The Sound of Mull

Inner Hebrides, Scotland. Day 21-22 , 19th-20th July.

Just to be clear, the Sound of Mull is the stretch of water between the Island of Mull and the Scottish mainland, not a rustling of marijuana or a Hebridean pipe band.

The first two images of fishing trawlers are actually in the Sea of the Hebrides; the rest of the images are in the Sound of Mull.

Hebrides, Lighthouses, Nature, Photography, Scotland, seascape, Travel.

Ardnamurchan Point Lighthouse

This is Ardnamurchan Point Lighthouse, at the end of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula.

Tobermory Lighthouse

As we sailed down the Sound of Mull, the weather was fine and the fog had gone.

Ardtornish Castle

Duart Castle

Ardtornish Castle

We anchored off the ruins of Ardtornish Castle for the night and watched the sun go down.

Ardtornish Castle

Next morning, we sailed the short distance back to Oban. There was a final surprise not far from our anchorage – a white-tailed eagle.

Glassy seas, Inner Hebrides

Jul20

Inner Hebrides, Scotland. Day 21 , 19th July.

Heading back for Oban in very still conditions. We are passing Neist Point near the north-west tip of Skye. You can just see the lighthouse. It looks very different here from when we saw it on land.

For a time the mist descended and we could hardly see anything. It seemed the sort of weather where one might encounter the Marie Celeste. We didn’t see her but were soon to make other sightings and the sea was amazingly still….

An orca dorsal fin (not the flipper of a whale).

Female orca.

Male orca. The birds appear to be ringed plovers.

Fishing boat (dredger) in the distance.

Ringed plovers.

There are three orcas altogether. A bull known as “John Coe” and two females.

Common gull.

Lesser black-backed gull.

Gannet.

Dolphins.

Altogether, an incredible display in remarkably calm conditions.

Leverburgh

Jul17

Leverburgh, Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 20 , 18th July.

On our return from St Kilda we stopped in Leverburgh for the night. This is right down at the south tip of Harris. You can drive here from Lewis (which is actually the same island) but to go further south to Uist you need to take a ferry. There was some time left before nightfall so we went for a short walk on land.

The ruins of an abandoned croft, probably from the clearances in the nineteenth century.

Soay

Jul15

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 20 , 18th July.

These images are all from the Atlantic coast of Soay (the north-western island of the St Kilda group) as we slowly sail by….

St Kildan hunting parties frequently came here to gather birds and eggs from the cliffs of this wild landscape. There are 40 cleits on Soay, though I didn’t notice any from the ship (and certainly not in this image!).

There are no trees here on Soay, so the gannets cannot use leaves, branches and twigs to build their nests but make do with whatever materials are available, mainly probably flotsam and jetsum. Notice the number of pieces of rope hanging from the underside of the nests.

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Soay and Am Plastair (small island to right) with Hirta in the distance – Click to zoom into very large image

This is another panorama available in large size. Click on the image to zoom in for detail.

Stac Biorach

Jul13

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 20 , 18th July.

We are in the channel between Hirta and Soay. Hirta is the main island in the St Kilda group and Soay is the large island to the north-west of it (original home of the Soay Sheep). Refer map in the Arrival at St Kilda post.

It’s a bit hard for me to know exactly what we are looking at here. The triangular rock looks like Stac Dona but that’s beside Soay and too far away so that must be just a coincidence. My guess is that the two rocks in the foreground are at the end of Hirta off An Campar (or the Cambir) and are too small to appear on an online map. The larger rock in the background is probably Stac Shoaigh, seen lengthways and looking closer than it really was due to perspective compression with a long telephoto lens.

The same two rocks in the foreground and definitely Soay in the background to the right. Probably Stac Shoaigh again in the background to the left.

Here we are looking back against the sun at the headland at An Campar on Hirta. What appears to be a square end to the point is actually a small island (Mina Stac).

On the left is Stac Shoaigh, showing a hole from a tunnel through it. The tall rock to the right of it is Stac Biorach. At the far right is Soay. The sea mist is a bit heavier here. it comes and goes.

Looking back at Hirta.

Stac Biorach in front of Soay.

Again but closer. There are innumerable seabirds on top of the stac.

The bottom of the stac, underneath the mist.

