St Kilda, Britain’s Loneliest Isle

“Seventy-five years ago, five-year-old Norman John Gillies left his native island for the last time after the death of his mother. The entire community of St Kilda left with him.”

Extract from The Last of the St Kildan’s

The community continued to visit St Kilda in the summers following evacuation. The last visit took place in June 2005. Accompanied by the journalist Torcuil Crichton, a Gaelic speaker from the island of Lewis, Norman John Gillies, the five-year-old who in 1930 had waved to his mother Mary as she sailed out of Village Bay to her death in a Glasgow hospital, returned to Hirta for the final time.

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