Qualla: Cardigan Island

Cardigan Island: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Firth, CC BY-SA 2.0. On a stormy night in 1934, the liner Herefordshire broke free of her tow rope and ran aground on a small, almost-island just off the Welsh coast. The ship was already on her way to the breakers' yard. What no one realised in the wreckage and rescue was that her real cargo had been the rats living in her hold. They came ashore. They found nesting puffins, Manx shearwaters, eggs and chicks, and they ate. By the time anyone thought to count, the seabirds were gone. It would take 45 years to get the rats off Cardigan Island, and the puffins have never returned.

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Image: John Firth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cardigan Island: Welsh Parrots

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jprw, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the wreck, Cardigan Island had been famous for them. A guidebook in the 1890s called the puffins "Welsh parrots", a name that captures something of their absurd, painted-clown faces and the noisy disorder of a thriving colony. In 1924 the Welsh naturalist Ronald Lockley co...

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Image: Jprw | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cardigan Island: The Storm of 1934

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Llywelyn2000, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Herefordshire was a Bibby Line ocean liner of nearly 8,000 tons, decommissioned and being towed from the Mersey to a Welsh scrapyard when the weather turned. Her tow parted in heavy seas off Ceredigion, and she drifted onto Cardigan Island, where she broke up against the clif...

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Image: Llywelyn2000 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cardigan Island: Empty Burrows

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flopsy Designs, CC BY-SA 2.0. Forty-five years is a long time to fight a small mammal on a small island. The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, which owns Cardigan Island, only managed to declare the rats gone in the late 1970s. By then the puffin colony was generations vanished. Shearwaters did not retu...

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Image: Flopsy Designs | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cardigan Island: The Sea Around It

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Firth, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the coast at Gwbert, Cardigan Island looks impossibly close — barely 200 metres of churning channel separates it from the mainland. The strip of water is what saves it. Atlantic grey seals haul out on its rocks and pup in its sea caves. Bottlenose dolphins from Cardigan Bay'...

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Image: John Firth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cardigan Island: What Islands Teach

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Cardigan Island is a small lesson in how easily a place can be unmade. A snapped tow rope, a few rats, and a colony that had been there long enough to earn a nickname was simply gone. The Wildlife Trust now treats the island the way a museum treats an irreplaceable manuscript: wi...

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Image: Public domain