Here you can see the density of the birds on the rock.

Birds on rock ledges on Stac Biorach. I think they are all gannets.

The St Kildans were expert climbers and had no trouble climbing stacs like these.

Gannets against Stac Biorach.

A closer view of a gannet.

Farewell to Hirta

Jul11

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 20 , 18th July.

Early in the morning, before we left, I took some shots of Village Bay from the ship. This first one is a wide angle and you can see some naval buildings in front on the far right and a little of them on the far left. “The street” stretches across the middle, with stone fences, enclosures and cleits behind. (You can always click on the image to see that better). There’s still some fog but the weather is much clearer than either of the previous two days.

Much of the sea wall at the top of the bank behind the “beach” was demolished by the navy years ago but remember that after the huge storm of 1860 the houses along “the Street” were knee-deep in water.

This image and the following ones were picked off with a 300mm lens, though some combine multiple images for a panorama. This shows a little of the density of cleits, walls and enclosures behind the houses.

The cleits and enclosures continue behind the “head dyke” or back wall.

A view of the Feather Store from the front and the wharf in front of it (with the tide out). You can see why landings can be difficult in rough weather.

Lady Grange’s house in the mid left foreground. Behind that is the street and behind that the cemetery. You can see the cemetery gate if you click on the next image and zoom in, though you can only really see the front wall of the cemetery.

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Click to view much larger image

The image above is a panorama comprising six images. You won’t see much detail in it as it sits on this page, but you will if you click on it. If you click on any image in the Blog you’ll see a larger one, but in this case you go to a huge image that you can zoom into.

The cleits continue up the hills and beyond the horizon.

Our last glimpse of Village Bay – these are some enclosures on the cliffs of Hirta near Dun, just south of the village.

Looking back from the North-East coast of Hirta. Village Bay is out of sight behind the headland and Dun is in the distance at the left.

History, Landscape, Nature, Photography, Scotland, seascape, St Kilda, Travel

Sgeir nan Sgarbh

Hebrides, History, Landscape, Nature, Photography, Scotland, seascape, St Kilda, Travel

Stac an Armin, Stac Lee and Boreray

These are two stacks and a corner of the island of Boreray, some miles away. Stac an Armin, on the left, is where three men and eight boys survived for nine months when the smallpox epidemic laid waste to the residents at Village Bay on Hirta.

Sea Cave

There’s a small line of black-and-white guillemots perched on a ledge high inside the wall of the sea cave.

Archaeology, Architecture, Hebrides, History, Landscape, Nature, Photography, Scotland, seascape, St Kilda, Travel

Abhainn a’ Ghlinne Mhoir at Gleanne Mor

This is our last glimpse of settlement on Hirta. The creek is called Abhainn a’ Ghlinne Mhoir and the area is Gleanne Mor. If you look closely there are a number of cleits in the landscape. To the left of the creek, out of sight here, there are the remains of a number of interesting structures. These include sheilings, or summer huts and the “Amazon’s House” (Taigh na Banaghaisgeich), thought to be a Pictish-era residence dating from 400AD to 900AD. Mind you, there should also be sheilings within our field of view, though you’d have to be walking around to have a chance of identifying them.

Mina Stac off Conachair

Not so long ago, the inhabitants of St Kilda would have lowered themselves down these cliffs on homemade ropes and swung sideways to get to the birds and their eggs.

The birds are guillemots.

St Kilda Monochrome and Infrared

Jul9

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 18-19 , 16th to 17th July.

This is a series of monochrome conversions of selected images from the previous six posts on St Kilda. In those posts these mono images appear as colour and there is often detailed commentary including historical notes. For information and context about St Kilda and these images, see those previous posts starting at Arrival at St Kilda.

The following eight images are infrared, shot using an R72 filter. Some are colour and some are mono conversions. None have snow; that’s just how grass and leaves can come out in infrared.

Unlike the mono images, there are no colour versions of them in other posts. The exposures were all taken within a half hour period. I brought my monopod to shore (though it should really have been my tripod) and I then discovered that I had left the head for it on the ship. Consequently they are all hand-held at high ISOs. This produced a lot of noise but then this is in line with the excessive grain often found in monochrome infrared film photography and I think actually assists the images.

