Outer Hebrides, St. Kilda and Lewis
Today was spent in the Outer Hebrides, the morning at St. Kilda – the most remote of the inhabited islands – and the evening at the Isle of Lewis. On St. Kilda we were able to walk among the many beehive huts which the original inhabitants had occupied for thousands of years before they were “discovered” in the 19th century and eventually removed from the islands in 1930. The St. Kildans had lived off the many seabirds that nest on the islands and their sheep, an ancient breed called Soay Sheep. Though the original inhabitants are now gone, a small group of military and representatives of the National Trust of Scotland share the island with numerous sheep and the occasional migrant like the Whooper Swan we happened upon. The sheep themselves are interesting and have been studied by evolutionary biologists to determine how a closed population adapts to environmental stresses.
We sailed back east to the Isle of Lewis through the afternoon and, after dinner, we took our Zodiacs to the Standing Stones of Callanish. These stones are comprised of the beautiful banded gneiss which makes up the entire island and is known, therefore, as the Lewisian Gneiss. These are the oldest rocks in Britain and Ireland and some of the oldest on earth, having an age of 3.1 billion years. We stayed until sunset, and the light became more beautiful by the minute. One can only imagine, on a night like this, what must have been going through the minds of the people who erected this magnificent monument and how they saw themselves connected to their world. On these very remote islands which even today are difficult to reach and on which survival requires constant vigilance of the weather and the sea conditions.
