Ingham’s W RLD
EVER since I was a child, one place has stood at the top of my bucket list: the near mythic islands of St Kilda. Call them what you will – Seabird City, the Islands On The Edge – these spraybattered remnants of an ancient volcano standing alone against the North Atlantic cannot disappoint.
Lying 40 miles west of the other Outer Hebrides, they have double Unesco World Heritage Status for their remarkable wildlife and the relics of the islanders’ culture, abandoned when the last 36 were evacuated 88 years ago, hit by depopulation, crop failures and illness. Getting there is far from easy. But at great expense, my wife and I made it courtesy of a cruise on the flawless Hebridean Princess.
Our first glimpse of St Kilda came in the northern summer’s pale evening light, a grey 1,400ft pyramid looming on the horizon.
When we woke the next morning in the calm of Village Bay, off Hirta, the main island, we breathed a sigh of relief. The weather can turn quickly here.
I went on deck to see what I had come for: the birds. About one million breed here every summer. St Kilda has the world’s biggest colony of gannets – about 60,000 pairs – and Britain’s biggest colonies of puffins and fulmars, 140,000 and 68,000 pairs each.
Later, when we sailed past the sister island of Boreray and its twin seastacks, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, we were greeted by a gannet tower block. Rising 600ft skywards were sheer black cliffs painted white with guano from gannets nesting on tiny ledges, their guttural chatter drowning out the wind.
Darting in among them were the pirates of the sea, great skuas – brown bruisers powerful enough to mug any bird for their fish or to rob their nests while they are off foraging.
Life was no less harsh for the islanders, who lived here for centuries before they were evacuated in 1930. Victorian photos show tough, scowling, bearded men who fed their families by scaling the cliffs with homemade ropes, harvesting the seabirds and their eggs.
There only remain hundreds of stone food stores and the ruins of their stone-built homes. There’s also a small MoD radar base, a 200-year-old kirk and a National Trust For Scotland shop – the Trust cares for St Kilda. Walking the main street, it is hard to comprehend how anyone could have survived here.
Weather is still the enemy. We had to leave an hour early for a four-hour dash back to safer waters as the wind strengthened, the swell grew and St Kilda vanished once more into the grey. But briefly, it had been ours. ST KILDA’S slopes are closely cropped by the descendants of the only residents left behind in 1930: the Soay sheep. This ancient breed is nimble and much smaller than modern sheep, about the size of my Labrador. They look after themselves, shedding their brown wool of their own accord. They clearly like St Kilda – they’re everywhere. IN THE teeth of Atlantic gales it takes tough vegetation to survive on St Kilda. But in the sward our guide, Pat Canning, showed us tiny carnivorous plants which live off midges, trapping them in their “dew” secretions and then digesting them at their leisure.
Scattered around were also tiny pink, blue and purple flowers. Life can thrive anywhere. GREEN TIP: Help protect the rainforest by using only Forest Stewardship Council certified charcoal for your barbecues. ST Kilda’s pub is well named: The Puff Inn. Sadly, it is not open to the public. It is an exclusive club for MoD and QinetiQ contractors monitoring missile tests from Hebridean neighbour Benbecula, 41 miles away. A po-faced QinetiQ statement sadly declares it is a canteen and will never, ever, be a pub. Spoilsports. HERE’S another stereotype smashed. Rain and the Hebrides seem to go hand in hand but when we visited St Kilda it was recovering from a drought.
Our ship’s first two visits this summer brought the conservation rangers supplies of water. But this time the drought must have been easing. The ship brought beer.