Final preparations are being made around the country this morning to celebrate the first St Kilda Day. The events will mark the evacuation of the Atlantic archipelago�s final inhabitants on August 29, 1930.

Final preparations are being made around the country this morning to celebrate the first St Kilda Day.

The events will mark the evacuation of the Atlantic archipelago's final inhabitants on August 29, 1930. Their legacy, and the symbolism of their remote lives over millennia, will be remembered in music, words and pictures around Scotland.

"It is the UK's only dual World Heritage Site and while the St Kilda's story isn't unique, it has captured the global imagination and become emblematic of islands and what happens to populations that are not sustained," said Malcolm MacLean, of the National Gaelic Arts project that staged the celebrations.

The islands themselves, 41 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, remain difficult to access. Fewer than 5000 visitors a year make the voyage.

The easiest way to reach St Kilda nowadays is to head towards Suffolk. In the village of Chelmondiston is St Kilda, the home of Norman John Gillies, the last of the islanders to have left in 1930 who can still tell the story of the evacuation and what happened next.

Now in his 85th year, fit and healthy, Mr Gillies is the last man standing of the 36 islanders who left St Kilda eight decades ago.

"There are only two of us left," said Mr Gillies, greeting visitors at the gate of his manicured rose garden "Rachel Gillies, married as Rachel Johnston in Clydebank, is the other. Unfortunately her memory is fading now although I saw her in June, the last time I went to St Kilda."

Having lived most of his life quietly in the Suffolk village, he became a media star when Ben Fogle and Countryfile took him back to St Kilda four years ago. He has been back twice since then, most recently for a BBC Alba documentary being broadcast tonight.

Now each week brings a postbag of polite inquiries and requests for information. Norman Gillies was a five-year-old boy when St Kilda was finally abandoned, but retains remarkable clarity of the day. "I remember being on HMS Harebell coming from St Kilda, running around, and the older people were stretched out on the deck. My main memory is watching several of the ladies at the rear of the boat waving to the island as it went out of sight. It was quite a sad moment really, none of these ladies saw the island again.

"We came on the HMS Harebell into the sound of Mull, opposite Lochaline. We were transferred to a paddle boat, I think the Princess Louise, and that took us into the pier."

Remarkably a photo of the St Kildans arriving on the mainland has ended up in Suffolk too. Recently Mrs Margaret Baillie, a Scot living in Ipswich, unearthed a picture of her father welcoming the islanders ashore at Lochaline and contacted Mr Gillies.

"My father was a commercial traveller from Glasgow covering the whole of the west coast and the islands," said Mrs Baillie. "He was so well known in that area that the police just approached him to help take the islanders to their new homes in his car."

Mr Gillies recognised some of the older people being greeted by Mrs Baillie's father 79 years ago. "When we came into the pier the crowds come to see these aliens from outer space. That was the first car I saw," said Mr Gillies.

Church proved to be pivotal in his life and it was there he met his wife of 61 years Ivy. The couple live just a few yards from Chelmondiston church, a little part of Suffolk that will always be St Kilda.