St Kilda is a small archipelago, 40 miles west of North Uist, off the west coast of Scotland. The four islands with attendant stacks support abundant sea bird colonies, particularly petrels, gannets and auks. Only Hirt, the largest, has been permanently inhabited, with evidence of occupation from early in the first millennium AD. Charts from as early as the sixteenth century, and maps of the archipelago, demonstrate a variety of perceptions of shape, and provide over 200 placenames, mainly Gaelic in origin, though some are considered to be Norse and some to be Gaelic/Norse hybrids. From the sixteenth century onwards an increasing number of articles, books and manuscripts provides an increasingly comprehensive account of St Kilda, its history, its people, and their way of life. As proprietors, different branches of the MacLeods of Harris and Skye left the collection of rent in kind, and the provision of imported goods in the hands of a Steward or Factor. The maximum recorded population was 180 (1697); after a drop in 1727 due to smallpox the thirty survivors were augmented by families from the Hebrides but the numbers never rose again above 120, and had dropped to 36 by 1930 when the islanders were evacuated by the Government at their own request. In the late 1830s the site of the village and the arable land tenure system were changed, the new pattern of a linear street across parallel strips of land obliterating most traces of the earlier nuclear settlement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:652124 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Harman, Mary |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19825 |
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