Qualla: Skokholm

Skokholm: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ronald Lockley arrived on Skokholm in 1927 with a 21-year lease, a wife, and a plan to live on a treeless island in the Irish Sea by farming and writing. He stayed twelve years. From the kitchen of the restored farm cottage - now a Grade II listed building - he opened Britain's first bird observatory in 1933, started ringing the storm petrels that nested in the stone walls, watched the Manx shearwaters return at night, and wrote books that turned this tiny lump of Old Red Sandstone into one of the best-known small islands in the world.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Skokholm: A Norse Name on a Sandstone Island

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0. Skokholm is two and a half miles off the Pembrokeshire coast, just south of Skomer. It runs about a mile long and half a mile wide - 106 hectares of grass-topped cliff. The cliffs climb from 70 feet on the northeast side to 160 feet on the southwest, where the Atlantic does most ...

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Image: Manfred Heyde | CC BY-SA 3.0

Skokholm: Lockley's Lease

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dave challender, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ronald Lockley took his lease from the Dale Castle Estate in 1927. He was twenty-three. He, his wife Doris, and later their daughter Ann lived on the island for twelve years, restoring the old farm cottage, raising chickens and sheep, and studying birds. In 1933 he opened Britain...

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Image: dave challender | CC BY-SA 2.0

Skokholm: After the War

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The bird observatory reopened in 1946 under John Fursdon as warden. Fursdon would later write: 'There can be few other islands anywhere in the world that can boast the continuity of biological recordings, save for wartime years, that has taken place on Skokholm.' In 1948 the West...

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Image: Bob Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Skokholm: Puffins and Petrels

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Witt, CC BY-SA 3.0. The island holds extraordinary numbers of breeding seabirds. In 2021 the puffin population exceeded 11,000 - the highest count since the 1940s. Lesser black-backed gulls, herring gulls, and great black-backed gulls nest in large colonies. Red-billed choughs, Eurasian skylarks, an...

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Image: Matt Witt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Skokholm: Visiting the Island Today

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JKMMX, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales bought Skokholm outright in 2006. In December 2008 it was designated a National Nature Reserve. The landing quay was improved in 2010. Today the island runs as a residential reserve: small groups come out for stays of a few nights, sleep...

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Image: JKMMX | CC BY-SA 3.0