St Kilda sits 64 kilometres west of the Outer Hebrides, further into the Atlantic than anywhere else in Britain. It was evacuated in 1930 at the request of its remaining 36 inhabitants, who could no longer sustain life there without outside support. The National Trust for Scotland has managed it since 1957. Getting there requires planning, a reasonable sea crossing and a degree of luck with the weather.
I sailed out with a small group and spent a week on Hirta, the main island, staying in one of the restored houses on Village Street - the row of blackhouses that once formed the heart of the St Kildan community. Sleeping in a building that was last lived in by people born in the 1800s, with the sound of storm petrels calling in the dark outside, is an experience that stays with you.
"The people who lived here weren't just surviving - they were thriving, in a way that seems almost incomprehensible now. The photographs on the walls of the museum tell that story better than anything."
Bird counts and conservation work
The week was structured around NTS conservation work. St Kilda holds some of the largest seabird colonies in the North Atlantic - the world's largest colony of northern gannets on Boreray and the Stacs, enormous numbers of puffins, fulmars, guillemots and razorbills on Hirta itself, and storm petrels and Leach's petrels breeding in the stone walls and old buildings across the island.
The puffin food surveys are methodical work: watching burrow entrances, recording what fish the adults bring back, building up a picture of prey availability year on year. The data feeds directly into understanding how the colony is responding to changing sea temperatures and shifting fish stocks. It is not glamorous, but it matters.
Petrel conservation is nocturnal. The birds only come ashore after dark to avoid predation by great skuas, and much of the survey work happens by torchlight. Getting close to a storm petrel in your hand - a bird that may have crossed the Atlantic and back before you were born - is one of the stranger privileges wildlife photography has given me.
The route there: Staffa and The Burg
Getting to St Kilda was part of a longer journey through NTS sites on the west coast of Scotland. Before sailing out, I had camped on Staffa to document the seabird colonies - including the puffin rafts at the base of the basalt columns - and spent time on The Burg on Mull searching for the rare Scotch Burnet moth, one of Britain's most restricted insects, found on only a handful of sites on the west coast.
Snedge
St Kilda's most unusual resident during my visit was a snowy owl that had taken up residence on the island - believed to be the only snowy owl living permanently in the UK. Snowy owls bred on Fetlar in Shetland until the 1970s, but none have established a resident population since. This bird, known informally as Snedge, had been on St Kilda for some years and had become part of the island's character. Finding it on the hillside above the village, hunting in the long summer evening light, was one of those moments that feels almost too good to be true.
You will find some of the newspaper coverage of Snedge and the wider St Kilda work in the publications section.
