A little piece of St Kilda

A friend came round to visit tonight who was off on a trip to St Kilda last week. Roz and I are both really jealous. If you're interested the Wikipedia page or, even better, Tom Steel's excellent book The life and death of St Kilda can give you a far more in-depth description but I'll give a brief one anyway.

St Kilda is an archipeligo about 40-50 miles west of the Outer Hebrides. It was an isolated island community which, despite it's remote location and extremes of weather was permanently inhabited for about 2000 years from the Bronze age through to 1930 whena long process of destabilisation caused by increased contact with the wider world led to the final thirty six inhabitants requesting to be evacuated to the mainland.

The islands are now owned by the national trust and has only a few temporary trust workers and a small military presence on the main island of Hirta.

Anyway, the friend in question knows that Roz has a selection of rocks from remote places we've been int the wee rockery bit in the garden so brought a stone from beneath the waterline. Since Roz was quite excited I thought I'd blip it but a macro was the best shot I got.

Also had a day of internet research. I found a rather disturbing site about Camel spiders which, it transpires, aren't really spiders at all and are more like scorpions. And possibly an even more disturbing site, which I was directed to by a friend, about a hot new property in Scottish cuisine. Who says we Scots don't ooze class eh?