Qualla: Annet, Isles of Scilly

Annet, Isles of Scilly: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rowan Legg, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first time you see Annet from the water in early summer, you cannot quite parse what your eyes are showing you. The sea around the island is not water but plumage. Black bands of puffins and razorbills sit so densely that their white breasts disappear into glare, and above them the air shakes with the cries of gulls. Reverend Smart, in 1885, wrote that the ground itself was honeycombed, so soft with shearwater burrows that you could not walk across it without a leg sinking suddenly into someone else's home. Annet is the second-largest uninhabited island in the Isles of Scilly, only a kilometre long, and twelve species of seabird treat it as the most important nursery in the archipelago. No people are allowed to set foot on it. That arrangement is roughly a century old, and Annet's birds have already needed every minute of the protection it provides.

Read more: Annet, Isles of Scilly on Qualla

Image: Rowan Legg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Annet, Isles of Scilly: The Island That Will Not Hold Cattle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Annet is low, granite at its north end, almost cut in two at West Porth where storm waves overrun the neck. The carns at the head of the island, Annet Head and Carn Irish, rise as outcrops above heath and storm beach. Only one freshwater seepage exists on the whole island, which ...

Read more: Annet, Isles of Scilly on Qualla

Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Annet, Isles of Scilly: What Happens When Cattle Land on Bird Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. In June 1877 the steamship Castleford struck the Crebawethans, the rocks south of Annet, and her cargo of between 250 and 450 cattle was driven onto the island to wait. Some of those animals were still wandering Annet ten days later. The naturalist J. H. Gurney, visiting two mont...

Read more: Annet, Isles of Scilly on Qualla

Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Annet, Isles of Scilly: The Egg Collectors and the Permit

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. Even after shooting and egg collecting were officially banned, Annet remained on every Victorian collector's list. The Natural History Museum holds forty-five eggs taken between 1880 and 1936 by fourteen men from Holloway College alone, and the cards bear names familiar from Engl...

Read more: Annet, Isles of Scilly on Qualla

Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5

Annet, Isles of Scilly: What Comes Back, and Slowly

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Rostron, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twelve seabird species nest on Annet. European storm petrels tuck themselves between the rounded boulders of the storm beaches. The largest Manx shearwater colony in Scilly burrows the peat soil here, alongside puffins, razorbills, kittiwakes, fulmars, and the long flat shadows o...

Read more: Annet, Isles of Scilly on Qualla

Image: John Rostron | CC BY-SA 2.0