With nature and a camera

Chapter I. St Kilda and its people

The Lover's Stone

In olden times, pluck was considered even a greater virtue than it is today in St. Kilda. This is proved by the fact that every young man who considered himself brave enough to deserve the fair, was obliged to give a public exhibition of his daring on the Lover's Stone - a projecting piece of rock with nothing except two hundred feet or so of thin air betwixt it and the waves below. As soon as all the islanders had assembled at the invitation of the love-sick youth, he walked out on to the very end of the crag, and standing upon the outer edge of it on his left heel put his right to the toes of his left, and then stooped until he touched the toes of his right foot with the finger-tips of both hands. In this perilous position he was obliged to remain until those around him expressed themselves satisfied that he had vindicated his claim to manhood and fitness for a wife.

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At this period, an old writer says, the women married very young - about thirteen or fourteen years of age - and "gave suck to their children for two years."

My brother photographed the ancient Lover's Stone, but, unfortunately, a tantalising accident has robbed us of the chance of using the picture in the present work.

I was telling my friend Captain McCallum, of Glasgow, about hearing the sea make a noise in the caves of St Kilda one night, like the booming of distant cannon, when he laughed and told me that it reminded him of a great scare the people had some years ago. A woman woke up suddenly one night convinced that she could hear the big guns of the dreaded Sassenach or Saxon, of whom they formerly - and, no doubt, with good reason - stood in great awe. She at once aroused everybody in the village, and they all fled to the rocks, where they remained until daylight convinced them that they had had their slumbers broken by a false alarm. An enemy wishing to land on the island would, I am persuaded, have to go about his business very stealthily. Sandy Campbell, the abhorred piper, told me that he had visited the place seventeen years in succession as factor's gillie, and landed at all hours of the night, but never once got inside Village Bay without being seen by someone ashore. The dogs, many of which seem to be always left prowling about outside the houses at night, give the alarm, as I discovered when wandering about in the small hours of the morning studying bird-life and habits.