The St Kildan Tale of Marilyn that's not a Munro

For the past month or so while I have been aboard several ships, I have mostly been in the company British travelers. As a result, I notice unusual words are beginning to creep insidiously into my vocabulary. I casually utter phrases such as “dessert was brilliant” or “be careful, the steps can be slippy.” Plus my new personal favorite winklepickers, referring to a sharp pointy implement used for scraping shells (winkles) from various objects in the sea. (Winklepickers were also a popular shoe style in the in the ‘50s and ’60s featuring long pointy toes and quite trendy among rock groups.) Whether I continue referring to brilliant desserts and slippy steps when I am no longer in the company of my British cronies remains to be seen. What I will remember is the extraordinary story about Stac an Armin, a Marilyn in St Kilda, but not a Munro.

There is an abundance of information that has been passed down through the years about the St Kildans most of which focuses on their peripatetic lifestyle, their evacuation, and now the legacy of the Soay sheep. But there are other remarkable tales which are all too often squeezed out of the headlines, including an ill-fated fowling trip in August of 1727.

To set the scene, Stac an Armin is a ginormous hunk of rock standing straight out of the sea. Some say it looks like a dog’s tooth, I look at its triangular shape and instantly start humming the music from Jaws. But of all the possible shapes I think it might resemble, I would never have come up with a voluminous breast. In fact, very … large … mountains or hills, specifically with a drop of 492 feet or higher on all sides are commonly referred to as Marilyns by my fellow travelers, a name given to distinguish them from Munros, which is any Scottish mountain measuring at least 3,000 feet and listed by the Scottish Mountaineering Club.

It is important to note that Munros were initially identified in the 19th century by Sir Hugh Munro, who compiled the first list of said hills. But it wasn’t until the late 20th century that Marilyns garnered their own category with the publication of The Relative Hills of Britain: Mountains, Munros and Marilyns by Alan Dawson; initially a well-known hill bagger and now a Munro and Marilyn bagger as well. (I am waiting for the day someone calls me a sheep bagger.)

The St Kildans were known for their unwavering diet of vegetables, mutton, and an inconceivably large number of sea birds and eggs (more than thirty-six eggs per day per person). Most of what they ate was gathered directly from their own backyard on the island of Hirta, but they would also travel to the other islands in the archipelago to increase their winter stores and on August 15, 1732, three men and eight boys set off in their rowboat for Stac an Armin; a four-mile journey in what were undoubtedly formidable seas. With no place to safely land (or store) the boat, the group was dropped off at the "best" landing site at the base of the cliffs. For the next week they would gather hundreds of birds, mostly gannets but also puffins and the now extinct Great Auk was hunted as well. Plus, they would gather all the eggs they could carry. It was a routine that had been going on for as long as anyone could remember. Except this year, when no one came to pick them up.

They waited a week, and then two, three, and four weeks. A full month went by and soon another. By now, winter had settled in and this later day Marilyn stood proud and tall, fully exposed to all Mother Nature could throw at her. Survival must have surely seemed impossible, but St Kildans already knew the impossible was possible, a reality that did not hold true for the rest of the St Kildans back in the village. In the brief time the fowlers were busy on Stac an Armin a smallpox epidemic broke out in the village. It is believed that when of the St Kildans died on the mainland of smallpox earlier in the year, it wasn’t until his clothes were returned to St Kilda that the plague began to spread. No one went to rescue the dislocated group because no one left in the village was capable of doing so. Out of the twenty-one families living on the island only four adults survived. There wasn’t enough manpower to bury the dead (ninety-four in all) and the twenty-six orphans quickly became the responsibility of the survivors.

Nine months later, the land steward organized a trip to rescue the men and boys. Somehow, they had all survived subsisting on a heavy diet of seabirds, eggs, and drinking water from a spring. Tragically, nearly all of them returned home to empty houses. With so few survivors, the islands' owner had no choice but to repopulate Hirta, relocating both men and women from the mainland and nearby isles—not all who came readily embraced the comforts of their new island home.

I can't begin to imagine how the strong-minded Christians of St Kilda would react to having this legendary site named after Marilyn. Brilliant it's not. I am more inclined to say slippy at best.