Scotland's last 'penguin' killed amid fears it was a witch

The visits of the “stateliest” of all the sea birds, with its long curved bill and white eye patch, would be retold down the generations.

But despite its celebrated status on the archipelago, it was here that the last Great Auk in British waters was killed to extinction in 1840.

It was stoned to death by a group of fisherman petrified that the three-feet tall bird was actually a storm-conjuring witch.

They discovered the last Great Auk on a fowling raid to the sea stack Stac-an-Armin.

“Prophet-like that lone one stood,” one of the men later said of the encounter.

Errol Fuller, author of the Great Auk, The Extinction of the Original Penguin, described the last hunt.

“Here lying asleep on the ledge, they found - and caught - a large, plump bird of a kind they had never seen before. But they knew immediately what it was,” Fuller wrote.

He added: “They took the bird to their bothy and kept it confined for three days while they decided what to do with it.

“Sometime during these three days a storm blew up, and the men, unable to get back to their home island, were forced to sit out the storm in the bothy with their strange companion.”

The men, at some point, got frightened in their isolation with the group slowly becoming clouded by the superstitions held close by the islanders.