29/08/2026
On this day, 29 August 1930 the last residents were evacuated from St Kilda, a group of islands 110 miles off the west coast of Scotland that had been lived on for thousands of years.
📌This object from our collection is a St Kilda mailboat and was used by islanders to communicate with the mainland.
📪By the late 1890s a unique system of mail dispatch had developed on the remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda. Letters were enclosed in a waterproof receptacle, usually a sheep’s bladder, attached to a homemade buoy, and launched into the sea in the hope that they would wash ashore on the mainland and be forwarded on by whoever chanced upon them. They were aiming for them to find land in the Outer Hebrides on the Isle of Lewis, but depending on the current, it could take weeks or months for letters to reach their destination.
📮There are records of mailboats washing ashore as far afield as Norway. Life of these remote islands was harsh and in August 1930 the island was evacuated on the request of the islanders and the archipelago abandoned. This mailboat came into the museum’s care sometime before 1938.
