Fresh insight into St Kilda goes online

A NEW insight into life in the most remote human outpost in Britain a century ago is to be made available online.

Extracts and transcripts from handwritten diaries of Alice MacLachlan, who lived on St Kilda in the early 20th century, will be published by the National Trust for Scotland.

The three volumes of diaries cover the period between August 1906 and May 1909, when her husband Peter was minister on St Kilda, and also the six months prior to this when he was Church of Scotland minister in the village of Garve, 20 miles north of Inverness.

In January 1906, she wrote of the couple receiving a letter informing them that their manse was to be handed over to the Free Church of Scotland and they were to find a new position.

She wrote: “Very much depressed at receiving letter from our office in Edin.”

Steve Callaghan, assistant director for the Trust’s Countryside and Island properties, said: “These diaries provide a fascinating and personal insight into life on St Kilda in the early 20th century, its challenges and rewards.”

Mrs MacLachlan, nee Scroggie, was born in 1872 in Haddington, East Lothian, the fourth child of six, although she was educated in Lincolnshire before later going into teaching in York.

She married Reverend Peter MacLachlan in June 1899. He was born in Tobermory on Mull and became a Church of Scotland Minister, with Garve his first charge. Throughout her diaries, Alice refers to her husband by the nickname she gave him of ‘Duine’ which means ‘man’ in Gaelic.

She died of a cerebral haemorrhage in March 1920 aged 48, at Acharacle, then in Argyll, 10 years before St Kilda was evacuated. The diaries will be published on the trust’s website.