Episode 1 Britain's Lost World

This is the wildest, most remote part of the British Isles.

It's called St Kilda.

A handful of rocks out in the Atlantic Ocean, over 100 miles

from the mainland, it's the most secret place in Britain.

Home to sea birds and seals, these islands are also a place of mystery.

Until just 80 years ago,

St Kilda was inhabited by a race of people

who lived in an extraordinary way.

But when they suddenly abandoned their homes,

they left behind a place full of secrets.

St Kilda is Britain's very own Lost World.

Today historian Dan Snow, naturalist Steve Backshall and me, Kate Humble,

are going to venture there, to explore, to experience, and to unravel the secrets of St Kilda.

For the first time ever,

we have the technological know-how to do a really thorough investigation

of one of the wildest places, if not the wildest, in the British Isles.

But it's a tough assignment.

We want to find out just who were the strange and remarkable St Kildans?

Why did they leave?

And can St Kilda's amazing wildlife survive in the modern world?

To do that, we'll be scaling the cliffs...

..diving into ancient caves beneath the sea...

..talking to baby puffins...

Dear little thing!

..and turning Robinson Crusoe.

This is going to be really quite something.

All to unlock the secrets of Britain's Lost World.

This is one of those adventures that only come along once in a lifetime,

a chance to sail into the unknown.

But no-one said adventure comes easy.

The crossing to St Kilda is going to take us six hours in an open boat.

I'm already wishing that I'd skipped my breakfast!

I can see why people don't go to St Kilda very often!

It's Hell!

The boys stay annoyingly chipper, their eyes fixed on the horizon.

We've been going for about five hours now and we've just

really got for the first time these ominous shapes on the skyline.

Although it looks imposing at the moment, it's a really welcome sight.

We just can't wait to get to dry land.

-And it, it has a real lost world quality about it.

-Yeah!

The way that the clouds are hanging so low over it, it's just...

The jagged rocks over on that coast there, that's incredible, isn't it?

There it is, our first proper sight of St Kilda.

Shrouded in mist, with sea birds pouring off huge sea cliffs coming

just to check us out, it's like Mother Nature's final frontier.

I've never seen anything like it.

It's like, like coming to another world. It's so surreal

after that six hours of just having your head down and thinking,

when will this journey be over, when will it be over?

And suddenly this appears out of the gloom

and you've got all these gannets ahead, it's like we're coming into their territory.

And there's, oh, my word! Wow.

Everywhere you look there's just another incredible vista.

I can't believe that humans actually lived there. I mean, it seems like something primeval

-and yet humans lived on top of that.

-I can't believe anyone GOT here!

At last, Village Bay on the main island.

It seems like ghosts are watching us from their abandoned homes,

but only the seals come out to greet us.

It's a truly eerie place to arrive, but we're glad we have.

I can see why people kiss the land.

Well done, Kate.

Oh! Dry land!

Thank God!

-That was a passage. You all right?

-Yep.

St Kilda is a small cluster of breathtaking islands,

all that remains of a huge 60 million-year-old volcano.

The biggest island is Hirta with its horseshoe-shaped harbour bay.

Spectacular Boreray and its sea stacks lie four miles away.

These islands are shrouded in mystery.

How long did people live here?

Why did they leave?

And can this precious part of our natural heritage survive in the modern world?

We've got just ten days to find out.

I can't believe I'm here.

I can't believe I'm on St Kilda.

It may look a little bit grey and drizzly but, this place, if you are into wildlife,

if you are into really remote, wild places, this is the ultimate.

I just can't wait to go and explore it, to go and stand

on one of those cliffs and listen to a cacophony of sea birds.

I've always wanted to come to St Kilda because even though it is within the British Isles, it's as

isolated as any island community anywhere on the planet.

It's very exciting because I've got the opportunity to come here and try

and find out a bit more, like just how long people have been here and how they first got here.

But for now it's getting dark, and we are all completely shattered.

There are no hotels on St Kilda, so we're going to make do with three

tiny tents, but at least we're not sharing!

Welcome to Camp St Kilda, home sweet home.

Dan, you snore like a train.

You couldn't possibly have heard him over all this weather.

Oh, no, he doesn't snore at all!

Right, come on, chaps.

It's amazing to wake up here,

surrounded by the remains of centuries of human life.

The extent of these ruins is really... It's a lot of habitation,

and it's amazing this island would support so many people.

That's the most surprising thing.

You'd think that they would have gathered in a little cluster

for sort of protection, but it's really strung out isn't it? Sort of,

basically one line of houses all the way along.

We want to find out what it was like to live here

and why the St Kildans left,

so the best place to start is here in the abandoned village.

This is what remains of Main Street,

80 years after the St Kildans deserted it,

and this is how it was back then.

