Hirta is the largest island of the group. The coastline measures some eight and three-quarter miles and the total land area is 1,575 acres. It has two bays: Glen Bay lies to the north-east of the island and Village Bay, where the people of documented history lived, lies to the south-west. The two cut deep into the land and shape it into a rough letter ‘H’.
Hirta can only be thought of as stupendous. In parts only one and a half miles long, and at no point more than one and three quarter miles across, the island has five peaks over nine hundred feet high. Of these, three – Mullach Mor, Mullach Bi, and Conachair – are over a thousand feet above sea level. Conachair rises to 1,397 feet, and its awe-inspiring cliffs are the highest in the British Isles.
Of the three other islands in the group, the island of Dun lies nearest to Hirta, to the western side of Village Bay. It is separated from the main island by a narrow channel, only fifty yards wide. Dun is a long, narrow finger of land which rises to over 570 feet above sea level as it stretches out into the Atlantic. The island is rocky and precipitous on its western side, grassy on its eastern flank, and in winter it was not unknown for the spray from waves to crash over the top of the island into Village Bay below.
Soay, the second largest island of the archipelago, lies to the north-west of Hirta. Abrupt on all sides of its two and a quarter mile coastline, Soay has a land area of 244 acres. Rising to 1,200 feet Soay, like Dun, is separated from Hirta by a narrow passage of ocean. Three needles of rock, Stac Donna (87 feet), Stac Biorach (240 feet), and Soay Stac (200 feet), stand in the sound.
Boreray, the remaining island, lies four miles to the north of Hirta. It has an area of 189 acres and is surrounded by a wall of rock which climbs from 300 to 1,245 feet above sea level. Lush grass grows on the steep south-westerly slope of Boreray facing Hirta.
The archipelago includes other giant rocks, called stacs, that rise out of the Atlantic like the tips of icebergs. Stac Levenish (203 feet) lies outside Village Bay; Mina Stac (208 feet) and Bradastac (221 feet) lie at the foot of the cliffs of Conachair. Stac an Armin, which rises to 627 feet and is the highest stac in the British Isles, and Stac Lee, eighty-three feet shorter, rise from the waters round Boreray. Stac Lee is the more impressive of the two, rising like a great tooth of solid rock out of the ocean. Together with Boreray, from which in ages past they broke free, the two stacs have frequently aroused comments similar to that made by R. A. Smith when he sailed to St Kilda in the yacht Nyanza in 1879. ‘Had it been a land of demons,’ he wrote, ‘it could not have appeared more dreadful, and had we not heard of it before, we should have said that, if inhabited, it must be by monsters.’
Until the coming of steamships in the nineteenth century, the journey to St Kilda even from the Hebridean ports was slow and perilous. In 1697, when the island’s historian Martin Martin visited the people of Village Bay, the voyage took several days and nights. There was only one type of vessel available – an open longboat rowed by stout men of Skye. It took sixteen hours of sailing and rowing before the crew caught their first glimpse of Boreray. ‘This was a joyful Sight,’ wrote Martin Martin, ‘and begot new Vigor in our men, who being refreshed with Victuals, low’ring Mast and Sail, rowed to a Miracle. While they were tugging at the Oars, we plied them with plenty of Aqua Vitae to support them, whose borrowed Spirits did so far waste their own, that upon our arrival at Boreray, there was scarce one of our Crew able to manage Cable or Anchor.’ It was left to the following day to row the few miles to Hirta.
The prevailing winds helped further to cut off the people of Village Bay from would-be visitors. On the northern, uninhabited side of Hirta, Glen Bay is exposed to northerly gales, while on the other side of the island Village Bay is open to winds that blow from the south-east and the south-west. Because of steep rock faces, Glen Bay was rarely used as a landing-place, except by a few stray trawlermen running before a storm. The majority of landings throughout the island’s history were confined to Village Bay.
Wind and tide frequently prevented a landing. A sudden storm could lash the sea into waves forty feet high and make disembarkation impossible. To add to the difficulty, any vessel larger than a longboat could not come close enough to enable people to be put ashore on the slippery rocks that were the only possible landing-place.
Around 1877 a simple jetty was built on Hirta to assist the landing of people and stores. Two winters later it was swept away in a storm. In 1901–2 a small concrete jetty was built by the Congested District Board at a cost of £600. It proved less than adequate. Its size was governed less by the needs of the St Kildans, and more by the money available at the time. Although well constructed it was little improvement on the previous state of affairs. It made for a more graceful landing but did not significantly increase the number of landings possible. Even to this day, only the four months of summer – May, June, July, and August – hold out hope of a landing for visitors. To set foot on Hirta depends to this day upon small boats and calm waters.
For at least eight months of the year St Kilda, whose annual rainfall is about fifty inches, is subjected to frequent and severe gales and storms. Sudden and vicious, these storms are most common from September to March. Mary Cameron, daughter of one of the island’s last missionaries, remembers a storm that literally deafened the people of the village. ‘One particularly severe storm’, she writes, left us deaf for a week – incredible but true. The noise of the wind, the pounding of the heavy sea, were indescribable. This storm was accompanied by thunder and lightning, but we could not hear the thunder for other sounds. Our windows were often white with salt spray, and it was awe-inspiring to watch the billows and flying spindrift.’ On one occasion the entire village was destroyed in a gale, and sheep were frequently blown over the cliffs into the sea below. After a single night of rain, the island is literally running with water, and because of the steepness of the hillsides and the shallowness of the soil, the run-off is extremely destructive to crops.
Stormy weather inevitably meant privation to the St Kildans. ‘Their slight supply of oats and barley’, wrote Wilson in 1841, ‘would scarcely suffice for the sustenance of life; and such is the injurious effect of the spray in winter, even on their hardiest vegetation, that savoys and german greens, which with us are improved by the winter’s cold, almost invariably perish.’ Somehow the St Kildans survived that year as they had done in the past and were to do in the future. They placed little reliance on the scant crops the weather would allow them to grow. Their main source of food and income remained the sea birds that were gathered in the few summer months.
Winter on Hirta was less cold than might be expected. The archipelago lies in the path of the Gulf Stream and the sea helps keep the temperature higher. According to Wilson in 1841, the winter was mild and when ice formed it was little thicker than a penny. The St Kildans, however, claim that snow lay thick on the ground and there were often drifts deep enough to bury their sheep.
What was of greater concern to the people of Hirta was the rapidity with which the weather can change. The islands make their own weather as well as receiving the brunt of what rolls over the Atlantic, and within a period of twenty-four hours sunshine can make way for rain and rain for a storm. The St Kildans became weather forecasters par excellence; what to the outsider seemed a perfect day was frequently not a time to risk work either at sea or on the cliffs. ‘The islanders in general’, wrote the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay in 1765, ‘possess the art of predicting the changes of the weather perhaps in much greater perfection than many of those who are beyond doubt superior to them in some other branches of knowledge…The St Kildans owe much of their knowledge to the observations they and their predecessors have made on the screamings, flight, and other motions of birds, and more especially on their migrations from one place to another.’
To an outdoor race like the St Kildans, weather was all-important. The summer months on Hirta frequently made up for the misery of autumn, winter, and spring. June, July, and August were months of much sunshine. When John Mathieson, the geographer, was on St Kilda in 1927, he kept a complete meteorological record of the months April to October. During that time there were 627 hours of sunshine and eleven and a half inches of rain. In Edinburgh during the same period there were 644 hours of sunshine and fourteen