The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community

By 1831, the St Kildans were having to make do with an awkward ship’s boat, weighing almost three tons. Although the boat had three oars either side, the St Kildans made a square mainsail out of their own cloth. Because each family had been responsible for making its share of the sail, the final product was made up of twenty-one patches of various sizes and shades, ‘like what you would have fancied Joseph’s coat to have been’, wrote George Atkinson. The islanders had given their boat a nickname – Lair-Dhonn (Brown Mare).

Ten years later, there was still one boat on Hirta, although the advantages to the community of possessing a second were being talked about by philanthropists on the mainland. In 1861, at a cost of £60, the St Kildans were presented with a fine, new, fully equipped boat. The Dargavel, as she was called, was tragically lost at sea with all hands two years later.

By May 1877 there were four boats on Hirta. Two were given to the people by a wealthy visitor and the others, although almost new, were not thought by the St Kildans to be strong enough to withstand rough usage.

Never in their history did the St Kildans build a boat of their own. Although each household possessed a hammer, and one islander, it is said, had a complete set of carpenter’s tools, there was no indigenous supply of wood on Hirta. It was just as easy therefore to transport a finished boat from the mainland as it was to bring over the materials from which one could be built. The men did their best to repair the boats they had, although many from the mainland thought they did so in a less than enthusiastic way.

Like their cousins in the Hebrides, the St Kildans regarded the sea as a spirit to be wooed rather than a challenge. Although not thought to be particularly good sailors, they did at least respect the Atlantic Ocean surrounding them. ‘The St Kildans’, commented Wigglesworth in 1902, ‘are as expert in the art of managing their boats as they are in climbing the cliffs. I do not mean to say that they are specially expert sailors, but the skilful manner in which they bring their boats up to the rocks and land and re-embark in the face of a heavy swell, where few sailors would even care to risk their boats, is remarkable.’

Every year, the men of Hirta would make the dangerous trip to Stac Lee. It was agreed by the morning meeting that time and tide were right to risk a boat on the four-mile crossing. While the little rowing boat rose and fell with the swell of the ocean, the man in the bows would throw a rope towards the giant stac. ‘In the olden days,’ remembers Lachlan Macdonald, ‘there was a bolt put into the rock there. You’d be lucky sometimes when you were in the boat if you would see it.’ Once the rope was secured on the steel bolt, those who were to land scrambled from the boat onto the rock. ‘Everyone’, says Lachlan, ‘had to take an empty box. You’d carry it up to the top of Stac Lee and when you reached the top you would fill it up with gannets’ eggs.’ Several men would have to stay in the boat. There was no safe mooring by the rock, so they would try to seek as sheltered water as there was available and wait.

When all the St Kildans had filled their boxes, the most dangerous part of the exercise began. Carrying the boxes of eggs on their backs they would make the treacherous descent, ‘which was a worse job than going up’, recalls Lachlan. ‘There would be anything in the box from half a hundredweight to a hundredweight. And you hadn’t got to break them; you had to take them down whole. Maybe sometimes there would be an odd one broken, but there weren’t many.’ The boat, laden down with men and eggs, then returned to the safety of Village Bay. The women, by tradition, were always waiting at the landing-place to greet their exhausted men.

In the early days, eggs were rarely taken from Stac Lee. Most were removed from the nests of Boreray and Stac an Armin. The St Kildans reasoned that by leaving the eggs on Stac Lee, by autumn the young gannets would be more advanced there. A double crop of sea birds was thus assured. Should bad weather, moreover, prevent a crossing to Stac Lee at the appropriate time of year, there were always the birds on Boreray. At the time of the evacuation, Stac Lee was climbed for eggs and nothing else. By then it was too dangerous, given the number of men available, to risk a crossing.

