Qualla: White Island, Isles of Scilly

White Island, Isles of Scilly: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Davey, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twice a day, an island appears. For a few hours on either side of low water, a rough causeway of shingle and boulders surfaces between St Martin's and White Island, and you can walk across. Then the Atlantic reclaims it. The currents that pour across the bar at the turn of the tide are strong enough to drown experienced swimmers, and the granite slabs underfoot are slick with kelp. White Island sits at the northern edge of the Isles of Scilly, exposed to every gale that crosses three thousand miles of ocean. Bronze Age people buried their dead here. Modern biologists count gull chicks. In Cornish, the older name was Enys Wynn, the white island, and the Cornish word for that south-eastern cove, Camper, means tide race. Everything here is named for the sea.

Image: John Davey | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Island, Isles of Scilly: The Island That Wasn't

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Geologists know White Island as a recent departure. Until comparatively recently in geological terms it was simply the north-eastern end of St Martin's, and on calm days at the lowest tides you can still walk between them without getting your feet wet. In 1814 someone measured th...

Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Island, Isles of Scilly: The Bronze Age Hilltop

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The north-west of the island rises to 21 metres above the sea, and on the top sits a ruined entrance grave, one of the distinctive Scillonian burial monuments built between roughly 2500 and 1000 BC. A chambered cairn lies nearby, with six smaller cairns sheltering on the south si...

Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Island, Isles of Scilly: The Wind-Pruned Heath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Because White Island faces north into the Atlantic with no shelter at all, its soils are thin and skeletal and its plant life has learned to keep its head down. The dominant cover is waved maritime heath, the gorse and heather sculpted into low waves by the prevailing wind: weste...

Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Island, Isles of Scilly: A Gull's Republic

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are no people, but there are residents. Four species of gull and one of petrel breed on White Island: great black-backed gulls, the heaviest gulls in the world, with their slow strong wingbeats and pirate's appetite; lesser black-backed, herring and kittiwakes, the latter c...

Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0