St. Kilda

Leaving Barra we headed out into the North Atlantic, looking for the tiny now uninhabited Isle of St. Kilda.  This was our most memorable stop on the entire cruise, and this our most memorable photograph.  St. Kilda has been occupied for thousands of years, though often inaccessible for 6 long winter months.  But the population dwindled to 36 and finally those remaining islanders voted to be evacuated in 1930.

Below Mrs. F.G. you can see the line of old stone houses ringing the bay.  Now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, it is one of very few double World Heritage Sites on the planet, qualified for both its natural and cultural features.

The Trust has restored five of the homes with a secure roof, so you can get a sense of how the village may have looked with its very solid but tiny stone homes.  This 'street' was where the men of the village met each morning to decide on the plan for the day, based on the season and the weather.  Collecting eggs from the cliffs was the biggest and most dangerous work.

You could look inside these, and archeologists were working in one.  It was a simple life, in mostly one-room homes, based on a communal way of living.

We climbed up toward the hills enough to get a view back down over the village.  The stone enclosures were really exclosure, designed to keep the sheep that roamed freely over the island out of the potatoes and barley, and the graveyard.  High on the opposite slope is a scar on the cliff, an ancient Neolithic quarry, probably for making stone tools 5000 years ago.

Dotted all over the island are these small stone 'cleats', rough dry-walled stone buildings roofed with turf.  The breeze could blow right through the cracks, effectively curing the birds hung inside.  There are over 1200 of these on the island.

Cleits were used for storage, of eggs and cured waterfowl, the basic diet of St. Kildans.  Both eggs and birds were collected by scaling the cliffs of the island.  Cleits were also used to store feathers with which to pay their annual rent.

I was checking out the cleits after I saw a small bird darting around.  There was a lot of this 'Thrift' growing on the rooftops too.

Can you spot the tiny bird?

This is the distinctive St. Kilda Wren, a subspecies of the Eurasian Wren, endemic to only these islands.  I was thrilled to spot it, the only place in the world it can be seen.  

And we were both fascinated by the chance to see St. Kilda for ourselves.  We were told that we'd been lucky with weather, it was a beautiful day and the seas were calm, enabling our ship to offload its passengers by dinghy.  We were one of only two of five ships able to discharge passengers so far that year.