St Kilda

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St Kilda is somewhere that my husband had always wanted to go. He is Scottish born and bred, but was born in the lowlands of Ayrshire. And so, he had told me about St Kilda when we were planning our trip to the Outer Hebrides, and said that it was somewhere we could go from there, and it takes you to like the UK’s most westerly point.

And we felt really lucky because our trip went ahead and we were speaking to people on our trip that had tried four, five, six times to get across to St Kilda, and because of the sea conditions, it prevented them from going. And so I can’t think of anything more heartbreaking than having travelled all the way to the Outer Hebrides to then be told that you can’t go on that one day, that you’ve got booked to go to St Kilda.

Of course, your window goes, because then everybody else on the next trip is booked for their day and has been for months. So, we got to go on our first try, which we know was really lucky. The sea was wild, mind. It was probably a three metre swell. There is some videos that I will link in, of the journey and the experience of St Kilda, and it was pretty intense in terms of the journey and when we got into St Kilda, there was quite a lot of cloud on our journey. I mean, for a lot of it, all you could see was like the waves and cloud and meeting the horizon. So it was really disorientating because you couldn’t see the land we left or the islands that were 45 miles away that we were heading to.

We were just kind of in this 360 cloud and sea, with loads of seabirds flying through. That was the amazing thing. So, you got a sense of where you were going because of the amount of sea bird life that increased in number as we were getting further into the journey and as we got there, the sun was burning through the cloud and it was really starting to lift.

And you could see a lot of the individual islands, and they just look really, really dramatic or cloaked in the cloud. And I really hope to see it like that rather than it being a pristine, clear day. A lot of the time that’s how I like to photo, rather than it being, you know, kind of ‘perfect’ in inverted commas conditions. Perfect for me, is like, oh, is there rain? Is there light bursting through a cloud? Is this happening? You know, I look for a very different mood when I’m shooting, landscapes in nature. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have nice weather as well, but I think some of the most interesting shots or the shots where you really feel you’ve worked and pushed your boundaries, to be in some extreme conditions to capture something, makes that shot feel really rewarding, like you’ve actually really worked and earned the moment in nature with nature, because you’ve put that graft in to, to experience it, and so St Kilda is just one of those places. And it is absolutely incredible to get to.