This fascinating volume reveals a long Hebridean hunting tradition, in all its richness and strangeness, says Will Self in the Daily Telegraph.

A decade and a half ago, I spent a winter living on the Orcadian island of Rousay in a four-square early-Victorian dower house hard by a tumultuous sound. Throughout the long, dark nights, while the gales from the wild Atlantic soughed about the eaves, my very sense of orientation – like an internal weathervane – was swivelled around.

On my trips down to Edinburgh, I found the city to be oppressively warm and its inhabitants brassily sensual; as for London, it felt like Rio de Janeiro. The idea of north had become the only reality, its scattered archipelagos my main, and I began to seriously consider the Faeroes as a holiday destination.

One of the books I read during my boreal reclusion was a short history of the isolated Hebridean island of St Kilda, where a small community survived for almost a millennium harvesting seafowl from the 1,000-foot sea cliffs.

The idea of the St Kildans gripped my imagination powerfully: meat, condiments, catholicons, feathers for export – even their footwear was furnished for them by fulmars, gannets, puffins and cormorants.

Some assert – although others just as strenuously deny it – that Kildan society was even done for by tetanus, transmitted to newborn infants by an animistic ceremony involving the smearing of the umbilicus with fulmar oil.

To be in these northern isles is to be insistently aware of seafowl – they criss-cross the skies and swoop from the sea cliffs. Indeed, the overall number of seafowl in the north of Britain has significantly increased in the past century or so, a pleasing contrast to the war of conquest enacted by humankind against all other species in the lower latitudes.

It’s against this background – remote island communities threatened with depopulation – that we must understand, and appreciate, the sagas of the guga hunters.

I had no idea until I picked up Donald S Murray’s remarkable book that the hunting and eating of seafowl was still a live tradition in the Hebrides.

But it’s true: a small group of men from Ness at the northernmost tip of Lewis are granted an exemption each year from the provisions of the Bird Preservation Act, in order that they may voyage 40 miles north to the remote and rocky islet of Sulasgeir, where they harvest anything up to a couple of thousand gugas, or immature gannets, from its cliffs.

The men are put ashore, or drag their boats up on to the bluffs – there is no natural harbour. They sleep in earwig-infested bothies, and erect rope pulleys and wooden chutes to aid their industry.

The birds are taken from the nest and their necks wrung; they are butchered, plucked, salted and stacked into bizarre circular towers. After three weeks or so, weather permitting, the guga hunters head south again, with their cargo of seafowl.

Traditionally, guga has been both a staple and a delicacy for many folk in rural Lewis. Predictably, opinion is sharply divided on how palatable the meat is, with some prizing it as rich, game and piquant, while others reject it entirely.

It’s one of the many strengths of Murray’s book that he not only places the guga within the Hebridean culinary culture, but demonstrates how widespread the eating of seafowl once was, including a recipe for roasting “solan goose” offered by a London butcher in the 1920s.

Indeed, it’s possible to understand the gradual flight, since the 1600s, of seafowl from southern tables as of a piece with the casting off of other ties to the natural world.

The guga hunters are representatives of a community that has remained deeply imbrued with sea and land, one that has, until the last generation or so, clung to the rock of its Christian faith (or several rocks, for the churches thereabouts are as fissiparous as they are fundamental) and stayed nesting within the Gaelic language.

Murray is neither sentimental nor whimsical when he writes about this atavism on the edge of our world; as a Hebridean native himself, he understands the culture as a living and changing thing, mourning the loss of people first, and folk-ways only in as much as they form part of a holistic system.

The guga hunters, far from representing a dangerous depredation of the Sulasgeir gannetry, have husbanded the wide-winged and sharp-beaked gulls over the decades, tending them as other less hardy men might tend their allotments.

Perhaps it’s me who is sentimental, because I found Murray’s evocation of life on the edge of the world deeply moving.

Interspersed with his own poetry and that of others (some in English, some, a little annoyingly, not translated from the Gaelic); laced with archive accounts and personal testimonies; containing glosses of ancient legends both local and universal; and with fine descriptions of the topography and ecology of the northern isles, The Guga Hunters builds into one of those books that prove incontrovertibly the hoary old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

When I’d finished it, I found that like those Orcadian gales, Murray had succeeded in reorienting me, and I was already planning my route from Stornoway to St Kilda, from St Kilda to Sulasgeir, from Sulasgeir to North Rona – and so on via other distant gull-thronged stacks and skerries, to Ultima Thule.