people have lived on and visited St Kilda for thousands of years, since the Stone Age. Traditionally the community relied on seabirds for food because it was too stormy to fish regularly.
They developed special ways of catching the birds; wind-drying and storing them in small stone huts called cleits. More than 1400 of these remain as relics of the past on the islands.
The remains of the village with its layout of stone houses, dry-stone walled fields and enclosures can be found on the largest island, Hirta. The local Soay sheep, unchanged on the island for more than 3000 years, are the most primitive breed surviving in Europe.
Scotland’s first World Heritage Site
St Kilda was named Scotland’s first World Heritage Site. This recognises the cultural and wildlife significance of the islands, placing them on a par with the Galapagos Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.
With its 680,000 breeding seabirds, St Kilda is the most important seabird colony in Europe and one of the major breeding stations in the north east Atlantic, with abundant gannets, puffins and fulmars.
Sadly, the Great Auk is no longer among them. The last Great Auk in Britain was killed on St Kilda in the mid 1800s; it was the only flightless bird that had bred in Europe in historical times.
