St Kilda Archaeology Coast

40 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean

lies a group of islands which have an almost mythical status.

St Kilda.

It's a place of superlatives.

The biggest sea cliffs in Britain,

the largest sea bird colonies

and the remotest village street.

Regular lines of stone walls and houses are still standing,

but the last native St Kildans left in 1930.

Increasing contact with the industrialised world

had destroyed their traditional way of life.

Today the houses are empty, except in the summer months,

when they are home to a band of conservationists,

dedicated to preserving the past.

I love the island, I love the isolation, I love its location.

The pure beauty of the place.

I'm Samantha Dennis.

I'm here as the archaeologist for the National Trust of Scotland.

My job here really is to look after

all the cultural material on St Kilda.

I go around checking on the buildings,

also rebuild some of the walls when they're falling down.

Basically, just keep the standing structures, the buildings.

One of the best things about being on St Kilda

is the number of people you meet, the variety of people

and the skills that you learn from people passing through.

Everything from handling puffins to reslating rooves

to fixing a blocked drain.

You kind of feel a feeling of you belong somewhere.

You've done something for someone else.

SEA BIRDS CALL

The islands of the Outer Hebrides

are bursting with archaeology and ancient monuments.

But the most enigmatic of them all

are the magnificent standing stones at Callanish on Lewis.

Put up around 3,000 BC by Neolithic farmers.

You can speculate to your heart's content

about what these stones were for,

but the thing that gets me is just how old, old, old they are.

It's 5,000 years old. That means before there was anything.

Before there were cities, before there were roads,

before there were big populations.

Before there were pyramids in Egypt, there was this.

Many stone circles are probably associated with the sun and stars.

But the layout of Callanish

is more likely linked to the movements of the moon.

That's the theory,

although we will never know what was in the mind of the communities

that gathered here for generations.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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