The St Kildans took the eggs of some fourteen species of birds that bred on their archipelago. Some, like those of the gannet and the guillemot, were for eating, others were blown and sold to tourists in the summer months or sent to egg collectors on the mainland. The eggs of the starling, oyster catcher, tree sparrow, fork-tailed petrel, grey crow, raven, and eider duck were frequently asked for, but the greatest prize was the egg of the St Kilda wren – a species of wren slightly larger than the mainland varieties, that was found only on Hirta. After all the eggs were harvested, they were laid out in boxes on the grass and divided out among the islanders. Most homes owned a glass blowpipe brought over from Scotland which was used to remove the contents of the eggs.

Puffins, the major source of fresh food throughout the summer months, arrived in March and remained on Soay and Dun until the end of August. The birds made their nests in the turf. The female laid her single egg at the end of a burrow, usually three or four feet long, dug by both birds. Until recently, it was estimated that the puffin population of St Kilda was over a million; but in the past two years the number has more than halved, and there is some mystery as to what has happened to the birds that never returned. It is thought that oil pollution out at sea has claimed them.

The islanders trained their dogs to drive the birds from their burrows. Once they were forced into the open, the puffins were trapped by an ingenious method. The St Kildans laid a length of rope to which were attached anything up to forty little nooses made of horsehair upon a rock or patch of turf that the puffins frequented. The bird would catch its ungainly legs in the noose. The capture of a few would attract the inquisitive attention of others who, by investigating, got caught themselves. It was estimated that using a puffin gin (as it was called) on the slopes and rocks of Dun, an islander could kill fifty puffins a day.

The puffins were plucked and their carcasses split down the middle. They were hung up on strings outside the house to dry and were then ready for the cooking pot. Apart from eating the flesh themselves, the islanders gave it to their dogs and cattle. In the first half of the nineteenth century, between 20,000 and 25,000 puffins were killed every year. By 1876, more puffins were taken in the summer months than all the other birds put together – upwards of 89,000 birds were slaughtered. In later years when the population was smaller, the St Kildans were still catching 10,000 annually.

There was a time when the women and young girls went to Boreray to catch puffins, while the men saw to the sheep on the island. Before the snaring began, a curious rite was performed. A puffin was caught and plucked of all its feathers, save those on its wings and tail. It was then set free and, according to the St Kildans, immediately attracted other puffins around it. Mass slaughter would then begin.

On occasions, the frightened birds were dragged from their burrows by the dogs. ‘While the sagacious animals pawed at one hole,’ wrote Sands who witnessed the harvest in 1877, ‘they (the women) kept a watchful eye on the burrows adjacent as if they expected the puffins to issue from them. Some of the girls at the same time were plunging their hands deep into the holes and dragging out the birds, and twisting their necks with a dexterity which only long practice could give.’

Guillemots were also killed in the spring and summer months. Their flesh was eaten by the islanders and their feathers kept to be exported later in the year. Stac Biorach was their main breeding ground. The stac was nicknamed the ‘Thumb Stac’ because on the needle of rock the only firm hold available was of the size of a thumb.

Apart from the brief three months September to November, the fulmar petrel could be found on Hirta all the year round. The St Kildans ate some adult birds in the early part of the year, but their main concern was to harvest the thousands of young fulmars in mid-August.

Similar in size to the common gull, the female fulmar lays a single white egg towards the end of May. Both parents take it in turn to incubate the egg. After some forty to fifty days the young bird is hatched, and after seven weeks or so is big enough and strong enough to leave the nest. The St Kildans surveyed the cliffs daily from the beginning of August to be sure that they would commence their slaughter before the birds had flown.

The fulmar harvest was the busiest, most exciting and most important incident in the St Kildan year. ‘They catch the birds for the sake of their meat, oil and feathers,’ wrote Norman Heathcote in 1900, ‘and the act of catching them is their only sport. It is this that makes them love their island home. If it were not that they can rival one another on the rocks, they would be less unwilling to seek adventures in the outer world.’

In the weeks prior to the harvest, many preparations had to be made. The women brought the cattle back to Village Bay from their summer grazing in Glean Mor and made sure that they had ground enough corn to feed the family during the harvest period. The men meanwhile got out the old barrels that would be used to store the prepared birds for winter. The salt, used to preserve the birds and normally delivered to the island by the factor in June, was fetched from the storehouse and distributed to each householder. The stomachs of adult gannets caught earlier in the year would be inflated and dried out. They would be used during the slaughter to contain the precious amber oil of the petrels.

