Qualla: Ramsey Island

Ramsey Island: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pampuco, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Bitches are not a metaphor. They are a line of jagged volcanic rocks that drag straight out into Ramsey Sound from Ramsey Island's eastern flank, and at flood tide the current pours over them at almost four metres per second. Kayakers come from across Britain to surf the standing wave they create; the RNLI keeps a lifeboat on the mainland opposite, in part because of what these rocks have done over the centuries. In 1910 the lifeboat Gem broke up on The Bitches during a rescue, and three of her crewmen drowned. The reef lies about halfway between the Pembrokeshire mainland and an island the Welsh call Ynys Dewi, David's Island, after the patron saint of Wales.

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Image: Pampuco | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ramsey Island: Hrafn's Island, David's Island

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pauline Eccles, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ramsey is one of those places that carries both halves of its history in its names. The English word comes from the Old Norse Hrafn's island, a Viking trace from the centuries when longships worked this coast. The Welsh name remembers Saint David himself, the sixth-century missio...

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Image: Pauline Eccles | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ramsey Island: Two Wardens and Four Hundred Pups

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pauline Eccles, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two people live on Ramsey now. They are the RSPB warden and assistant warden, occupying the same farmhouse that medieval tenants worked. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds bought the island as a nature reserve, and what they protect here is unusual even by Welsh standa...

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Image: Pauline Eccles | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ramsey Island: A Geology Sampler

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. For an island this small, Ramsey's geology is absurdly complicated. The north end is mudstone, the centre cuts across a Cambrian-age band of volcanic tuffs and pencil slates known as the Aber Mawr Formation, and the south is dominated by an intrusion of rhyolite that also forms t...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ramsey Island: The Sound That Would Not Be Tamed

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ramsey Sound has a depth of around 66 metres and a tidal regime so dramatic that engineers tried to harness it. In December 2015 the first of three planned 400-kilowatt tidal turbines was installed on the seabed by a Welsh company called Tidal Energy Ltd. It developed faults almo...

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Image: Robin Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0