This rare footage gives us a tantalising glimpse into their lives,

young and old huddled together in these islands

on the edge of the world.

From writings and photographs, we know they lived in a very simple but unique way,

catching the sea birds that nest on St Kilda's rocky cliffs.

Although they were part of Britain,

they grew up in a world far away from doctors, telephones, newspapers and radios,

or any home comforts of the 20th century.

Modern life had passed them by.

It was a community so remote and so strange

that they were known as "Britain's own primitives."

In 1930, the St Kildans left, abandoning their homes forever.

But why did they decide to go?

And what can we find out from the houses they used to live in?

Remarkably, many of the traditional buildings still stand,

and it's the more modern cottages which have fallen into ruin,

although a few have been recently restored.

This is great!

So often with archaeological sites you really have to use your imagination

to imagine what a building looked like, or a settlement.

But this is very clear. It was the main street of St Kilda and you can

see this line of cottages stretching away there to the distance.

These more modern cottages were brought in, in around the 1860s.

These were the sort of latest thing in Glasgow,

zinc plating for roofs, lovely glass windows.

Perfect, you would think, but,

you look at the cottages over there.

Those ones just show how bad the St Kilda weather can be.

As soon as the people left, the roofs have disappeared.

And I think that was probably the problem.

You know, they lived in these stone huts with turf roofs for hundreds of years,

they had those raw materials, they knew how to work them.

Bring in zinc, which they can't get here, bring in glass, which they can't replace,

and suddenly they are living in a noisy, leaky building

that they have no means or wherewithal to fix.

So, they were probably an awful lot better off in those little stone piles.

So what would it have been like to live in one of the older traditional stone houses?

Dan, our history expert, should know.

I mean, on the same street, you've got your kind of 18th-century windows and roof tops, and then

this, which is really older than time itself. Just pile up rocks,

put a bit of timber and turf on top and it's a house,

and you keep your animals in there. No window.

They were called black houses,

because you lit a fire with nowhere for the smoke to escape so everything went black.

-Animals as well.

-Oh, really!

-You slept in here with the animals.

-Oh, it must have been dark, smelly and rife with kind of...

-Everything.

It was, but funnily enough the body heat from the animals would help to keep this area warm.

-I suppose.

-It was practical but of course, you probably wouldn't want to live in one now.

No. Which reminds me, have a look at these.

-Right, hand on a second, through the nettles.

-I know, I know, but you know...

These presumably, all these out here, they aren't...

They're not like the houses for the kids or anything are they?

No, they're Wendy houses! That's one of the first thing I noticed

coming here, all these cleits, they're storehouses.

-Oh, right!

-They're built along the same lines as the black houses, but they're just for storing

all the bird carcases and rope and everything. Peat that you might cut.

Well, there's no room in the house with your animals and your family.

There are over 1,000 of these cleits on the islands.

They are unique, nowhere else in the world has buildings like them.

They were outdoor larders where the St Kildans would store and dry their food.

this is very substantial.

Imagine moving these rocks, this is a serious bit of engineering for a family.

-To be honest, there's been a lot of sheep and dead things in there recently, haven't there?

-Yeah.

What do you reckon Kate, a little stroll in?

Oh, you can actually stand up in this one.

-This is huge!

-Yeah, it's huge, isn't it?

Wow, it's an amazing piece of architecture.

Yeah, I know. And there are hundreds of them. Hundreds of them.

Everywhere you look.

The St Kildans were clearly accomplished house builders, but their traditional houses

served their unique lifestyle far better than the more modern houses they ended up in.

This could have been one reason why they left.

But what was it that made their lifestyle so unique?

To find out, we need to look at their almost total reliance

on the island's greatest natural resource,

its sea birds.

St Kilda is one of the most important bird colonies in the world

with over a million sea birds arriving every spring.

There are over a hundred different species on the islands

and you can witness some startling sights throughout the year.

Among them are the gannets

who dive for fish like fighter planes, at up to 60mph.

It's also home to thousands of fulmars, who defend themselves

by vomiting acidic oil at anyone who threatens them.

And it's famous for its puffin colony, the largest in Europe -

they nest here throughout the summer.

It was this abundant birdlife

the St Kildans ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But with the birds perched high on the cliffs and sea stacks around St Kilda,

catching them took death-defying nerve.

This amazing footage from the 1920s shows the St Kildan men

abseiling down to collect birds from their nests during the summer months.

This was a unique and extraordinarily dangerous lifestyle.

To find out just how they did it, I'm going to give it a go myself.

The relationship the St Kildans had with the sea birds that live here

may nowadays seem, well, pretty unpalatable really.

But the reality is that the gannets, the guillemots, the puffins, the fulmars were their main harvest

and without them they would have starved to death.

