The Life and Death of St Kilda by Tom Steel

It was the consensus that you only have two choices: leave and survive or remain and perish from hunger, sickness and for lack of enough able-bodied men to continue working on the land, harvest the birds, mend your boats and do other chores only men can do. All your work/pet dogs were put to sleep. The British government had persuaded all of you to leave, your sheep and cows sold to partly pay for the cost of the evacuation. On 29 August 1930, however, your community ceased to exist. You and your community of around 180 men, women and children are perhaps the only bird-eating community the world has ever had. You get that oil from the food source which come to the islands seasonally and which you harvest like Thais harvest rice-birds. In any case, you find fish too bland for your taste. The wood you'll need to repair them, or build new ones, can only come from shipwrecks or imported from the mainland. The few boats that your community has are too precious to be put at risk for fishing. The waters are often too violent for fishing. You are surrounded by the ocean but your main staple food is not fish. No trees grow in your islands of towering rocks which have been the world to you all your life.

You do not know what trees are, you haven't seen one, not even in pictures. It'll be all sunshine in the morning then, just for a few more hours, it'll be as stormy as hell, with wind so strong that some of your sheep will be swept away to the sea and drown. You do not know it, but subsequent archeological studies indicate that remote as these islands are, your ancestors had inhabited the same for about two thousand years before you were born. In fact the locals like you prefer to call the place 'Hirta' yet the origin of this name is also vague. It is not known how these group of rock islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about 100 miles off the Scottish mainland, got their name. Much later did your place have a postal service but even then it took months for mails to travel in and out of the islands, from origin to destination. There's no TV or radio or books or magazines anywhere around. You do not know what is happening anywhere else in the world.

You're supposed to be a British subject but you don't know English, don't pay taxes, you don't know what money is and are not touched by any governmental regulation.

The Life and Death of St Kilda by Tom Steel