Sail to the end of the Earth and keep going – that is where you will find St Kilda, a Scottish archipelago composed of emerald isles in a pewter grey sea, speckled with violets and tormentil. Utterly isolated, the nearest civilisation is in North Uist, 50 miles east-southeast. The ‘big’ island of Hirta is a wilderness complete with sheer cliffs of weathered granite and gabbro (the highest of which is Conachair) and the highest sea stacks in Britain, as if all the sharp angles leftover from creation were picked up and scattered out of sight in the middle of the Atlantic. The wet, windy, barren, and unforgiving circumstances left inhabitants with no obvious way of survival…and yet they thrived.
St Kilda is thought to have been permanently inhabited for two millennia, although the population never exceeded around 180. The first detailed report of
