Mingulay lies twelve nautical miles south of Barra, the second-largest of the Barra Isles. The cliffs are among the highest in the British Isles. Hecla rises 219 metres. Macphees Hill reaches 224 metres. Carnan crests at 273 metres. The name, W. H. Murray wrote, appropriately means Bird Island. Nearly ten thousand pairs of razorbills nest here, 6.3 percent of the European population. Eleven thousand pairs of guillemots. Almost three thousand pairs of black-legged kittiwakes. Puffins, storm petrels, fulmars, gulls, terns, and great skuas crowd the sea cliffs. A natural arch at Gunamul opens 150 metres tall in the western rampart, big enough on calm days for boats to sail straight through the cliff.

Iron Age remains mark Dun Mingulay on the southwestern promontory. Christianity arrived early. The Vikings came around 871 and left names if not graves, a Norse vocabulary etched onto every prominent feature. After the Treaty of Perth in 1266, the islands returned to the Scottish crown. In 1427 the Lords of the Isles granted Barra and its associated islands to Clan MacNeil. The MacNeils held it for centuries, paying rent to the laird in shearwater chicks called fachaich. After acts of MacNeil piracy, King James VI transferred some of the southern archipelago, including Mingulay, to the Bishop of the Isles. These islands became known as the Bishops Isles, and the name lingers in old charts.

In 1840, the MacNeil estates passed to Colonel John Gordon of Cluny, an Aberdeenshire landlord whose attitude during the potato famines became a byword for cruelty. Across the Hebrides he cleared tenants and replaced them with sheep. Strangely, this increased Mingulay's population. Families evicted from Barra chose to resettle on remote Mingulay rather than board emigrant ships to Nova Scotia. The island's isolation was, briefly, an advantage. Rents fell from 1840 to 1845. In 1878 Lady Gordon Cathcart inherited the estate. Over fifty-four years of ownership, she visited Mingulay exactly once. The islanders dealt with an empty title and the consequences of it. They had no landlord to appeal to and no advocate to speak for them.

The reasons accumulated like silt. In 1897 a Pabbay boat was lost off Barra Head with five men, more than half of Pabbay's adult males. The fishermen of Mingulay watched and remembered. The lack of a sheltered landing meant the island could be cut off for weeks. Buxton tells of two men who left together. One went visiting on Barra, the other emigrating to New York. The New York emigrant returned three months later, the venture having failed, and met his friend again in Castlebay. The friend explained that he had been unable to return to Mingulay since their farewell, the sea conditions making it impossible. In 1868 a wave washed over Geirum Mor, a fifty-one-metre-high islet, and carried the sheep away. The Congested Districts Board installed a derrick in 1901 to help with landings. It failed. By 1912, the islanders had chosen. They left of their own accord, not in a single dramatic evacuation but in a slow, painful drain. The schoolhouse closed. The chapel house emptied. The Village stood quiet.

After the evacuation the island passed through several owners. Jonathan MacLean from Barra bought it in 1919. John Russell, a sheep farmer with experience in Australia and Montana, bought it in 1930 and lived alone all autumn and winter with pet ferrets and cats, joined by shepherds only in spring and summer. Peggy Greer from Essex bought it next and rarely visited. In 1955 a local crofters' syndicate, the Barra Head Isles Sheepstock Company, purchased the island. The National Trust for Scotland took it over in 2000. Only the schoolhouse and the chapel house still stand. Yet the songs that the islanders actually wrote also survive. Neil MacPhee, the Vatersay raider, composed Oran do dh'Eilean Mhiulaidh, the Song to the Isle of Mingulay, after the abandonment. Father Allan MacLean wrote Turas Neill a Mhiughlaigh, Neil's Trip to Mingulay. These are the real songs of the island, voices of people who lived and left.