I fell for St Kilda 20 years ago, when I was dragged grumbling into a picture gallery on a dreary family holiday in Cornwall. Inside was an exhibition of sepia-soaked photographs from the other end of the country – and I was immediately transfixed.

The pictures showed barefoot men with ZZ Top beards dancing across vertical rockfaces to gather up sea birds. These were the people of St Kilda, harvesting their main source of food, fuel and insulation.

Their only method of communication with the mainland, the display said, was a mail boat constructed from an inflated sheep’s bladder, which they would cast into the sea like a message in a bottle.

It all seemed too exotic, too antiquated, to be true, but it got weirder. The photographs were dated as late as the 1920s – they had been taken as the rest of the world recovered from the first world war. I had to go there.

12 classic Scottish island stories

The travel editor at Times Online delves into the collection to choose his favourite recent features on the Scottish islands

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St Kilda is a place few know about, but one of endless wild miracles. Cast away at the remotest periphery of Britain, 40 miles beyond the outermost Hebrides and battered by North Atlantic waves, its magnificent cliffs are cloaked in shifting mists and alive with more sea birds than the mind can comprehend.

Minke whales and orcas cruise its coastlines, and seals sing mournful songs from caves beaten into the rock by the ceaseless sea. It is our most remote wilderness.

I finally made it there last summer, when the BBC invited me to make a series on the islands with Kate Humble and Dan Snow. Dan is a historian and spent his time investigating the astounding archeology of a people who abandoned their near-Stone Age way of life only when they evacuated the island en masse in 1930. Only military personnel occupy St Kilda now.

Kate and I were tasked with finding out about the archipelago’s extraordinary natural wonders – and thus I found myself cast adrift on Boreray island on a glorious blue-sky day, with just my video camera for company. Boreray lies four miles east of St Kilda’s main island, Hirta. Because of its steep flanks, and the lack of any harbour, it has never been inhabited, and it has more sea birds per square foot than any place I’ve ever seen.

Even in modern times, years go by without a single visitor setting foot on Boreray, and it is instantly obvious why. The rocks emerge sheer from the waves and form 1,200ft cliffs – the highest in Europe. The only place a landing can be attempted is at the southern toe of the island, where a bold leap from the prow of a bouncing boat and a dangerous scramble across slippery boulders can place a nimble-footed passenger on the shore.

But, since we had a still, sunshiny day – the likes of which St Kilda experiences perhaps once a decade – I decided to take the safer option of diving into the sea and swimming for land, dragging enough gear to last a week, should a change in weather strand me there. This may sound melodramatic, but ferocious storms can whip up in hours on these islands, leaving human beings fragile and exposed.

WESTERN In the 19th century, the ISLES members of a small crew of St Kildans who landed on Boreray on a birdcatching trip were stranded for nine months when their boat did not return. How they survived a winter here, on an island without water, fuel or proper shelter, and with nothing but raw sea birds to eat, is beyond me. Worse, when they were finally rescued by a boat from the mainland, they found that Hirta had been ravaged by smallpox, and almost all their loved ones were in the ground.

It’s difficult to reconcile this tragedy with the mind’s-eye image I will always cherish of Boreray. I ascended its vertiginous grassy slopes to the summit, where a sapphire ocean pricked with diamonds of sunlight stretched out towards the sea-monster skyline of the main islands. The air was choked with fulmars pirouetting and dancing on the updraft, and great skuas swooped furiously towards my head whenever I inadvertently neared their nests. Brown Boreray sheep stood and watched as though bewildered by my presence, scattering in panic if I got too close.

Out to the north, I could see two sea stacks, Stac an Armin and Stac Lee – leviathans jutting up out of the ocean like immense papal mitres. About their walls, in an endless holding pattern, circled hundreds of thousands of Britain’s most impressive birds.

A recent BBC survey voted the sight of gannets dive-feeding as our number-one wildlife spectacle, and Boreray is home to the largest colony in the world. Even Dan the history man, who had spent the entire trip mocking Kate and me for cooing over “seagulls and pigeons”, was stunned into silence by a boat ride around these stacks.

Gannets are striking birds, their plumage purest white save for wings dipped in black ink, Egyptian eyes painted with kohl and heads adorned with butterscotch. When feeding, they soar above the water, spot their mark, then hang motionless for a fraction of a second before folding in their wings and dropping into the waves like avian harpoons. They rarely miss. To see thousands of these birds piercing the sea is more spectacular than anything the game reserves of Africa can offer.

It was almost midnight before the sky’s pale pinks and oranges turned to scarlet over the main islands and I bedded down on the steep, grassy slopes of Boreray. Above my head, the circling gannets had been supplanted by puffins returning from their day at sea. They plummeted toward the hillsides like comedy clockwork toys, crash-landing into burrows all around me. It was the most beautiful thing I have seen in this country.

As I looked across the straits, snuggled in my nice Gore-Tex bivvy bag, it was impossible not to think of the men who were stranded here so long. What melancholy they must have felt, bedding down every evening, able to see their home just a few miles across the water, yet as far away as the stars. But I knew only serenity and contentment – and the curious lullaby of storm petrels and puffins, wooing me to sleep on the edge of the world.

Travel details: day trips to St Kilda from Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, cost about £170pp, with Kilda Cruises (01859 502060, www.kildacruises.co.uk ). Be prepared for some serious weather; the boats do not sail in extreme conditions. To really get a feel for the archipelago, you’ll need more time there. For that, the only option is a whole-boat charter. Steve Backshall’s team used the Glen Tarsan (0131 623 5012, www.themajesticline.co.uk ), a well-equipped boat with berths for 12: a three-night cruise costs £6,950.

The three-part series Wilderness: St Kilda will be screened on BBC1 in the spring

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