It's the most remote island group in Britain, a place of seemingly inaccessible rocky crags rising up from the sea. But until the 1930s, St Kilda was home to a thriving community

Norman John Gillies lives in a pretty village by the river Orwell in Suffolk, in a house with a tidy lawn, a privet hedge and large windows overlooking a cul-de-sac. But he was born in a much wilder place, on the most remote island group in Britain, St Kilda, which sits out in the Atlantic 41 miles west of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. St Kilda was evacuated on 29 August 1930 after thousands of years of habitation, and Gillies, now 84, is one of only two people alive who were taken off that day. Clues to his origins are dotted around the Suffolk house. A wooden sign above the porch bears St Kilda's name. The living room walls are adorned with black-and-white pictures showing a lost community. When inquisitive strangers come visiting, as they sometimes do, Gillies talks them through the photographs – a string of aunts and uncles and grandparents – explaining what became of each of them. They stare back, half-smiling, at the lens and into the future.

Lawrence Durrell once defined "islomania" as a rare affliction of the spirit that results in a strong attraction to islands. He could have added a subcategory, "Kildamania", to describe an obsession with St Kilda. Early Kildamanes included Samuel Johnson, whose friend James Boswell wanted to buy the islands after their visit to the Hebrides in 1773. "Pray do, Sir," replied Dr Johnson, "we shall go and pass a winter amid the blasts there." When the young Michael Powell read about the evacuation of the islands in 1930, he carried the newspaper clipping with him for six years, determined to turn the story into a film. The Edge Of The World, his debut as a director, led to a glittering career. In recent years Kildamania has blossomed again: film footage taken on the islands in the 20s, The Island Tapes, plays to full houses on tours of Europe and the US, and the opera St Kilda, Island Of Birdmen, was one of the highlights of this year's Edinburgh festival. Novels, poems and songs have been written to celebrate the archipelago. Today, the anniversary of the evacuation, Scotland celebrates the first national St Kilda Day.

Few Kildamanes ever reach St Kilda, however, protected as the islands are from the mainland by 80 miles of blue-black ocean. Johnson and Boswell didn't; Powell had to shoot his film on Foula in the Orkneys. Even now, would-be visitors are often found stewing in Benbecula, Leverburgh or Stornoway, waiting for a gap in the storms. This year, after a decade-long bout of Kildamania, I was offered my chance to visit the islands, to tramp the peaty cliffs where seabirds scream and wheel, and to walk the single street. A group of friends were chartering a boat and sailing there. We'd leave Skye just before the summer solstice, when the days were longest and the weather at its best. First, two of us would visit Norman John Gillies.

On a sunny day in late spring we arrived at Gillies's house and sat in the living room with his wife, Ivy, listening to him recount stories from the islands in an accent that switched between the Hebrides and the south-east of England. He was five on the day of the evacuation, but could recall it clearly. "I remember being on the boat, running around on the deck of HMS Harebell, and the older people were lying or sitting down," he said. "I remember several of the women at the rear of the boat waving to the island until it was out of sight. I can see that as plain as anything. It was a hard life, as you can see."

The wind on St Kilda was sometimes so strong that the islanders' sheep and cattle were blown over the cliffs. One visitor from the mainland reported that the sea beat so hard on the shore in a storm, it left the villagers deaf for a week. Trees refused to grow there, and the few crops would sometimes became polluted with salt water. Fishing was considered too dangerous: many St Kildans were drowned, including the two uncles Gillies is named after, Norman and John, after their boat overturned in the swell just a few hundred yards from their home in Village Bay. "They never did find them," Gillies said.

There was one asset, however, that St Kilda possessed in extraordinary abundance: seabirds. Three-quarteres of a million of them came every year to nest on the islands and on the sea stacs: gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes, puffins, great skua, razorbills, guillemots and petrels. The St Kildans lived on these birds, catching them by lowering themselves on ropes from the clifftops or climbing up the stacs from boats. The men became expert climbers, learning their skills as children. John Lane Buchanan recorded the St Kildans' technique in the 1780s. The fowler descended the cliffs at night, and artfully started a fight between the sentinel gannet and its nearest neighbour: "This alarms the whole camp, and instead of flying off they all begin to fight through the whole company; while in the meantime the common enemy, unsuspected, begins in good earnest to twist their necks, and never gives up till the whole are left dead on the spot."

"When you get there and see the stacs, you'll say to yourself, 'I'll never know how they climbed up there to get the gannets and birds – or even landed on the islands of Bororay and Soay,'" Gillies said. He had a photograph of a fulmar catch in which men and women stood around a great feathered mass of hundreds of seabirds. It was a loyal, democratic community, and food caught by the able-bodied was shared among the young, the sick and the old. "You can see that they're all waiting to get their share of the catch. Everyone sort of looked after each other – if somebody fell ill, they would go and see to them, you know. They used to meet at what they called the St Kilda parliament, and they would allocate the different tasks. When they were going fowling, so many would go here and so many would go somewhere else." Little was wasted: fulmar bones and the bills of oystercatchers made fastenings for clothes, the skin of gannets' necks made shoes. Feathers and fulmar oil went to the laird to pay the rent.

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The rocks of the St. Kilda archipelago comprise the St. Kilda Central Complex. This complex was intruded into Lewisian gneiss, which represents some of the oldest rocks in the world.



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