Dun.

It was a bumpy ride out to St Kilda in a nauseatingly noisy, smelly and small boat that was driving straight into the weather; a journey of 85 miles taking over four hours. It was a full twenty-four hours before I felt I could comfortably cope with the world at large again.

The first things you see as you approach Hirta, the main island, are the two radar stations on the tops of the hills (see first extra). The army has a permanent presence here and without them, I would have no holiday; they provide both water and electricity for the National Trust for Scotland, though the drought over last two months has meant that water is in short supply and we needed to bring our own with us for drinking to eke out the supplies. The shortage is exacerbated by the seventy workmen on site who are rebuilding the army base to be more sympathetic to the island's status as a dual World heritage site (and a couple of National Trust volunteers were not helping matters by insisting on taking 30 minutes over their daily showers).

Perhaps the most striking feature of Hirta is the vast number of cleits that litter the entire island as well as portions of Soay and Boreray; they were used as larders for storing the vast number of gannets and fulmars that the islanders caught for their winter food, each person needing a hundred birds to avoid starvation until he spring. Most of the cleits are in poor repair, presumably because, as the population fell from a few hundred to a few dozen, there was neither the manpower nor the need to maintain them. There are, however, a number like that in the second extra which are in good condition.

The Islanders took their sheep with them when they left in 1930; a few years later, some native sheep were taken from Soay, the small island a few hundred yards from the north west tip of Hirta, and used to populate the main island. Soay also provided breeding populations for Woburn Abbey, Lundy and Cheddar Gorge amongst other places; allegedly, a few even found their way to Roslin. Here on Hirta, they are tagged and monitored for research purposes, but otherwise unmanaged; if one is sick or injured, nature is left to take its course as happened to that in the third extra.

On our first evening, we went out for a walk to Blip the sunset. Having been the only person to be sick on the boat, I was now the only person to wimp out on the precarious path around the headland. I seemed to have earned brownie points by fessing up to the problem before things started to get nasty. The result was that I went the long way round to the proposed destination, Blipping as I went, and ending with the main picture of Dun taken from a disused army helipad.

The sunset didn't happen.