Hirta: A Portrait of St Kilda

Rising out of the depths of the North Atlantic, the great cathedral-like sea stacks of Stac Lee and Stac an Armin and the jagged outlines of the islands of Hirta, Dùn, Levenish, Borerary and Soay make up one of the most famous groups of islands in the world, the archipelago of St Kilda. The names we have given to the islands reflect our own impressions of a place which in the minds of many lie far off in the west, 100 miles distant from mainland Scotland, surrounded by the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic. From ‘Britain’s Loneliest Islands’ to the ‘Islands at the Edge of the World’, the archipelago is often considered to be an outlier both physically and culturally from the British Isles, a place where a separate, supposedly more basic existence took place in an environment whose stark natural beauty is matched by its harsh and unforgiving location.