The St Kildan men killed tens of thousands of sea birds every year

using primitive snares like this one here.

It would consist of a simple split cane, then a gannet quill,

and a noose at the end here, made probably out of horse hair.

Once the snare was round the bird's neck, there was no escape.

The St Kildans were extraordinary cragsmen, they could get about on

even the most vertical of cliff faces going hunting for birds.

And myself, and my climbing partner, Cubby, are going to see what it must have been like for them

heading across those cliff faces in any kind of weather.

The only real nod that we are having for modern safety techniques

is the helmet and in order for it to be really genuine, I'm going to have to lose the shoes.

-You OK?

-Absolutely, yes.

The St Kildans climbed barefoot, so I'm going to have to, too.

I've climbed all over the world but never like this, no chalk,

no boots, no harness, hanging on the end of hemp rope 400 feet above the sea.

It certainly takes a bit of getting used to, but the St Kildan men would

do this all the time, like bringing in the milk from the doorstep!

And doing this so often completely changes the shape of their feet.

You can see in this Victorian photo, the St Kildan foot on the right, is

broader, with a stronger ankle and toes that grip the rock.

The St Kildans would often go out hunting on a moonless night, over on Boreray.

They'd go for gannets, and the trick with those,

was to kill the sentry bird, that was the one that stayed awake.

And once you'd got that one, getting the rest was comparatively easy.

Here though, it was mostly fulmars that they went for,

and if you get too close to fulmars, they vomit a nasty oil all over you,

but that precious oil is one of the main things that they were actually catching them for.

Fulmar oil was used for medicine, lighting and greasing the ropes that they climbed with.

But mainly fulmars were just food.

In the summer season, the St Kildans would eat them freshly boiled,

but through the winter they'd live off dried and salted fulmar meat.

It's estimated that every year each St Kildan would eat 350 sea birds.

You can see how, once you get the hang of it, this is an effective way of moving around the rock face

from one fixed point at the top.

You can get yourself in a good position and really move easily about laterally.

It's a great way of getting to different nests.

It's no wonder they could catch so many birds in a day.

I can see now what a good way this was of making your way about

the cliff, and it would be impossible to catch these birds any other way.

But it is very potentially very dangerous.

Occasionally St Kildan men would fall hundreds of feet to their deaths

and some days the prospect of heading out onto these cliffs, in all weathers,

must have filled them with utter dread.

Despite all that though, part of me does still envy them.

I guess, to many people the St Kildan way of life must make no sense at all, but for me,

on the rock with the elements and the sea birds

I think I'd take this over the banality of mainland life any day.

Today the bird life is no longer on the menu, thank goodness.

In fact, as a World Heritage Site,

all the birds are actively protected.

But that doesn't mean they're not under threat,

and that includes one of my personal faves.

I think few people would disagree when I say that the puffin

is the most adorable of the world's sea birds and St Kilda is famous for them.

Now Sarah Money who works for the National Trust has been monitoring all the sea birds on St Kilda

for the past three years, and I'm going to join her to go and see the biggest puffin colony in Britain.

These are North Atlantic puffins, and they live

by diving for small fish, their favourite being juicy sand eels.

Although there are still lots of puffins here,

their numbers have dropped by over a 100,000 in the last ten years.

I've joined Sarah to try and find out why, but I'm rapidly starting to regret that decision!

-This is so stupid.

-It's ridiculous.

The puffin burrows on Carn Mhor on the west of Hirta are on such steep slippy slopes, down hundreds of feet

onto the rocks, I don't even dare stand up, but with only a week before the pufflings leave the nest,

it's essential that Sarah gets an idea as to how well the chicks are developing.

I don't know how she does it.

You'd think she was walking on a cricket pitch.

Working on these ridiculously steep slopes is not the only problem though.

Finding a burrow that's actually occupied can prove to be just as difficult.

-We've got a burrow here that looks it might be active as well.

-Oh, yes.

Yeah, you can see it's been scraped as well. Just take my rucksack off.

I'll hold that.

Yep. That's great. So the technique is very simple -

you just put your arm down the burrow

until you find something fluffy at the end.

Hopefully.

Simple but messy.

They go quite a long way in, don't they?

I can't actually get to the back of that burrow, but what I might have is a pike fish for you.

Oh, really!

Oh, my goodness!

That is not a good sign...

-Look at that!

-..At all.

Presumably, the main thing that it is not a good sign of

is that they are simply not eating them.

Nope, and you can see, and then the chick is going to be that long, these fish are longer than the chick.

And it's only that little bit that's got meat on,

it's hardly any meat if you feel it, you can just feel the spine.

It's a sign that there's not other good fish for them to eat.

