St. Kilda and the Callanish Stones, Outer Hebrides, Scotland
The remote island cluster of St. Kilda of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides stands alone as a remarkable haven of nesting seabirds and a legacy of humans dependent upon them. The Endeavour cruised between the windswept towering sea stacks of Stac Lee, Stac An Armin and Boreray, home of the world’s largest nesting colony of gannets, those striking high latitude boobies, and fulmars, strong-flying tubenose seabirds.
For perhaps four thousand years people had lived at St. Kilda, scaling sheer cliffs to take from the bounty of birds. Fulmar and gannet oil was used for lamplight and heating, shoes made of gannet heads, puffins, guillemots and other birds and their eggs eaten or salted for winter. Feathers and oil played part of an annual rent paid to the island’s owners, the MacLeod clan, whose castle we visited yesterday on the Isle of Skye. Harvested seabirds were preserved in oblong stone structures with turf roofs called cleits found throughout the village and up the hills on the main settlement isle of Hirta.
People of this remote place depended on known ocean currents to send messages to civilization by means of a small wooden mail float with inflated sheep bladder. After a wave of early era tourism that lured young would-be ‘cragsmen’ bird catchers away and ultimately changed the centuries-old rugged way of life, the last 36 people were evacuated in 1930 upon their request.
We landed on Hirta and explored the abandoned settlement of this curious culture, guided by a National Trust ranger and archeologist. Stone cottages, a small church, a one-room schoolroom, oval cemetery and slew of cleits survive. A primitive stock of bovines, Soay sheep, runs free amongst the ruins. Meanwhile, out on the water we took advantage of incredible sea conditions and explored St. Kilda’s shores and sea caves by Zodiac, enthralled by the thousands of seabirds perched on cliffside nests and rafted on the water. It was exhilarating to be amongst hundreds of puffins floating beside us!
After traveling the afternoon under rainbowed skies, and as if the St. Kilda visit wasn’t monumental enough, we made an after-dinner stop at the prehistoric Standing Stones of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis. Visiting this ancient lunarly aligned monument of Lewisian gneiss at sunset was a spiritual nightcap, provoking further thoughts of peoples past and ways of life in the Outer Hebrides.
