The church was built in 1903 on the initiative of Fr Allan MacDonald, born 1859 and dead at forty-five in 1905, just two years after his church opened. He was a parish priest and something more - a folklorist and Gaelic poet who collected songs and prayers and stories from the women and men of South Uist and Eriskay during the years when crofters were being pushed off the land and a language was bending under the weight of English. The Scottish Gaelic literary tradition counts him among its most important modern figures, and his hymns are still sung in Gaelic-speaking parishes across the Hebrides. He chose the hill above the village so the church could be seen from the boats coming in - a beacon for the fishermen whose lives, and deaths, gave the parish its shape.

The building itself is plain - a Gothic apsidal church of coursed square rubble, painted margins picking out the corners, a slate roof, a small belfry corbelled out above the porch. None of this is what people remember. They remember the inside: the triple-arched chancel screen, the stone font that may have come from an earlier building lost to time, and above all that altar. The bow of a boat, supporting the table where the Eucharist is celebrated. On an island where men drowned often and the sea was both larder and grave, the symbolism was not metaphor. It was inventory. The fishermen brought what they had, and what they had was timber that floated.

The iron bell is the strangest object on the property. In June 1919, the interned German High Seas Fleet was scuttled by its own crews in Scapa Flow, in Orkney, rather than be handed over to the victorious Allies. Among the ships that went down was SMS Derfflinger, a battlecruiser that had fought at Jutland. Decades later, salvage operations raised pieces of the German fleet, and somehow - by what chain of hands no one quite remembers - one of Derfflinger's bells found its way to a small parish on Eriskay, where it now rings on an iron frame to call the faithful. A weapon of imperial war, repurposed as a summons to prayer. The Hebrides have a long history of taking what the sea gives back.

Eriskay itself is barely three miles long. It is famous in song - the Eriskay Love Lilt, collected by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser in the early twentieth century, became one of the best-known Gaelic melodies in the world - and famous in story, as the place where Bonnie Prince Charlie first set foot on Scottish soil in July 1745 to launch his doomed Jacobite rising. It is also famous for the SS Politician, the ship that ran aground here in 1941 carrying 264,000 bottles of whisky, an event Compton Mackenzie turned into the novel Whisky Galore. The church on the hill watches all of this. Since 2002 a causeway has linked Eriskay to South Uist, ending centuries of isolation, but St Michael's still looks out over the same water and waits for the same boats.