So they are having to catch these in lieu of something like sand eels which would be so much better.

-Yeah, full of nutrition.

-Is this a sign

that the birds simply aren't adapting quickly enough?

Yeah. In the last few decades, the temperature of the sea has gone up

and evolution takes thousands and thousands of years to adapt. So...

God, that's extraordinary.

That must be quite a gloomy sight for you.

It's never a good sign, I mean we've seen them early on in the season,

bring quite a lot of sand eels back.

And then in the last week or so they are starting to bring in pike fish, so it's not great.

The search for an occupied burrow goes on for another precarious hour,

until finally, we hit puffling pay dirt.

-Oh, I've got one.

-You've got one!

Fantastic! OK.

Not coming out willingly, is it?

Oh, oh, look at

that pike fish.

I've got him. Oh, look, little thing.

That's no fun is it? You don't want to be eating that.

Should we remove that?

I think it would probably cause more damage than good.

I think we'd leave it. It seems to be quite floppy, so it hasn't

dried out, so it's not going to choke it, it doesn't seem too distressed.

It's extraordinary that that bill, completely different.

Picking up this chick, you would never know that it was a puffin, would you?

-Cos the colours really only come out in the breeding season.

-Yeah.

Yes, of the adults, the coloured bit on the bill is just plates,

and they fall off, so if you see them in the winter,

-they look nothing like an adult puffin at all.

-Just the plain, dark coloured bill.

Not happy. Come on, I know.

There you are, look. And then just...

There just, on the top of it.

So this age, a healthy chick, what sort of weight would you expect?

You are looking for about 250.

-250 grams?

-Yeah, I think yeah, between 200 and 250.

Hmmm... It's not too bad actually,

that's saying 240g, so if we take the 50 off for the bag,

that's 190, so it's not disastrous but it's not great.

And as you say, it's obviously pike fish that they are bringing in now.

Yeah but I think he has had an OK start, he's not doing too bad.

So you think that this little fella...

-Yeah, if he gets...

-..might make it.

A few more good meals,

I think. Less of these I think.

So the warmer sea water means fewer sand eels and some pretty hungry pufflings.

Scurrying back in quite quickly.

-In he goes. Not disastrous news.

-No.

-But not great either.

-But not enough to have us whooping down the cliff.

Let's hope that St Kilda still has puffins for many years to come.

-They are St Kilda, so...

-They are. They are, they are St Kilda for sure.

Back at base camp, we can't help but wonder how people survived here on St Kilda.

It is a joy to be here, though I have to say that physically,

visually, this place has lived up to all my expectations and then some.

What's interesting is I wonder whether a human population could

survive here, now, with the pressure that's being put on the birds.

It would be a very, very tough job having to feed a family on the birds that live here.

You know, they seem to be everywhere but you approach close to them, with anything other than

utter silence when you are going down a hemp rope from you know, 80-90 metres up and they disappear.

So, you know, it's not exactly easy grub.

That's when the weather is good, there's plenty around, and you're fit.

You know, any, any one of those legs gets knocked out from the table

and you are in big trouble, your family is starving.

Yes, imagine you have a kid with a guillemot allergy, then what do you do?

Eat the kid!

Next morning I'm taking our quest to reveal how the St Kildans used to live to the next level.

I'm preparing to venture to the furthest reaches of the annual

bird harvest, to somewhere so inaccessible,

I'm having to take my own camera to document it.

One two, one two, one two.

Boreray, St Kilda's second largest island,

lies four miles away across often hostile seas.

The island is protected by jagged cliffs up to four times the height of the white cliffs of Dover.

It's home to one of the world's largest northern gannet colonies, and the St Kildans would go there

once or twice a year to harvest the birds from the cliffs and sea stacks.

One of these expeditions led to high drama when three men

and eight boys were trapped there for nine months back in 1724.

How did they survive there for so long?

And what did that sort of isolation feel like?

Well, I'm going to get a taster for myself by spending the night there.

It's going to be a real challenge.

Not least because Dan's going to be taking me there,

in the traditional St Kildan way.

What on earth is that?!

This, my boy, is the boat that's going to get you...to Boreray.

No questions asked.

These are the kind of boats, clinker-built wooden boats,

they would've been using for the last hundred years in St Kilda.

We've got perfect weather for it, light wind out of the west, beautiful flat seas.

-I've got a good feeling about this!

-This isn't going to get us out the harbour, I gave you one job!

One job and you come us with this!

You've got one job which is holding that bailing.

Luxury...

a finer vessel I've never seen.

Nicely done.

Two hours' time, my boy, we're going to be in Boreray.

I can't believe I'm bailing already, this is insane!

There is a lot of water in this boat.

