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3 hours ago
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Our Tiny Islands is dangerous television. Ostensibly the gentlest of concepts, this four-part series of hour-long documentaries narrated by Meera Syal is about life on some of the hundreds of minute, ancient islands scattered off Britain’s coastline. Not your Lundys, Lindisfarnes or Merseas – which are Manhattan, Vegas and Dubai compared with what is on offer here – but scraps of land where birds and wildflowers outnumber humans by thousands to one, the only transport is boats or bikes and life is what you make it. It is paradise for introverts.
We are talking about the likes of Rathlin, a puffin-stuffed 14.5 sq km (5.6 sq miles) off the coast of Northern Ireland, home to 150 people including ferryman Tom and assorted RSPB staff and volunteers who are preparing to rid the place of rats and ferrets – non-native species whose appetite for eggs is causing the island to become less puffin-stuffed than it once was. Or Tresco, much of whose 1.15 square Cornish miles are taken up by the Abbey Gardens established in the 19th century by the then proprietor (whose family now leases the island from the Duchy of Cornwall) and which are now overseen by head gardener Andy and his wife, Kate.
Or there is the community-owned Isle of Gigha, off the west coast of Kintyre in Scotland, where Tony and his family came to live 12 years ago after persuading the islanders that farming oysters there could be a viable addition to their way of life. His son, Archie, was born there; he loves to help his dad and hopes to follow in his saltwater footsteps. Perhaps we are watching another ancient tradition being born.
If you want to go really hardcore, there is Cockle Island, whose 1,500 sq metres becomes 50 at high tide and has no permanent human population. People from the National Trust monitor the colonies of Arctic, common and sandwich terns there and the rising sea levels that will one day submerge the island completely.
It is Bardsey, though, that has my heart. A narrow home off the Llŷn peninsula to a plentiful population of grey seals, thousands of seabirds, 1,500 years of Christian history and three humans – though this rises to nine in the spring, when farming needs are at their height. It is the supposed resting place of 20,000 saints, but they probably didn’t disturb the peace much even when they were alive. Its fame peaked in the middle ages, when it was a revered destination for pilgrims. The island’s current chaplain, a Yorkshireman called Adrian, gazes at the ruins of the abbey and ruminates on the 400 years over which it would have witnessed a million acts of worship. “Surely,” he says, “the pouring out of the longing, the yearning, the adoration for divine reality has left something of itself behind in the landscape.” Whenever there is a particularly beautiful sunset, he delays compline so everyone can stand outside and watch it.
Our Tiny Islands is, behind its beautiful views and banal script, a meditation on what we really need to have a good life – one that makes us content, one that has meaning and give us purpose. It shows us, too, that it can be done. The number of people who have walked away from ordinary modern lives in favour of something completely other is striking. Tony was doing his final placement as a trainee primary school teacher in Edinburgh when he saw an advert for an oyster farmer and it struck a chord in him and his wife. “I never really got on with bosses,” he says. “Now my only boss is the tide.” Rathlin’s ferryman, Tom, downed tools on a building site one day in 2006, suddenly sick of it, and never went back. He found his way to the island he had loved as a day tripper in the 1980s and hasn’t left since. “What I’ve gained from being here is peace, in my soul.” Adrian lives in the former oratory of Sister Helen Mary, an accomplished pianist and talented linguist who became first an enclosed nun and then, when that wasn’t enough, was granted permission in 1969 to live as a hermit on Bardsey, which she did for what I imagine were 15 glorious years.
Of course, island life would be hell on earth for some. But for those of us who find the wider world too much, a perpetual battle – who feel like puffins guarding our precious eggs of sanity against the marauding modern forces that assault us like determined ferrets – it is wonderful to see it and to know that the promise, the possibility – the slightest possibility – still remains.
Our Tiny Islands is on Channel 4.