The talk at the daily meeting would be of fulmars. The men would discuss and decide what parts of the cliffs should be cleared first. Normally the harvest began where it was agreed the young fulmars were most advanced, for fear that the islanders might lose them forever. The weather was also an important consideration. Some areas of the cliff were notoriously more dangerous in damp or wet conditions than others.

The most important task was to test the ropes. A length of rope taken from the loft of each home was tested by the men in full view of the rest of the community lest it had rotted during the months of storage. The rope was agreed to be safe if it could stand the strain of being pulled by four men against the weight of a large boulder.

On 12 August the harvest began. Everyone on the island took to the cliff tops. The men had ropes slung across their chests and the women carried the empty stomachs of the solan geese. The children accompanied their parents to watch and learn and help the women carry the day’s catch back to the village. Many women were capable of carrying as much as two hundred pounds of dead birds on their shoulders at a time.

In the early days, particularly when St Kildans went off singly to kill birds, an iron stake was hammered into the cliff top to secure one end of the rope while the fowler descended the face. By the nineteenth century such a practice had been done away with. Instead, an islander would fasten the rope round his chest, low enough to allow the maximum freedom of movement. His colleague would hold on to the other end of the rope while a descent was made. The men worked in their bare feet to ensure a firmer grip on the grassy cliffs that plunged a thousand feet into the sea. When the fowler had gained support for his feet, he would shout up to his friend, ‘Leigas!’ (‘Let go!’), at which command the man at the top would slacken the rope. Below, the slaughter could then begin.

On the cliffs of Conachair the fulmars were normally so dense that the fowler had to kill them in order to clear a way for himself along the ledge. Each young fulmar could weigh up to two or three pounds. The man who did the killing wore a belt, and as the birds were strangled, he slipped the head through the gap between the belt and his body. When he had killed twenty or so birds, or had cleared a particular part of the cliff and wished to move on, the bundle of birds was tied to the end of a second rope and pulled up by one of his companions at the top. ‘And then maybe you go to another place’, recalls Lachlan Macdonald, ‘and do the same and then you maybe take thirty or forty of them on your back home. It’s pretty heavy sometimes. Hard work in a way.’ As little time as possible was spent in the actual killing of birds, and with the call of ‘Tarning nard’ (‘Pull up’), the fowler would be pulled up to the top of the cliff and safety.

Occasionally the thirty-fathom ropes that the St Kildans used would not be long enough to reach the lower parts of the cliffs. In such instances, three men would work together. The first would stay at the top, as before, and the other two would be lowered down one at a time. The second man, having found a secure platform, would then lower the third down to a position from which he could continue the slaughter.

The St Kildans always adopted the easiest method of killing the birds. In many parts of the cliffs, ropes were not needed at all as the nests were readily accessible. In other parts, rather than haul the birds up to the cliff top, the islanders tossed them into the sea, where a waiting boat would pick them up.

The most dangerous operation of all, however, was the ascent of the cliffs from the sea. An island boat would be taken round to the foot of Conachair and two cragsmen would climb by turns in true alpine fashion. In such cases an end of the rope was attached to both fowlers so that in the event of the foremost losing his footing, his companion would be able to break his fall.

The fulmar is capable of spitting the vile-smelling oil contained in its stomach some two or three feet. To the St Kildans, the oil was valuable. ‘As you were going down the rock on the rope,’ remembers Lachlan Macdonald, ‘you try and hide yourself as much as you can. The young fulmars were just about the stage to fly, right enough, but if you don’t get them quickly they’ll make an awful mess of you. They’d spew that oil out on you.’ The fowlers had also to be wary of being startled by such an action lest they be thrown off balance and fall off the face of the cliff. In order to retain the oil in the bird’s stomach, the St Kildans gave the neck a twist.