The last time I was in a boat like this I was on the Serpentine with a beautiful girl in the back.

It gets better for you, doesn't it?

-We've got the first bit of equipment failure here, look at this thing...

-Oh, dear!

LAUGHTER

The water is absolutely p...ing in!

100 metres out.

A few running repairs already.

I've been reading up about how the St Kildans did this. They only had one boat for the one

village up until sort of 1870s, and there was one famous story

of a loaded boat full of cargo which set off for the Harris Islands,

and was never heard of again, completely disappeared.

That won't happen to us.

I'm very impressed, mate, you can tell you are a rower.

Well...one of my few talents.

Being as your two talents are rowing and history and we are rowing

in a boat that should've been consigned to a museum...

-this is perfect!

-This should just be my speed.

It really doesn't look that far away now.

-From where you're sitting!

-No, seriously, I think we are going to make this.

We're taking lots of water, but it's...

hopefully manageable, and the waves aren't too big.

I tell you what, there's an almighty leak just down there.

-Bubbling up?

-Yeah. It's squirting through the boards.

-Is it a squirter?

-Yeah.

LAUGHTER

This is now a first.

I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're looking low at the stern,

it's getting pretty hard to...

We've got a major leak right underneath, you'll see it, sprung up.

It's like having three extra people in here.

I don't want to be the first guy to say this, but do you think we should get a safety boat in?

We're up to our knees now, actually! Shall I bounce?

Oh, that's not helping.

No, pass me that bucket!

-It was a valiant attempt.

-Aren't we supposed to go down with a sinking ship? Oh, ooh ooh ooh!

OK, get your kit out, let's go.

It was a good voyage!

I'm the last man out, see you later.

Oh, it was...a noble attempt, Steve.

LAUGHTER

I don't suppose you'd give me a lift to that island?

Oh, oh!

To be honest...

I'm having trouble pretending that I'm disappointed.

Oh, well, another piece of St Kildan history lost!

Look at that, that is unbelievable these are all gannets, all of them!

That is fantastic!

Very few people have ever set foot on Boreray.

Its treacherous rocky sides make it impossible to land a boat.

Listen, I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm gonna hop in,

and then if you can chuck me a rope, pull over the gear on the rope...

-No problem.

-..and then wave you goodbye.

So there's nothing else for it, and if I'm honest,

I quite fancy a swim.

How is it, Steve?

Very cold is how it is, Dan!

All right, buddy, well...

I'll see you later then.

See you later, guys.

For the next 24 hours I'm going to be left to explore Boreray without my fellow presenters...

..and to tell you the truth, I can't wait.

That's the first difficult bit over and done with.

Now I've got the great privilege of being able to explore this island

which probably receives less than a visitor every couple of years.

This is going to be really quite something.

I'm heading up there.

Boreray and its sea stacks, are the only place on St Kilda

that has northern gannets,

and the St Kildans would come here every September to catch them.

They were mainly after the babies

which were oilier and fattier than the adults.

In just a day or so each collector would catch up to 300 birds.

Borerary's ledges were like supermarket shelves -

there were certainly plenty to chose from here.

Oh, wow!

Just got my first view...

of the two stacks, oh!

Surrounded by...more birds than I've ever seen in my life.

The air is just thick with gannets.

It's...the most majestic thing I've ever seen in the British Isles.

This is the largest breeding colony of gannets in the world.

They are such beautiful birds. It's our largest sea bird.

It looks as if it's kind of dunked its head in butterscotch

and it has almost kohl like an Egyptian around the eyes.

Really delightful birds.

It's fabulous watching all the jostling going on on the ledges.

Some of them have got chicks, others you can see nuzzling each other,

preening each other, obviously little rituals going on between partnerships.

Occasionally because the ledges are so small, they knock other gannets off the ledges which turn off,

do a couple of circuits, and come back in and land again.

Catching the gannets on these cliffs must have been incredibly dangerous.

The St Kildans themselves had wonderful names for these places.

This is known as the "Cliff of Thunders",

and that below me is "Vertigo Slope",

and...it's very well named.

Maybe if I take this off the tripod I can show you why.

The ground here is pockmarked with puffin burrows, incredibly unstable

and dropping away thousands of feet down to the sea below.

It's not a place you would want to be in a howling gale, but right now

it's about the most beautiful place I think I've ever seen.

Beautiful but perilous.

In 1724 there was an expedition that went spectacularly wrong.

Three men and eight boys came to harvest the gannets,

but the boat to collect them didn't return.

They were stranded here for nine, long months, all through the winter.

How they managed to survive, no-one really knows.

They must've eaten the gannets for food, probably raw.

I can see there are some cleats they could have slept in,

but what did they drink?

Despite the amount of rainfall here there's precious little fresh water on Boreray.

