St Kilda

St Kilda lies 65 km west-northwest of North Uist and holds the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides. People lived on Hirta for two thousand years or more, from the Bronze Age until 1930, and sherds of Neolithic pottery found in 2015 pointed to earlier settlement. The name St Kilda first appears in a pilot book published by Lucas Waghenaer in 1592, and no saint of that name is known. The islands belonged to the MacLeods of Harris, whose steward collected rents in kind; when Martin Martin visited in 1697, 180 people lived there.

The islanders lived mainly on seabirds, taking gannets, fulmars and puffins from the cliffs and sea stacks, and stored food and peat in stone huts called cleitean, about 1,260 of which remain on Hirta. Every morning the men met in the street in a parliament to decide the day's work. In 1852, 36 islanders emigrated to Australia on the Priscilla, and 18 of them died on the ship or in quarantine. Steamers brought tourists in the 19th century, and disease with them: in the 21 years before 1876 only 15 of 56 babies born survived, most deaths being put down to neonatal tetanus.

After the First World War most young men left, and by 1930 only 36 people remained. By their own collective decision they were taken off on 29 August 1930 by HMS Harebell to Morvern on the mainland. The ornithologist Lord Dumfries, later Marquess of Bute, bought the islands in 1931, kept them as a bird sanctuary and left them to the National Trust for Scotland, which accepted them in 1957, the year they became a national nature reserve. St Kilda was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1986 and extended in 2004 and 2005, becoming one of the few sites listed for both natural and cultural values.