Sometimes the fulmars nested in places out of reach of a fowler on the end of a rope. To capture them, the St Kildans used a fowling rod, which they made themselves. This was a bamboo pole about fifteen feet long, to one end of which was attached a thin strip of cane. A running noose, made of plaited horsehair or wire and stiffened with a gannet’s quill to maintain a bow, was attached to the cane. With a fowling rod the St Kildans could easily lasso the unsuspecting, inaccessible bird.

The killing lasted a fortnight. Every evening the fulmars were laid in a heap by the shore in front of the village and divided out carefully and equally amongst the islanders. Although the cliffs themselves were divided out before the harvest began, the St Kildans also shared the final catch. ‘You see, supposing you had a share in the cliffs,’ says Lachlan Macdonald, ‘you might have a lot more than the other fellow, so it was fairer to share them all when they came home so that there wouldn’t be any difference.’

‘They all put them in one place,’ recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘and they shared them out – so much for each house – and when they took them home they started plucking them and cleaning them. The old men salted them and the young boys cut their feet and head off and the women took the guts out, and that was the way of it. Next morning you went for another load. That went on until you had two big barrels of fulmars salted. They didn’t get much sleep at all. They would be working till maybe two or three in the morning and away again at eight o’clock for some more.’ Every islander was given an equal share of the harvest, whether or not he or she had taken part in the work. The only exceptions to the rule of absolute equality were those fulmars killed while out of the nest, which the fowler was allowed to keep for himself. The reason why was explained to John Ross by an islander. ‘Should they be left out there all night,’ he said, ‘the ravens, hawks or crows would have eaten them up and they would do good to no one.’

The St Kildans had a use for every part of the fulmar. The feathers, a valuable source of income, were graded according to colour and put into sacks. The fulmar oil, of which every bird normally yielded anything up to half a pint, was poured out of the gannet stomachs into canisters to be bartered when the factor came. Those birds that were to be preserved for eating in winter were split lengthways down the back and filled with salt. They were then packed like herring in barrels. The entrails of the birds were often used as fishing bait, while the bones were condemned to the midden at the back of the house to become a good, rich fertilizer by the following spring. A large number of birds, of course, would be eaten fresh. The carcasses were boiled and the fat that came out of them, once cooled, could be skimmed off and used in the islanders’ lamps. ‘All this time there is nothing but birds, fat and feathers everywhere,’ remarked the Reverend Neil Mackenzie of the village at the time of the harvest. ‘Their clothes are literally soaked in oil, and everywhere inside and outside their houses, nothing but feathers; often it looks as if it were snowing.’

Traditionally, the St Kildans did not use salt to preserve the flesh of the sea birds. Salt was frequently scarce and to a poor people often expensive. The strong winds that are rarely absent from Hirta were used instead to stop the carcasses from going bad during the winter months. To be preserved by the wind, however, the birds had to be kept dry and the islanders built hundreds of little stone storehouses called cleits that allowed the wind to pass over the food, but not take with it any moisture.

Cleits are unique to St Kilda. Without them life would not have been possible on such a damp and wet island. They were constructed entirely out of stone and turf. The granophyre slabs that litter the eastern part of the island were admirably suited to the building of corbelled, dry-stone walls. Large, flat slabs covered with turf provided the structure with a roof. For strength as well as dryness, the little doorway was normally set in the end of the cleit facing the hillside. The cleits were usually about eight to twelve feet in diameter and four or five feet high. Those built by the St Kildans inside the wall surrounding the village were used mainly to store the carcasses of sea birds and were round in shape.

The greatest concentration of cleits lies in the Village Bay area, but the islanders built hundreds more on Hirta, some on the slopes of Conachair, others on Oiseval. Beyond the wall, cleits were used to store practically everything that had to be kept dry, like ropes, feathers and even clothing. High on the hill-slopes they were used almost exclusively to dry and store the lumps of turf for the fires of Village Bay.

At the end of the fulmar harvest, the St Kildans would take two or three days’ rest. Exhausted by their labours, they could relax for a while in the knowledge that safely stored away were some of the food supplies that would keep them alive in winter. But another harvest still remained to be reaped, that of the young gannet, or guga.

