[5][6][7] The name Stac an Armin means stack of the soldier/warrior, and evidence remains showing it was used by people living nearby as a hunting grounds.

The island was once home to the now extinct great auk, and rules exist to protect the bird habitats and breeding grounds.

Stac an Armin is separated from Boreray by a channel "so littered with rocks" that it should not be sailed,[8] though sailors write passionately about the views.

Martin wrote about the island after the Scottish writer had visited St Kilda in 1697 and included a few anecdotes about the stack in his A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland published in 1703.

Martin describes these cleitean as "pyramids" and wrote they were used to "preserve and dry" birds, especially the "solan goose" (northern gannet).

[12] In addition to the geese, the islanders used Stac an Armin for harvesting great auks, gannets, and puffins, as well as their eggs.

As luck would have it, Hirta suffered a smallpox outbreak while the eleven were on the stack, and thus the islanders were unable to man a boat and retrieve them until the next year.

A then 75-year-old inhabitant of St Kilda told Henry Evans, a frequent visitor to the archipelago, that he and his father-in-law with another man had caught a "garefowl," noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head.

[32] As part of the process of implementing this Management Plan, the Trust will liaise with SNH and the Mountaineering Council of Scotland to review whether any change is merited to this position.

[33]The Mountaineering Council of Scotland, in a review of the plan, "recommends that the NTS celebrate the historical importance and the cultural heritage of the climbing on the Islands of St Kilda.