St Kilda
— — the village the sea took back.
Not only on a wall.
“Forty miles west of the Western Isles, an archipelago of sheer black cliffs and abandoned stone houses. Hirta held a Gaelic-speaking village for at least two thousand years until the last thirty-six residents asked to be evacuated in August 1930. The cleitean, small drystone storehouses, still dot the slopes above Village Bay. The puffins came back. The people did not.
St Kilda, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St Kilda is an archipelago in the North Atlantic, 64 kilometres west-northwest of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides and 180 kilometres from the Scottish mainland. The main island, Hirta, rises to 430 metres at Conachair, the highest sea cliff in the United Kingdom. Boreray and the sea stacs Stac an Armin and Stac Lee complete the group. The whole archipelago has been owned by the National Trust for Scotland since 1957 and was inscribed as a dual UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of only a few worldwide, for both natural and cultural value in 1986 and 2004.
The village on Hirta has been uninhabited since 29 August 1930, when the surviving population of thirty-six asked the British government to evacuate them. They left on HMS Harebell. The single curving street of stone houses, the manse, the church, and the schoolroom remain in slow weathering on the shoulder of Village Bay. A small Ministry of Defence radar tracking station and the National Trust's summer work parties keep the village from being entirely empty, but for most of the year the only sound is wind, ocean, and seabird.
St Kilda holds one of the most important seabird breeding stations in the northeast Atlantic. The cliffs and stacs are home to roughly 60,000 pairs of northern gannets (the world's second-largest colony, on Boreray, Stac an Armin, and Stac Lee), along with around 140,000 pairs of Atlantic puffins and the United Kingdom's largest colony of Leach's storm petrels. The endemic St Kilda wren and the St Kilda field mouse have evolved in isolation. In early summer the sky above Hirta is dense with returning birds from first light to last.