The guys who were stuck here

must have had to survive on little puddles like this.

Yeah, it's kind of sweet, but there's an awful lot of bugs and things in there.

You live on that for long, you'd get all sorts of nasty diseases.

They had absolutely no idea why no-one had come to pick them up.

All they could do was wait...

..and wait.

It's just unimaginably beautiful.

But for the St Kildans who were trapped here,

you know, they can see their homeland,

their families are just there,

but it would be totally impossible to make any contact with them.

They'd have been sat here every evening just praying to see a boat,

but never knowing if anyone was going to come and rescue them.

It must have been just the most incredibly melancholy experience.

It was only when a boat from mainland Scotland came by

that the stranded St Kildans were rescued.

And when they sailed back in to Village Bay,

they finally discovered why no-one had come to get them.

The community had been devastated by smallpox.

They had left behind them 120 family and friends.

They came home to find only 30 of them still alive.

Perhaps the stranded men and boys had been the lucky ones after all.

My short time on Boreray has been magical.

But just as I'm getting myself comfortable,

I get an unexpected call from the producer.

'Just to keep you informed, it looks like there's a severe

'weather front coming in faster than previously forecast.

'If sea conditions worsen,

'there's a chance the boat won't be able to collect you, over.'

It seems hard to believe the weather could change so quickly,

but I'll just have to wait and see what the morning holds.

Just woken up.

It's really rather early...

and although it's beautiful still,

the waves here are starting to break into white caps.

There's quite a lot of swell and the wind is really racing,

and the clouds are moving at a terrific pace.

So, I'm not sure that the little boat is going to be able to come out and get me.

I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed and wait for a call.

Soon the whole scenery of the islands starts to change,

the clouds darken, and the waves pick up even further.

It seems things are taking a turn for the worse.

'The situation this morning is the tide and the surge

'is too strong for a RIB to get to you, over.'

OK, so what's your solution, then?

'The solution has become that the coast guard are going

'to come in, and they are going to winch you off, over.'

OK, approximately what time will that happen then, John?

'That's going to happen in the next, possibly half an hour, over.'

With no boat able reach me and a storm apparently on the way,

my options are limited.

This is the St Kilda I'd been told to expect.

Everyone on the main island has been monitoring the weather closely

and they're insisting there's a heavy weather pattern coming in

which could see me stranded here for several days.

So they've sent in this helicopter to pick me up.

As the helicopter gets closer I'm going to have to put the camera away

because we can't have anything flapping around that might get entangled in the rotors.

So I think these are my last words for a bit.

I never imagined that I'd be leaving Boreray quite like this.

Though I can see that leaving me high on the cliffs exposed

to the elements would be risky, part of me still wants to stay.

Especially as I know the St Kildans never had the luxury of a helicopter to rescue them.

I guess I've learnt the hard way how dangerous and changeable the weather can be here.

And how precarious life was for the people of these islands.

It's only a few days into our mission and we're making progress.

We've found out how the St Kildans hunted,

what they ate, where they lived

and just how tough and unpredictable life could be on these islands.

But for how long were these islands inhabited?

We know the St Kildans in these photographs spoke Gaelic

and so must have come originally from Ireland or Scotland.

But who, if anyone, lived here before them?

And are there clues on the island to help us find out?

Using a simple map of St Kildan place names, I'm going to do a bit of detective work.

I've been poking around the village and there's evidence of all the settlement,

but there's some clues on St Kilda which makes me think it's been settled for a lot longer.

There's Viking names all around the coast. Now 1,200 years ago the Vikings burst out across the

North Atlantic, they conquered and settled and raided, and this island

was no exception. They were excellent sailors.

They'd have known to come in here during a big northerly or westerly gale for shelter.

Where I am now, I am coming up to Orseval

which means Eastern Hill in Old Norse.

I mean the name St Kilda itself, or the name Hirta, in fact is possibly

the Old Norse for stag, and perhaps that refers to its jagged outline.

At sea, the silhouette looks like a stag's horn.

Then there's Boreray which means Fort Island.

It might've been used as a fort by the Vikings, or just looked like a fort.

This is Askin and Scarab, the rock of the cormorant.

All around the coast we've got Norse names.

The big question I'm wondering is, did they just come here and raid and plunder

or did they come on a more permanent basis and settle?

Hiking back inland, I'm looking for any names

on the map that will give me clues about the Vikings settling here.

Now this little dry burn here, this little dry stream has got

my favourite name I think it's called 'Alvin Aleshkow' which is very interesting.

It's a mixture of the Gaelic and the Viking names

for this stream, it means, "stream stream of the spring."

The reason stream is repeated is cos Gaelic settlers would've learnt the name of this and then renamed it.

