Soay, St Kilda
uninhabited islet in the St Kilda archipelago, Scotland
Soay (Scottish Gaelic: Soaigh) is an uninhabited islet in the St Kilda archipelago, Scotland. The name is from Old Norse Sauðey, meaning "island of sheep". The island is part of the St Kilda World Heritage Site and home to a primitive breed of sheep. Excluding Rockall, it is the westernmost point of the United Kingdom.
Geography
Soay lies some 40 miles (64 km) west-northwest of North Uist in the North Atlantic. It is about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) north-west of Hirta, from which it is separated by the narrow Sound of Soay, which is only about 500 metres wide. Three sea stacks, Stac Shoaigh (Soay Stac), 61 metres (200 ft), Stac Biorach, 73 metres (240 ft) and Stac Dona, 27 meters (89ft), lie between. The island covers about 96.8 hectares (239 acres) and reaches a height of 378 metres (1,240 ft), the cliffs rising sheer from the sea. The summit, Cnoc Glas, is the most westerly hill in Great Britain and the United Kingdom.
The island is formed of a breccia of gabbro and dolerites and is a single mountain peak rising from the sea-bed, without Ice-Age erosion.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Soay, St Kilda” as uninhabited islet in the St Kilda archipelago, Scotland. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1574956. Authority coordinates are 57.831, -8.632. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soay, St Kilda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.