Qualla: Eastern Isles

Eastern Isles: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Egginton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Look down at the Eastern Isles at low tide and the archipelago momentarily reveals what it once was: a single low plain, exposed when the boulder ridges and sandy bars between the small hills run dry, and twelve separate islands when the water returns. During the Roman occupation of Britain, these twelve hills were genuinely one piece of land, a plain stretching between St Mary's and St Martin's. The sea has been rising and the people have been leaving ever since. What remains are Bronze Age burial cairns, Iron Age field systems, a Roman shrine on Nornour, and a roll call of small islands with old Cornish names: Great Ganilly, Menawethan, Innisvouls, Nornour, Hanjague.

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Image: Steve Egginton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eastern Isles: Twelve Islands, One Drowned Plain

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Rostron, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Eastern Isles are scattered to the south-east of St Martin's, twelve uninhabited islands totalling around 36 hectares between them. They range from Great Ganilly at 13.83 hectares down to Hanjague, a 0.30-hectare sea stack at the easternmost edge of the entire archipelago. Be...

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Image: John Rostron | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eastern Isles: Nornour's Shrine

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Of all the Eastern Isles, Nornour is the strangest. The 1.64-hectare island holds the remains of prehistoric stone buildings, and inside their upper layers excavators found something that should not have been there: coins ranging from the late first to the late fourth century AD,...

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Image: Public domain

Eastern Isles: Botanists and Pseudoscorpions

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Knights, CC BY-SA 2.0. Because no botanist resides on the Eastern Isles and recording plant species on uninhabited rocks is difficult, the floras of these islands have been surveyed only intermittently. The 1971 Flora of the Isles of Scilly by J.E. Lousley, based on fieldwork by him and J.D. Grose and ...

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Image: Richard Knights | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eastern Isles: Hanjague and the Edge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. At the far east end of the archipelago sits Hanjague. It is the easternmost island in all of Scilly, a sea stack rising bare from the Atlantic, 0.30 hectares with no vegetation and only birds for tenants. From the air it looks like a misplaced fragment, a chip of cliff that wande...

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Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5