It's like an English person going to Scotland and calling something Lake of the Loch.

I think it means that later Gaelic settlers learnt lots

of these place names from the Vikings and adapted them.

I can see that there are more Viking names inland, and one for an important source of water.

OK, somewhere around here is the well for the village called Toba Kilda, which again is

an interesting example of the Gaelic and the Viking names mixed together. It means "Well, cold well".

So more evidence that the Vikings were here.

The other thing is, for my money, the Vikings settled vast parts

of Northern Europe, up into Russia, even into Northern France,

big parts of England, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and even a bit in Canada.

So, I can't believe they wouldn't have come to St Kilda to settle.

I think this is the well just up here.

There have also been Vikings finds - there's a spear tip, a sword

and a couple of broaches were found here, clearly of Viking origin.

And lastly, like this well,

things are named with Viking names that were for everyday domestic use.

I mean, there's fields on the island, called Land Fallin, for example - Paul's Land.

Queen Oscot, which means a hollow. They were naming...

pieces of the land, and if you're naming the land, you're not here to raid, you're here to stay.

These place names I think prove that the Vikings did colonise St Kilda over 1,000 years ago.

But now I'm wondering, were they the first people to live here?

Did anyone come before them?

Now we know from the Viking field names

that people have been farming on St Kilda for over 1,000 years.

But after centuries of surviving here, could the soil itself provide

a clue as to why the St Kildans eventually left?

In the mid-18th Century, their meagre crops started to fail.

This little piece of land in front of Main Street was the only place

on the island to grow barley,

but the harvest gradually got smaller and smaller.

The St Kildans didn't know why this was happening, but one theory

I'm going to investigate is that their farming land

had somehow become poisoned.

I'm joining the National Trust's Sam Dennis to put this theory to the test.

What I'm doing is just going to reveal some of the agricultural soil.

We've got a new machine that points out the soil

and gives us a reading of the toxins that are in there.

OK, so how does this work? Shall I do it? You're covered in mud.

So, what do I need to do?

Stick it in there, press down really hard and just...

-Push it into the mud? OK. And then part fire the triggery thing.

-Yes.

This hand-held gun acts like an X-ray machine

to test the soil for high levels of specific toxins.

OK, so for lead the PB, we've got 40.7 ppm - what's that?

-That's parts per million.

-What would be a safe level of lead in soil?

A safe one would be something under ten, so 40 is very high,

it's four times.

That's incredible. And the zinc ZN here is 60.1.

We would expect something below 50 for that to be at safe levels.

I can't believe that it's so toxic after so long.

It's frightening. These levels sound like, you know... You just think

this is such a lovely, pure, environment, away from it all.

But these are the sort of things you'd expect in a really polluted city or something.

They are about equal to modern-day industrial cities, those levels.

The soil does seem to be toxic, but how can this have happened?

Well, the thought is it comes from burning peat ash, thrown out on the

fields, and then throwing sea bird carcasses and even human waste as a type of manure.

-So, presumably, a pretty unhealthy environment if they are using that sort of thing to fertilise it?

-Yeah.

It's extraordinary.

It seems nowadays that that was incredibly stupid, that they were

living in such close proximity to fields that they were fertilising with dead birds and human waste.

I don't think they were stupid, they perhaps didn't realise the effect

it was going to have on their soil in the future.

Perhaps the same as just a few years ago we were unaware of how we'd been polluting our own environment.

This evidence does seem to confirm the St Kildans' own farming methods were actually poisoning the ground,

making crops more difficult to grow, and unwittingly

making an already hard life even harder.

Could this have been another reason why they eventually left St Kilda?

It was a precarious existence, with little to fall back on if things went wrong.

In September 1885, there was a terrible storm

and the St Kildans lost much of their harvest, both birds and barley.

By Christmas they were nearly starving, with only seaweed to eat.

Making contact with the distant mainland became a matter of survival.

My first experience of St Kilda, the first time I heard about the place, was when I saw an exhibition

of St Kilda with pictures of men with huge beards living in cottages, totally unaware of what was going on

in the rest of civilisation, sending their mail back to the mainland on a boat they just tossed into the waves.

And it seemed to me to be the most remote, bizarre outpost, that you could barely believe was British.

It stuck in my mind, so I've decided to rope Kate into creating our own

mail boat, just like the St Kildans did when they were starving in 1885.

But our mail boat has been dragged into the 21st Century.

This has got a satellite tracking device on, which obviously the St Kildans wouldn't have used.

But this really was the way that they communicated...

-Yeah.

-..with the outside world.

Their bright yellow plastic buoy would have been a sheep's bladder.

