The extraordinary story of the UK's most gruelling & spectacularly beautiful islands Tom Steel's acclaimed portrait of the St Kildan's lives is now updated in this reissued edition Situated at the westernmost point of the United Kingdom the spectacularly beautiful but utterly bleak island of St Kilda is familiar to virtually nobody A lonely archipelago off the coast of Scotland it is hard to believe that for over two thousand years men & women lived here cut off from the rest of the world With a population never exceeding two hundred in its history the St Kildans were fiercely self-sufficient An intensely religious people they climbed cliffs from childhood & caught birds for food Their sense of community was unparalleled & isolation enveloped their day-to-day existence With the onset of the First World War things changed For the very first time in St Kilda's history daily communication was established between the islanders & the mainland Slowly but surely this marked the beginning of the end of St Kilda & in August 1930 the island's remaining 36 inhabitants were evacuated Newly updated to include the historic appointment of St Kilda as the United Kingdom's only UNESCO Dual Heritage site the ongoing search for information about the island & the threats that it continues to face this is the moving story of a vanished community & how twentieth century civilization ultimately brought an entire way of life to its knees