A Walk to the Gap

Jul7

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 19 , 17th July.

In the afternoon, we decided to go for a walk up to the Gap, beyond the top of the ridge behind the village. I paused on the way for an image of this large cleit.

Another, looking back. The dark roof of one of the restored houses in the street is visible at far right in the middle distance.

I had to be careful I didn’t fall too far behind….

We’ve climbed the slope to a flatter area near the top known as An Lag (An Lag Bho’n Tuath in full). This is one of the large enclosures here, presumably for sheep. There are four large altogether, two of which also have internal walls.

(The rest of the group are to the right of the enclosure, almost out of sight).

Only one entrance to the enclosure….

… and there is a number of small cleits.

We are on top of the cliff now. This must be the Gap. It would no doubt look very different in the absence of fog.

Here carefully I lie down full length on the ground so that just my head and my camera are over the edge of the cliff. We are looking straight down, at the sea if we could see it. The sea cliffs along here are the highest in the UK. It’s probably higher a bit further along at Conachair but this is where it’s steepest, in fact vertical. We can’t see much but we are therefore at the point of the highest vertical sea cliff in the United Kingdom. Somewhere down below us there is also a sea cave and an overhang.

The fog is even heavier at the top.

We’ve walked back down and here we are overlooking the street again.

Lady Grange

Jul5

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 19 , 17th July.

The Scottish aristocrat Lady Grange was imprisoned on St Kilda for a number of years in the 1730s. The house in which she was imprisoned is in the middle foreground, behind the sheep. However, it largely collapsed over the next hundred years and has been rebuilt as a cleit, although some of the original walls remain. It was originally a 20 feet by 10 feet house (still about the same size), or according to another source, 40 feet long, and had wooden beams and a thatched roof. Prior to her occupation it had been the summer house of the Steward (the Laird’s representative).

Lady Grange was born Rachel Chiesley in Edinburgh in 1679. When she was ten her parents had separated and a judge awarded her mother alimony. This so infuriated her father that he shot and killed the judge in public in a street. This proved to not be a fortuitous move for his career. He was convicted then tortured, then his right hand cut off and then he was hanged.
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Rachel Chiesley, Lady Grange, 1710, aged about 31.

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Around 1707 when she was 28, Rachel married James Erskin. Rumoured to be a shotgun marriage, it was not popular with his family. Alexander Carlyle, a Scottish Church leader, knew the family as a child. He reports that Rachel was a savage martinet and her children were terrified of her. Her husband James was something of a religious fanatic but was at the same time affable and popular.

James’s elder brother, the Earl of Mar, became Scottish leader of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 (in the absence of the Auld Pretender, still in France). He and the rebellion were thwarted by the Duke of Argyll at the inconclusive Battle of Sheriffmuir. He would have been better advised to bypass Argyll and meet up with other Jacobite forces in the North of England. Subsequently, John had to leave for exile, from which he never returned.

By 1730, the marriage of James and Rachel was in trouble. They agreed to a separation but Rachel did not abide by it and moved back to Edinburgh. James had moved to London where he had a mistress (whom he later married) and he had removed control of the estate from Rachel. He was a judge and a little later became a member of Parliament. He also may have been dabbling with Jacobite sympathisers.

In 1732, after 25 years of marriage and nine children, he had her kidnapped by a group of his friends on the basis that she was about to reveal his Jacobite sympathies. She was definitely out of control and seeking to embarrass him in public but it is not clear whether his rationalisation was justified. It is a measure of her tyrannical reign over her children that none of them raised a hue and cry over her sudden and mysterious disappearance.

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Click to zoom in much larger image….

(Click the above image if you want to see it much larger and then to zoom around in it).

(Note: Lady Grange’s House in front centre is in front of and to the left of where the original village was. If you zoom in, you will see there are two buildings with turf roofs at the end of the wall that leads in from the right. One or both of those may be a house from the old village.)

Rachel spent some time imprisoned near Stirling and then at the Monach Islands (off the coast of Harris). In 1732, she arrived in St Kilda where she was to stay for the next nine years. This was not long after the catastrophic smallpox epidemic of 1727, the population of the island was still down and many were recent imports from Harris and Lewis. MacLennan, a minister who was there from 1734 to 1740, was sympathetic to her plight and smuggled two letters from her back to Edinburgh.

