There’s something special about time spent on small islands. It’s a chance to escape from a troubled world to a place of tranquility, and to be close to nature. Patrick Barkham explores what islands mean to mainlanders – and finds out what an island life is really like.
The water glittered and dazzled as the boat and I bounced past trim great northern divers and seals as plump as slugs towards the island of Eigg. We pulled on to an old concrete ramp beside a small shop and café, a rocky peak sticking up like a quiff, and I joined the locals milling outside, faces turned towards the sun.
While many small islands are treelessly austere, this unique Hebridean island is a fecund riot of bracken, meadowsweet, hazel woods and waterfalls beneath two rising ridges of columnar basalt. The trees possess wild beards of lichen; the residents just possess wild beards.
The water was a perfect blue and the light so strikingly sharp that it rendered everything in high definition, but the most miraculous thing was the air – not a fresh salty blast but a complex, constantly changing infusion of sweet, peaty bracken, flowers, kelp and mud.
Any arrival on a small island is always exhilarating and memorable. Encircle any land with salt water and it is made magical. When we stand on shore and catch sight of rocks beyond the surf, we are beckoned to explore them.
The novelist John Fowles, a great islophile, once likened the Isles of Scilly to “an eternal stone armada of over a hundred ships, aloofly anchored off England... Mute, enticing, forever just out of reach”. And British mainlanders are spoilt for choice: we live in an archipelago of more than 6,200 islands, islets and tidal rocks.
DISTANT RELATIONS
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 2018 من BBC Countryfile Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 2018 من BBC Countryfile Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Edible Seaweeds - An ancient food harvested by humans for millennia, seaweeds bring an intense and rich flavour of the sea to a wide range of dishes, as well as essential mind-and-body-boosting nutrients
An ancient food harvested by humans for millennia, seaweeds bring an intense and rich flavour of the sea to a wide range of dishes, as well as essential mind-and-body-boosting nutrients
We Are an Island Nation - So Let's Protect Our Seas - Living in the UK makes us islanders and personally I'm proud of that definition - not in any political or jingoistic sense, but simply because I love the sea and in this country we are totally surrounded by it.
Living in the UK makes us islanders and personally I'm proud of that definition - not in any political or jingoistic sense, but simply because I love the sea and in this country we are totally surrounded by it. We live inside thousands of miles of coastline, in a nation whose borders were created by nature and made us what we are.
Discover Jurassic Coast - With its towering cliffs, sweeping beaches and pretty seaside towns, the shoreline of Dorset and east Devon is spectacular.
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Sea stars
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Harris's wildly beautiful beach
Cornwall may pull in the crowds, but one Hebridean strand stuns visitors