Has anybody seen this film? I really want to see The Edge of the World. I've been reading about St. Kilda and it fascinates me. For those of you not familiar, St. Kilda is a small island wet of Scotland which enjoyed relative solitude for hundreds of years until the last residents left in 1930.

Here's some interesting tidbits:

-After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, it was rumored that Prince Charles Edward Stuart and some of his senior Jacobite aides had escaped to St Kilda. An expedition was launched, and in due course British soldiers were ferried ashore to Hirta. They found a deserted village, as the St Kildans, fearing pirates, had fled to caves to the west. When the St Kildans were persuaded to come down, the soldiers discovered that the isolated natives knew nothing of the prince and had never heard of King George II either.

-In the late 19th century, the islanders could communicate with the rest of the world only by lighting a bonfire on the summit of Conachair and hoping a passing ship might see it, or by using the "St Kilda mailboat". The St Kildans would fashion a piece of wood into the shape of a boat and place in it a small bottle or tin containing a message. Launched when the wind came from the northwest, two thirds of the messages were later found on the west coast of Scotland or, less conveniently, in Norway.

-An excavation of the Taigh an t-Sithiche (the 'house of the fairies') in 1877 by John Sands unearthed the remains of gannet, sheep, cattle and limpets amidst various stone tools. The building is between 1,700 and 2,500 years old, but the food items were the same as those consumed by contemporary islanders, which suggests that the St Kildan diet had changed little over the millennia. Indeed the tools were recognized by the St Kildans, who could put names to them as similar devices were still in use.

-Theirs was not a utopian society; the islanders had ingenious wooden locks for their property, and financial penalties were exacted for misdemeanors. Nonetheless, no resident St Kildan is known to have fought in a war, and in four centuries of history, no serious crime committed by an islander was recorded there.

-After World War I most of the young men left the island, and the population fell from 73 in 1920 to 37 in 1928. After the death of four men from influenza in 1926 and a succession of crop failures in the 1920s, the last straw came with the death from appendicitis of a young woman, Mary Gillies, in January 1930. On 29 August 1930, the last 36 inhabitants were evacuated to Morvern on the Scottish mainland at their own request.
The morning of the evacuation promised a perfect day. The sun rose out of a calm and sparkling sea and warmed the impressive cliffs of Oiseval…. Observing tradition the islanders left an open Bible and a small pile of oats in each house, locked all the doors and at 7 a.m. boarded the Harebell… They were reported to have stayed cheerful throughout the operation. But as the long antler of Dun fell back onto the horizon and the familiar outline of the island grew faint, the severing of an ancient tie became a reality and the St Kildans gave way to tears.


The island is now a military base and nature conservancy. Sounds like an amazing place.