Her lawyer, Thomas Hope, received one of the letters and sent a ship with more than twenty armed men to St Kilda to rescue her but by the time they arrived, it was too late. The prisoner had been removed. Lord Grange claimed that what had happened was sequestration because his wife was insane and that she had not been mistreated. Since he retained control of all the powerful voices in Edinburgh, everything quietened down after a while.

In the meanwhile Lady Grange left St Kilda probably in 1740 and was taken to a variety of hideouts; at some stage to Castle Tiorem, over the first winter in Assynt, staying for a while in Harris, and arriving at the Vaternish Peninsula on Skye in 1742. (Links go to pages in the blog, where I visited the places).

Trumpan Church, Lady Grange, Rachel Chiesley

Trumpan Church, Vaternish Peninsula, Skye

She died on the Vaternish peninsula in 1845. Unusual in many ways, she may have had up to three funerals. There may have been one in Edinburgh shortly after she was kidnapped, the real one was at Trumpan Church at Vaternish and there was an “official” one in Dunvegan a week or two after that.

I could have photographed her memorial stone in Trumpan had I known of it at the time and I almost did – it is the white stone just peeking out beyond the right hand side of the archway. The actual location of her grave is not known. There are a couple more images of the ruined church in the blog post.

Ironically, had she not sent the letters and had she survived a bit longer, she would have been freed when British troops invaded St Kilda in 1746 looking for Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Reference: Margaret Macaulay: The Prisoner of St Kilda

Cemetery at Village Bay, Hirta

Jul3

St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Day 19 , 17th July.

This is the entrance to the cemetery at Village Bay, Hirta, St Kilda. It predates the village of the 1830s and may be many hundreds or even thousands of years old, though the wall may have been rebuilt several times.

Here we are inside the cemetery. It is roughly oval, approximately 25 meters by 18. The rocks you see poking up are tombstones of an unknown age. There were probably never any inscriptions on them as few islanders would have been literate before the nineteenth century. We saw the same thing at Baille Na Cille in Lewis, earlier in this blog.

In 1851 there were 105 people on St Kilda, comprising 40 aged 0-14, 28 aged 15-29, 20 aged 30-44, 10 aged 45-59 and 7 aged 60+. There was a similar distribution and total in 1822. The population had previously been higher than this as we saw in the last post, though it was to fall later. The island was settled for 5,000 years and the main settlement would always have been at Village Bay where there is the best harbour and the best farm land. If we assume an average population of 150 and a life expectancy of 40 for those who got past 5 years old, and if people were always buried here, then there could have been very approximately 3,750 burials here over a 1,000 year period. Burying in damp soils with no coffins (due to lack of wood) probably meant that even the skeletons would disappear after some hundreds of years.

When the street replaced the old village in the early 1830s, a couple of “faerie mounds” were demolished. These may have been prehistoric grave mounds.

Another view, this time in infrared. The plaque in the left foreground was erected by a former islander, Alexander Ferguson, in the 1930s or 40s in commemoration of both his parents. The infrared makes the stones stand out in a different way from the grass.

Here lie
the remains of
Margaret Mackay
native of Jeantown,
who departed this life
at St Kilda Manse on the
(?) day of February 1874
aged 44 years.
This stone is raised over her
remains by her brother
Minister of St Kilda.

So the most impressive tombstone in the cemetery was not for a native of St Kilda but for the sister of the Minister. Jeantown is the old name for LochCarron village, on the shores of Loch Carron, on the mainland not far from Skye.

This one is for a native St Kildan, though.

In
loving memory
of
Finlay
the only son of
Angus Gillies
crofter St Kilda,
born 8th January 1878
died 22nd January 1898
aged 20 years.

“With Christ which is
far better”

Surnames of residents of St Kilda included Gillies, McDonald, McKinnon, McQueen and Ferguston.

Murray Foote

Tag Archives: Hebrides

The Sound of Mull

Glassy seas, Inner Hebrides

Leverburgh

Soay

Stac Biorach

Farewell to Hirta

St Kilda Monochrome and Infrared

A Walk to the Gap

Lady Grange

Cemetery at Village Bay, Hirta