Scotland’s remote St Kilda archipelago was inhabited as long as 2,000 years ago, according to archaeologists.
Sites in St. Kilda
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The remains of a permanent settlement which could date back to the Iron Age has been uncovered on a remote Scottish island, according to archaeologists.
It was previously thought Boreray in the St Kilda archipelago was only visited by islanders to hunt seabirds and gather wool from sheep.
Archaeologists have now recorded an extensive agricultural field system and terraces for cultivating crops.
They have also found an intact stone building buried under soil and turf.
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“....I pointed to the slope of Oiseval that rears up into the sky like a great snub-nosed whale, cut off cleanly by the cliffs all around. The turf there was poor and thin, studded with humps of stone cleits that looked in the distance like barnacles on the head of a leaping whale. So I told them all that Oiseval had indeed once been a giant whale, far, far bigger than any that the Norway men leave in the bay to take to Bunavoneader in Harris. How the giant whale came to St.Kilda meaning to eat up little Stack Leveish, but Herta saw the whale just in time and cast a spell from the waters of the hill of blessings and just as the whale rose up it was turned into stone, its great open jaws turned to cliffs. Grass grew on its back, and the sheep went up there to graze, but if you looked sideways with your eyes hal closed you could still see the barnacles on its back and the shape of its big head when it opened its mouth wide.
“I can se it, I can see” said Callum and the others were agreeing.
“And one day a year, you must be careful not to climb it, for it will turn back to a whale eat anyone who climbs it.” ...”
Passage taken from ‘The Lost Lights of St.Kilda’ by Elisabeth Gifford
Apparently the native people of St Kilda had developed a genetically inherited elongated big toe that let the men cling more easily to the cracks in the rocks. On one side of the island is the Mistress Stone where marriageable men had to balance on one leg – on the edge of a 300 ft drop – to prove their agility on the rocks and their ability to support a family.
Source: “West Coast” by Kate Muir
Nearly a century ago, the last 36 residents were evacuated from the most remote part of the British Isles, St Kilda, an isolated archipelago off the beautiful and rugged western coast of Scotland.
After 86 years, the music of St Kilda has been discovered, recorded in a Scottish care home by Trevor Morrison, an elderly man who was taught piano by an inhabitant of St Kilda. Heard by the outside world for the first time these haunting melodies offer a last link to the so-called ‘island on the edge of the world’.
Welcome to the incredible story of the lost songs of St Kilda.
Sites within 20km of St. Kilda
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The Milking Stone
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Amazon’s House
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Lover’s Stone
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Tobar Childa
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Clash Na Bearnaich
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House Of The Fairies
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Village Bay
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Village Bay
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The Mistress Stone
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Aoismheal (Oiseval)
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Bioda Mor
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Tigh Stallar, Boreray
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