The Magic Of Islands

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.

- Patrick Barkham

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