Auskerry
Auskerry is a small, remote island located in the Orkney archipelago of northern Scotland, situated in the open waters of the Stronsay Firth. It lies roughly halfway between the Orkney Mainland and the island of Stronsay, making it one of the more isolated inhabited outposts of the Orkney group. The island is notable for its lighthouse, its extraordinary seabird colonies, and its sense of almost otherworldly solitude — a flat, windswept scrap of land rising barely above the surrounding sea, yet possessed of a quiet, insistent character that marks it apart from the larger, more-visited islands of the archipelago. For those with a deep interest in remote Scottish islands, maritime heritage, or ornithology, Auskerry represents one of the genuine hidden places of the northern British Isles.
The island covers roughly 76 hectares and sits very low in the water, with no dramatic cliffs or hills to speak of. Its topography is almost entirely flat, covered by rough grassland, heather, and boggy ground that merges imperceptibly with the rocky shoreline. The coast is ragged and uneven, with reefs and skerries extending into the sea around it — hazards that gave the island its historical importance as a navigation point. The name Auskerry is thought to derive from Old Norse, with the element "sker" meaning a low rocky reef or skerry, reflecting both the Viking heritage of Orkney and the island's physical nature as a low-lying rocky prominence in a dangerous stretch of water.
The lighthouse on Auskerry was established in 1866 and was built by David Stevenson, a member of the famous Stevenson engineering dynasty that built the majority of Scotland's lighthouses during the nineteenth century. The structure is a relatively modest white tower, but it served a vital purpose in warning ships away from the reefs surrounding the island and guiding vessels through the Stronsay Firth. For much of its operational life the lighthouse was manned by keepers and their families who lived in the associated cottages, enduring the extreme isolation and fierce Orcadian winters in service of maritime safety. The light was eventually automated, as happened with virtually all Scottish lighthouses in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and the keeper cottages now stand as potential accommodation for those fortunate enough to arrange a stay.
Auskerry's most remarkable natural feature is its seabird population. The island hosts one of the largest colonies of storm petrels in Orkney, and perhaps in all of the United Kingdom. These tiny, dark, swallow-like birds nest in burrows and crevices across the island, and their nocturnal habits — they return to the colony only after dark — give the place a strange, almost supernatural quality on summer nights when their churring, purring calls emerge from the ground itself. Puffins, razorbills, guillemots, and Arctic terns also breed on the island, and grey seals haul out on the surrounding rocks in considerable numbers. The island has been recognised as an important site for wildlife, and the combination of undisturbed habitat and isolation makes it a genuinely significant place for nature conservation in northern Scotland.
In terms of human habitation, Auskerry has had a very small population for most of its modern history, largely consisting of lighthouse keepers and their families. At various census points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only a handful of people lived on the island. Today it is considered essentially uninhabited in a permanent sense, though it can be visited and the lighthouse cottages have at times been available as a rental property, offering one of the more unusual and memorable self-catering experiences anywhere in Britain. Living conditions even temporarily on Auskerry give an immediate and visceral sense of what lighthouse-keeping life once meant — complete dependence on supplies brought by boat, total submission to the weather, and an intimacy with the sea and sky that is impossible to replicate on the mainland.
Visiting Auskerry requires genuine planning and a degree of determination. There is no regular ferry service to the island, and access typically involves chartering a boat from Stronsay, which is itself reached by ferry from the Orkney Mainland or by small aircraft from Kirkwall Airport. The crossing can be rough and is entirely weather-dependent, so flexible travel arrangements are essential. The best time to visit is late spring through early summer, roughly May to July, when the seabird colonies are at their most active and the long Orcadian days provide extraordinary light. Autumn visits are possible but conditions become more challenging, and winter on Auskerry is genuinely severe, with gales, driving rain, and short, dark days.
The surrounding seascape is part of what makes Auskerry so memorable. On a calm day the Stronsay Firth can be almost glassy, and the views stretch to the low profiles of surrounding Orkney islands — Stronsay to the northeast, Shapinsay further west, with the hills of the Mainland visible on a clear day. On a stormy day the same water becomes a landscape of violence, with waves breaking white over the outer skerries and the wind reducing visibility to a grey wall of spray. The interplay of light and weather in these latitudes is extraordinary, with long summer evenings bathing the island in golden and amber tones that seem to last for hours. For anyone with a love of wild, marginal places — the kind of land that seems to exist at the very edge of the habitable world — Auskerry exercises a powerful pull that is difficult to articulate but immediately understood on arrival.