The Lorne Leader

St Kilda*   Where is it? >

By 1697, Martin Martin had graduated from the University of Edinburgh and made his now famous and arduous tour of the Western Isles of Scotland. He left us some of the earliest descriptions of life on St Kilda, our furthest inhabited island
and strong in the national consciousness.

In 1986 I headed out there myself - on a much less well known tour - on an old Brixham trawler the Lorne Leader > in the company of one of the last remaining St Kildans, Lachlan MacDonald. He was in his eighties at the time and snoring in the bunk above me. You can see a young Lachlan in many of the photos of the island prior to evacuation in 1930.

This year I have been there again - marooned for a week this time because of bad weather - but thus enabling more exploration and imagining and fishing and fouling than before. This isn't a history - the island has been prodded and poked enough by now probably. This is a personal journal.

*PS There isn't a Saint Kilda. My Catholic Irish friend Neil keeps asking about Kilda. I assume he is worried about some kind of blasphemous idolatry. I shall need to speak to him about that.

A link to a very much corrected second edition of Martin Martin's Description of the Weftern Ifles >

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