Framedlight

We had a very early start in the morning to take up the anchor in Village Bay and get going back east, across the 69 miles of open ocean, to Barra on the very south of Uist. The weather was clear first thing on Hirta but, passing Dùn and reaching Levenish, the fog came down again and the visibility dropped to nearly zero. Goodbye to Village Bay on Hirta I had taken some sea sickness tablets which, again, only partially worked and made me feel groggy. There was little wind and no thought of putting up the sails. We chugged across the sea until late afternoon when land came into sight as we arrived on the western coast of Barra. We passed though the channel south of Vatersay and came up to the moorings in Castlebay, the principal village on Barra. We passed some beautiful beaches with white sand And islets, white with guano and crested with cormorants  Kisimul Castle dominates the bay at Caslebay. It was abandoned in 1838 and then bought by Robert McNeil, the Chief of the Clan MacNei...

  It was late afternoon by the time we had got back on shore in Village Bay, St Kilda. We walked up past the rusty gun and the Feather House to the village. The Feather House is just what it says, used to store feathers for payment of rent to the factor. It had been blown up by a German boat during the First World War as it contained signalling equipment. After that incident the gun was installed, although never used, and the feather house was rebuilt. The fog was coming and going but we were determined to climb up beyond the Village to the cleatean and walled enclosures beyond. It was a strange place to be with our vision coming and going, amongst the ruined stones. The Soay sheep were scattered across the hillside. By the time we got beyond the Village wall the mist was really coming down and we could no longer see the tops of the hills. Calum Mòr's house. A cleat which was reputedly built by a strong man and completed within a day.  The cleatean were used for storage, but w...

 When we woke the next morning we found ourselves surrounded by a thick fog. The little yacht was still anchored up in the bay but now we had a really big ship on the shoreline, which must have been the one expected at 3.00am. It appeared to be off loading equipment for the base. We had a leisurely breakfast, staring anxiously at the weather, and finally, around lunchtime when it had started to lift a little, the skipper, Neil made the decision to take Zuza out and circumnavigate Hirta. We did this in an anticlockwise direction so that we first sailed out along the eastern side of Dùn, an island which is only just cut off from Hirta. It all looked very mysterious in the mist. The division between Dùn and Hirta St Kilda houses the largest puffin colony in Europe and Dùn is one of the places where they nest. We could see many bobbing about on the ocean and could glimpse through the fog their burrows in the grassy flanks of the cliffs.  Unfortunately as soon as they saw us they w...