St Kilda, then as now, could claim to be the largest gannetry in the world. A count of the colony taken in 1960 revealed that some 40,000 pairs breed on Boreray, Stac Lee, and Stac an Armin. Until the nineteenth century the gannet was the buttress of the community’s economy: the oils and feathers of the bird helped pay the rent and provide the people with essential supplies from the mainland.

The gannet builds its nest on ledges of rock. The female lays one egg which is incubated by both sexes for anything up to forty-five days. When the chick hatches it is black and naked but soon develops a white down. By September, the down is replaced by brown feathers. It was then that the St Kildans would prepare for the most spectacular and dangerous task of their year, the hunting of the gannet.

The gugas had to be killed at night, when the birds would be on their nests. Usually a dozen men were involved in the trip – seven would land on Boreray and the other five would stay in the boat and row and drift round the island all night. ‘This island’, wrote George Atkinson, ‘is more universally precipitous than St Kilda, and to a timid or awkward person would be really difficult to land on.’ Before a landing was attempted each man would remove his boots and don a pair of heavy woollen socks.

‘The St Kildans’, continued Atkinson, who went with a party of islanders to Boreray in the summer of 1831, ‘are very dexterous in landing or embarking on, or from, a rocky shore, where the long, heavy swell of the Atlantic keeps the boat rising and falling by the side of the cliff, a height of fourteen or fifteen feet, even when the sea appears quite calm. The boat is placed with her broadside to the rock and kept from striking by a man in the head and stern, each with a long pole for the purpose. One of their barefooted climbers stands ready in the middle with a coil of rope on his arms, and seizing an opportunity springs on the rock and establishes himself firmly on some rough projection. He then hauls on the rope, the other end of which, I should have observed, is held by some in the boat, or attached to it, and giving way when the boat falls, tightens the rope at its rising. Another companion joins him and standing three or four feet from him employs another rope in a similar manner, so that together they form a firm and safe gangway or railing, for an inexpert person to spring to land by.

‘When this is attained, however, a most arduous ascent of the precipice is to be accomplished, which is here of the height of six hundred or seven hundred feet, and quite difficult enough for the most indifferent climbers, though unembarrassed by any load, and we were told the women often ascend and descend this with a sheep or a couple of lambs in their arms.’

The colony of gannets on Boreray would be asleep on their nests, but one bird would remain awake and would give the alarm as soon as his suspicions were aroused. The ‘sentry’ bird always had to be killed first, then the fowlers could slaughter the unsuspecting birds at will with the aid of a small club. ‘After working for an hour or two,’ wrote George Murray in 1886, ‘we rested and three of us sat down on the bare rocks with the ropes about our middles, the cloudless sky our canopy, the moon our lamp, and had family worship. The scene to me was very impressive. The the ocean still and quiet far below, and offered praise and prayer to Him who was able to preserve us in such dangerous work.’ Before catching a few hours’ rest, some of the night’s catch would be gutted and stored in the cleits built on Boreray, to be eaten on further expeditions to the island. At daybreak, hundreds of gannets would be loaded into the boat and the crew would return to Hirta. At the landing-place the women, relieved at the sight of their returning men, would carry the catch after it had been divided out to their cottages.

A large bird with a five-foot wingspan, the gannet could be ferocious when disturbed on its nest. Although the birds would not intentionally attack the fowlers, they could and did hit them a hard blow with their powerful wings and sharp beaks as they attempted to flee. On the great stacs, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, there was always the danger, in the dark particularly, of losing footing and falling off. ‘They used to go at night time’, recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘and climb the rock [Stac Lee] at night when the gannets were roosting. But there was always one on watch and that’s the one they made for first in the dark and broke its neck. They then killed all the rest one after the other and left them lying there till daybreak and then threw them out to the sea for the boat to pick up.’ On Stac Lee, the St Kildans stood on a promontory, called the Casting Point, to throw the gannets to the men in the boat below. The point overhangs the base of the rock, so there was little danger of the night’s kill being blown and crushed against the rocks.