The allure of island life

APART FROM for two hours either side of low tide, the island of Oronsay stands alone off the south side of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides.

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A tiny jewel in the Atlantic, it has a population of five or six, a 14th-century priory and the inky tracks of tractor tyres and footprints of oyster-catchers on the Strand wiped clean with each tide. Heading north, towering out of the roaring sea 45 miles west of the Isle of Harris are the hostile rocks of St Kilda. Visitors brave the waves to marvel at Britain’s largest colony of Atlantic puffins and learn of how its last remaining islanders were evacuated in August 1930, a way of life that had existed here for 4,000 years — surviving on gannets, fulmars and puffins for food — no longer sustainable.

Then there's Brownsea Island, a bucolic haven off the Dorset coast where red squirrels happily scamper and where 20 boys were brought for a camp in August 1907 as a test run for the Scouts ahead of Robert Baden-Powell writing his handbook. Or there’s Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel off the north coast of Devon, granted to the Knights Templar by Henry II in the 12th century, and where puffins outnumber people 15 to one. North or south, there’s an addictive curiosity to the more than 6,000 islands off our shores, a romanticism to our archipelago of wild and solitary sanctuaries.

For Reverend Canon Dr Sarah Hills at St Mary the Virgin on the two-square-mile Holy Island, tentatively linked to the Northumberland coast by a tidal causeway, she sees the island's tiny resident population of about 140 people swell with over 900,000 visitors a year. “People come to Lindisfarne in all months but probably from Easter to October is the peak. They're tourists, people coming on retreats and pilgrimages and a lot of birdwatchers. Because it's a holy island they're often searching for something here, whether it's God or peace or something special,” she says. It was in 635AD that St Aidan came from Iona to found his monastery on the island, spreading the Christian message that would flourish throughout the world.