St Kilda

The last thirty-six residents of St Kilda were evacuated on 29 August 1930 — they locked their doors, left Bibles open on tables and sailed away from the most remote inhabited archipelago in Britain. The seabird colonies, older than the settlement itself, endured. The village has belonged to gannets, puffins and fulmars ever since.

St Kilda lies forty miles west of the Outer Hebrides in open Atlantic, a dual UNESCO World Heritage Site honoured for both nature and culture — a status a rarity counted in mere dozens worldwide. The main island, Hirta, keeps the abandoned village street: houses, hundreds of stone cleits for storage, and a church documenting a way of life sustained for at least two thousand years, in which men climbed barefoot on wet rock above four-hundred-metre cliffs to harvest gannets and fulmars — a practice that regularly killed the young. Stac an Armin rises 196 metres from the sea, the highest stack in Britain, wheeling with a gannet colony among the largest anywhere. Reaching it is a genuine open-ocean crossing, day boats running from Harris and Skye when the Atlantic permits — and it frequently does not, which is the point.