Scottish Islands, big and small, regularly feature in the world’s top holiday destinations. One, however, remains absent from all tourist itineraries: Gruinard.
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The mile-long treeless isle lies in a quiet bay just around the peninsula west of Ullapool and was once a haunt of fishermen and crofters. But by the mid-20th century visitors were prohibited and it became known as the island of death. Something terrible had happened but the full story only began to emerge following a BBC documentary in 1962 after reports of clouds of poison and mysterious deaths of sheep. The tale is entwined with Britain’s most desperate moments in the Second World War.
In 1942, with the Nazis ascendant, Prime Minister Churchill sought advanced tools of war to turn the tide. As part of the plan, the MoD came to Scotland to find land to test weaponry. Though less than half a mile from the mainland, Gruinard Island was isolated and seldom visited. It was deemed perfect.
The island was purchased, locals were banned and scientists from the MoD’s biological weapons facility at Porton Down arrived to carry out clandestine experiments. Their weapon of choice: anthrax, a deadly infectious bacteria produced from naturally occurring soil organisms. Having acquired a flock of sheep as the ‘sacrificial lambs’, the scientists used remote-controlled explosives full of the bacteria to infect the island. The sheep quickly became sick and died, their carcasses later burned or buried. Worse, sheep on the nearby mainland were also affected.
The MoD’s wider plan was to drop seedcakes laced with anthrax across Germany to wipe out livestock – and part of the human population. Thankfully, it was abandoned. As was Gruinard Island. Without explanation, the MoD locked down the island and left it contaminated for decades.
Yet the scientists had been seen by crofters on the mainland and, following BBC investigations, pressure was put on successive governments to explain the mystery. After an unsuccessful government-led clean-up attempt in the 1970s, a group known as the Dark Harvest Commandos emerged in the early 1980s demanding action. The Commandos left buckets of supposedly contaminated soil at Porton Down in protest. Their efforts may have worked. In 1986, a full clean-up of the island was ordered. Using a seawater purge and removing and incinerating some of the topsoil, the island was declared anthrax-free in 1990.
Main image: old sign at Gruinard/Credit: Getty
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