The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda

by Andrew Fleming

Discover the true story of St. Kilda.

When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’ lost its permanent population after five millennia.

It has long been accepted that the islanders’ failure to adapt to the modern world was its demise. Andrew Fleming overturns the traditional view. Unafraid of highlighting dark times, he shows how they sacrificed their reputation as an uncorrupted, ideal society to embrace and exploit the tourist trade. Creating a prestigious tweed, exporting the ancestors of today’s Hebridean sheep, the islanders gained access to consumer goods and learned how to play politics to their advantage.

This book tells the absorbing and eventful story of St Kilda from earliest times, up to the evacuation and its aftermath. Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich culture of the islanders themselves, as well as the numerous outsiders who engaged with the remote island community.

Reviews of The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda

'Rich with social history, counteracting stereotypes of the island community's final decline to produce a much more nuanced and interesting view' – Current Archaeology

'Fleming has written a magnificent and completely engaging book, the result of long engagement with St Kilda and its people. It is full of fine stories, acute character sketches, information about how the islanders lived, what they did, even what they thought' – Allan Massie, The Scotsman

'Andrew Fleming has written a book about St Kilda in a way no one has managed before … A sense of things as they actually were comes bounding out of its pagesas it sets the exceptional story of St Kilda in a context of undistorted truthfulness-to-life that is sobering, moving and revelatory' – Adam Nicolson, best-selling author of The Sea Room and Life Between the Tides

'this is a book that tells the definitive story of St Kilda that will be of lasting value having, quite literally, rewritten the history of the archipelago' – Ken Lussey, Undiscovered Scotland

'a comprehensive and thought-provoking history of a vanished community that is full of intriguing facts and stories' – Susan Flockhart, The Herald

'He is prodigiously well informed, an excellent writer, and his archaeologist’s eye and academic analysis could not be bettered. As a contributor to the modern St Kilda conversation, Andrew Fleming is compelling' – West Highland Free Press

'In his gripping new history, Andrew Fleming re-examines an often-told story, using anecdote, analysis and the British Newspaper Archive to convey the atmosphere and challenges of a place he believes may have been colonised by Mesolithic hunter-warriors' – Country Life

'the author’s research has been wide ranging over many aspects of island life… this is a book not to be missed' – Peter Costello, The Irish Catholic

'a nuanced and compelling analysis of this historic event, Fleming's re-interpretation of St Kilda's history overturns the traditional view that it was a failure to adapt that resulted in the end of the St Kilda way of life' – History Scotland

'Thorough, consistently readable and thought provoking. Andrew Fleming adopts neither a rose-tinted view of the islanders nor an overly critical one; he treats them as fellow humans, lodged in their own place and time – and in so doing, he has delivered an excellent history of St Kilda and its islanders' – Andrew Cordier, Scottish Local History

'Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich cultures of the islanders themselves' – Oban Times

'a well-written and sobering account of tough times' – Scottish Field

'A worthy addition to the St Kilda bookshelf… an entertaining, and at times, opinionated treatise on probably Scotland’s most intriguing island' – The Ileach