But otherwise it was the same as this, and they put it together

in a boat, cast it off to sea, and then anything from several weeks

to several months later, that message usually arrived back at the mainland and in some cases, it saved lives.

So do you want to be rescued?

-What shall I write?

-I quite like it here, I'd quite like to stay here, but what are you saying, Kate?

I'm going to say, "If you find this message, please phone this number".

Do I trust you enough to hold them while you hammer?

It's quite a nice story, how this used to have quite serious

uses obviously, and saved quite a lot of people from quite nasty situations

but also in the 1900s when lots of Victorian tourists coming over here to gawp at the St Kildans.

They started actually making some money out of it, because they'd send back mail boats like these,

-using them as postcards, and they'd charge the tourists to use them.

-Brilliant idea!

-You're going to go and...

-I'll try and get up there.

-We're going to give it the best start we can.

-Yeah. Yeah. OK.

I still think it's going to end up right here.

You see, frankly, if I were a St Kildan

and I'd spent as long as I had with sea birds, you'd think that they'd

have trained a gannet to do it for them, wouldn't you?

All right then, I name this ship Wilderness St Kilda.

God bless her and all who sink in her!

It's stuck in the seaweed!

THEY LAUGH

OK, it's stuck in the seaweed.

Soon the current sets the mailboat free.

In 1885 when the St Kildans were starving at Christmas,

their mail boat asking for help landed at Uig in the Hebrides.

The British Government sent supplies, and the St Kildans were saved from starvation.

But where will our boat turn up, and will anyone ever find our message?

Those living on St Kilda had to struggle to survive,

but life, and love, goes on.

At times, there were nearly 200 people living here, so when the time

came for a St Kildan girl to marry, she had a bit of a choice.

And she used a rather unusual way to pick out a husband.

Overlooking the southern island of Dun is a view point with a difference.

A triangular piece of rock that balances precariously over a 300-ft drop.

This was where boys became men, and women could take their pick.

That's the mistress stone there.

-That one there?

-What's the story of this place?

Well, hard as it is to believe, to impress women, to try and get

a woman to marry them, the guys would go up there and perform an act of daredevil balancing

and then the ladies would say, "Well, we'll have a bit of that".

You see, I'm sorry, but from a woman's perspective, if anyone stood

on there, on one leg or whatever, you'd just think they were insane!

You wouldn't marry them, you'd think, "What sort of an example is that to my children?!"

It's to do with the way they made a living, collecting sea birds off the cliffs,

-they had to be great climbers, have great balance.

-That's true.

Otherwise, they wouldn't make a good husband. It's like evolution.

-It's like driving a flash car today, it shows you've got money, you can provide for your family.

-Yeah.

Well, you know, as we're here, guys...

..see if you can impress me!

-Would you go up there?

-Not for you!

As the boys prepare to take up the challenge on Mistress Stone, they'll be re-enacting the ancient tradition

carried out by young St Kildan males before proposing to their prospective brides.

By performing this ritual balancing act, the St Kildan men would prove

to their women how capable they were of catching sea birds for food,

high on the cliff edge.

God, the things I'll go through to get a lady!

The idea is to balance on one foot, bend forward and line up your other

foot and both hands on top of each other, all touching.

Pretty darn tricky, even in your front room!

Well done, mate, that was very good. Right, I want to see the next one now! Send Dan across.

-Right... Right, your turn.

-My turn.

Now Dan, he does worry me a little bit, cos...

he's a good, active, brave bloke, but he's got a long way to bend.

Yeah, one of these days, Steve, I'd like to challenge...

on something I'm actually faintly good at.

OK, here we go.

Bit tentative there.

-Ooh, no, oooh!

-Hold on!

He's beginning the bend, bit of a wobble there. Oh!

Oooh. Oh!

Brilliant effort, yes!

Right, come down, and I'll give you your judgement.

You were very, very, very brave.

I was extremely impressed, so my verdict is...

..Steve, you...

wait, wait.

No, this is a dramatic pause moment, you did extremely well.

-However...

-Oh, no!

You've spent a lot of time hanging off cliffs, whereas Dan here has got

about a third more distance to bend than you have.

So, my choice is Dan.

-However...

-I'll see you later!

However, when he's away chasing birds you can come and visit!

See you, Steve!

So far in Britain's Lost World, we've found out the St Kildans

lived mainly off birds, and we know how they caught them.

We've discovered why their crops failed, and so why they might have left.

And we've seen that today the puffin colony is in trouble.

That is not a good sign.

-Look at that.

-Above all, we've started to get a real sense of

what life was like here, how tough it was, but also how beautiful.

Next time on Britain's Lost World -

we'll be finding out how the wildlife below the waves is doing.

We'll discover if anyone lived here before the Vikings.

And we'll be tracking down the island's biggest menace.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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