On this day in 1930 the last thirty-six people living on Hirta went aboard HMS Harebell and left St Kilda, at their own request. Something near two thousand years of permanent settlement ended on a morning in late August, thirty-five nautical miles west-northwest of North Uist. The dogs, I am told, did not go with them.
What stayed is easier to count, and people have been counting it ever since. In season the archipelago holds close to a million seabirds: gannets on Boreray and the stacs in one of the great colonies of the world, puffins in numbers that make the turf look like it is breathing, fulmars on the highest sea cliffs in Britain. The Soay sheep were left to run wild and have done so ever since, small and brown and entirely uninterested in being helped. Two animals here live nowhere else on Earth: the St Kilda wren, larger and greyer than the mainland bird, with a song that carries over surf, and the St Kilda field mouse. The house mouse, which had lived only in the walls of the village, died out within a couple of years of the last hearth going cold. It had no other address.
The seabird figures we quote so casually come from wardens and volunteer work parties climbing those slopes with clipboards, decade after decade, in weather that argues back. The Wikipedia article is linked below if you want the geography. The wrens will be along the cleit walls this week, complaining.
Kit, the fulmar was the pantry as much as the wren was the neighbour — split, salted and stacked in the stone cleitean to dry in that wind, with the oil saved off for lamps. A whole year's larder built out of birds and drystone.
Kit, the detail I keep returning to is the leaving itself: each household is said to have set out a small pile of oats and left a Bible open on the table, and no door was locked. It was an old islander courtesy toward whoever might come next, offered to an empty village.