Underneath a tarpaulin at Staosnaig on Colonsay's east coast, in 1995, a team of archaeologists dug into a Mesolithic midden pit and found hundreds of thousands of burned hazelnut shells. Radiocarbon dating put them at about 8,000 years old. Pollen analysis showed that the hazel trees on the island had all been felled in a single year - not gradually, but all at once. Someone had organised this: dozens of people working through one autumn to harvest, roast, and store enough food to last through winter and probably several winters after. The pit at Staosnaig is one of the largest Mesolithic food caches ever found in Britain. The Mesolithic people who built it are gone. Colonsay still has hazel groves. It still feeds itself through winters when the ferry does not run.
Colonsay is eight miles long and three miles across at its widest, oriented southwest to northeast, with the smaller tidal island of Oronsay attached at low water by a flat called The Strand. Approached from the sea the island looks bare and forbidding - bleached gold sand against grey rock - but the interior is unusually fertile and unusually wooded for the Hebrides. Hardwood plantations, sheltered by their own canopy from the Atlantic wind, contain oak and ash and beech that would not survive on more exposed islands. The highest point is Carnan Eoin at 470 feet, low enough to walk in an afternoon. Kiloran Bay on the north coast is one of the most photographed beaches in Scotland: a wide arc of pale gold sand bookended by dark crags, with the Paps of Jura visible across the water on a clear day. The geology underneath all this is the Colonsay Group, a 5,000-metre sequence of late Precambrian metamorphic rocks that takes its name from the island and outcrops on Islay and Oronsay too. Some of the oldest rocks in Scotland are visible at Traigh Ban in the far north.
Reports of crime on Colonsay are infrequent enough to be national news. In 1993 a journalist asked the local policeman about island crime statistics and was told that the last recorded offence on Colonsay was treachery against the King in 1623. The figure was meant lightly - paperwork had not always been carefully kept - but the underlying point was sound. In November 2006 a construction worker from Glasgow on a temporary contract walked into an unlocked house in Scalasaig, took £60 in cash, and was arrested at the ferry terminal trying to leave. The newspapers reported it as the first house theft in the island's history. The next recorded crime came in 2013, involving vandalism to a car. The current population is about 117 people. Most do not lock their doors during the day. Tourists who stay on the island for a week sometimes return to the mainland with that habit, and find that it does not transfer well to Glasgow.
Colonsay has a remarkable density of small industries for its size. The Colonsay Brewery opened in 2007 and is generally agreed to be the smallest island brewery in the world; it employs two people and produces three regular beers. The same business expanded into spirits in 2016 with Wild Island Botanic Gin, made with foraged island plants. The publisher House of Lochar - small, scholarly, specialised in Scottish history - has its office on the island, as does a tiny bookshop on local interest. Most striking is the Bee Keeping (Colonsay and Oronsay) Order 2013, which made it illegal from 1 January 2014 to keep any honey bee on either island other than the European dark bee, Apis mellifera mellifera. The order protects what is now the largest reserve of the native British black bee, free from cross-breeding with the Italian and Carniolan strains that dominate mainland beekeeping. About 50 colonies of dark bees exist on the two islands. The Scottish Government framed the order as conservation legislation, and on this issue at least the conservationists won. The bees are not a tourist attraction. They are simply allowed to be themselves.
Colonsay House was first built by the MacNeil family in 1722 - the McNeils of Colonsay being a Hebridean branch distinct from the better-known Barra line. In 1904 the estate was bought by Donald Smith, the first Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Scottish-born Canadian railway magnate who hammered in the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. The current Baron Strathcona, Alexander Howard, still lives at Colonsay House. The island has an active cultural life despite the population. The annual folk festival, Ceol Cholasa, started in 2008 and has hosted Aly Bain, Phil Cunningham, Karen Matheson, and Karine Polwart. The Colonsay Book Festival, founded in 2012, has featured Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin, and the Scots makar Liz Lochhead. The 1945 Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going, principally shot on Mull, used a fictional Isle of Kiloran clearly based on Colonsay. The American writer John McPhee, descended from a Colonsay emigrant, spent a summer here in 1969 and wrote The Crofter and the Laird about it. Donald MacKinnon, born at Kilchattan on Colonsay in 1839, became the first occupant of the Chair of Celtic Studies at Edinburgh University in 1882. He held the chair for thirty-two years and died at Balnahard on Colonsay in 1914. Small island, long shadow.
Colonsay sits at 56.07°N, 6.22°W, in the Inner Hebrides between Islay (10nm south) and Mull (15nm north). The island is roughly 8nm long. Colonsay Airport (EGEY) is a small hard-runway strip near Scalasaig on the southeast coast, served by Hebridean Air Services from Oban (EGEO, 35nm east-northeast) and Islay (EGPI, 12nm southwest). PPR strongly recommended. The Paps of Jura (785m) are unmistakable 12nm to the southeast. The Strand tidal causeway connects Colonsay to Oronsay on the south end and is uncrossable at high water. Strong tidal currents through the Sound of Colonsay; expect westerly winds and rapidly changing Atlantic weather. Beautiful low-altitude approach over Kiloran Bay or the western cliffs.