A Path to St Kilda

My story probably began as early as 1960, when I was 12 years old and living near St Kilda — not the remote island in the Atlantic, but the inner suburb of Melbourne. That was when I first began supporting the St Kilda Football Club in the Australian Rules competition.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when I moved into St Kilda proper, that my curiosity about the name truly took hold. I began researching its origins and discovered that St Kilda was also the name of a small, remote island some 50 miles west of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland.

At first, I assumed the island had been named after a Saint Kilda, but soon learned that no such saint ever existed. The name most likely arose from a misunderstanding — perhaps from the Norse word Kelda (meaning “well”) or the Gaelic Childa (also meaning “well”) — mistaken over time as the name of a saint.

Fast forward to 2010. At the end of a long cycling journey through the Orkneys, Skye, and the full length of the Outer Hebrides, a friend and I managed to arrange a boat trip to the Isle of St Kilda. Our three- or four-hour visit turned out to be the highlight of the entire Scottish adventure. After years of reading about the island and seeing it only in black-and-white photographs, I could finally experience it in colour — its cliffs, the silence, and the sense of isolation.

While there, I began to wonder what it would be like to stay on the island for an extended period — to soak up its atmosphere and glimpse what life might have been like for its former inhabitants. I knew that St Kildan men once wove a highly sought-after tweed that hadn’t been made on the island since 1930, when the last 36 residents asked to be evacuated to the mainland. And so a wacky idea popped into my head: what if I learned to weave, so that one day I could return to St Kilda and weave its tweed once again, using the traditional Soay and Boreray sheep wool?

When I returned to Australia, the idea slowly faded into the background — until July 2025, when I returned to Scotland to kayak the length of the Great Glen from Fort William to Inverness, paddling through the legendary Loch Ness along the way.

After the paddle, I happened to mention my long-forgotten idea to a close friend in Tayport, near Dundee. From that moment on, doors began to open one after another — almost miraculously — until I eventually received permission from the National Trust for Scotland to stay on the island for four weeks in 2027.

Along the way, I learned what St Kilda tweed actually was — not a tartan, as I had once thought — after receiving a photograph of one of the last known pieces, woven around 1930, from the West Highland Museum in Fort William. I began researching the type of loom the St Kildans would have used and the kinds of wool spun by the island’s women. I also met Cheryl, a Soay sheep breeder near Dundee, who kindly agreed to set aside 30 kilograms of fleece for me to collect next year.

Back in Australia, I bought a loom similar to those once used on St Kilda and learned to weave under the guidance of one of Australia’s finest weaving teachers, Ilka White, who happened to live near Bendigo.

One of many extraordinary coincidences occurred on the fifth Saturday of Ilka’s course, when she invited former students to join us for afternoon tea. I happened to sit beside a woman named Sandra, who asked about my interest in weaving — as I was the only man in the class. When I began to tell her about my St Kilda project, she nearly fell off her chair: her ancestors had come from the Isle of St Kilda, having emigrated to Australia in the 1880s! She later lent me several books about the island’s history, highlighting the sections on weaving, and even wrote a letter of support for my submission to the National Trust for Scotland.

Even with all these fortunate turns, I knew the final hurdle — gaining official permission to stay on St Kilda — would be the hardest of all. It seemed almost impossible that my eccentric idea might actually be approved. But with the help of a close friend, I prepared a submission and sent it off along with a sample of my weaving. After months of waiting and several email exchanges, I finally received the extraordinary news: the National Trust for Scotland had granted me permission to stay on St Kilda for four weeks in the summer of 2027 to weave St Kilda tweed — the first time it will have been woven there since 1930.

Since then, I’ve also arranged with a breeder of Boreray sheep in the Orkneys to supply another 30 kilograms of fleece, and with the Border Mill in Duns to spin the yarn as close as possible to the original specifications — though no written records survive to confirm exactly how the island women spun it.

When I return to Scotland next year to finalise the logistics, I plan to visit the West Highland Museum in Fort William to examine the original piece of St Kilda tweed in person. Having only seen photographs of it so far, I hope this will help me determine the likely thickness of the original yarn and discuss it further with the mill.

It’s hard to believe that in just over a year, so many pieces have fallen into place. What began as a passing curiosity decades ago has now come full circle — soon to be woven back into the living fabric of St Kilda itself.