Qualla: Priest Island

Priest Island: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two men hid on Priest Island for nearly a year. Jim Miller and John Bellord were on the run from the law, helped by an accomplice named Geoff Green, and from September 1975 until the summer of 1976 the small uninhabited rock off the Wester Ross coast was effectively theirs. They were eventually found, the story ran on the front pages, and the BBC's Everyman strand made a documentary about it. A Canadian film crew came back in 2008 and made another. For an island of perhaps a square mile, accessible only by boat from a coast that does not advertise itself, that is a strange amount of fame. The island had been hiding people for far longer than that.

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Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Priest Island: The Vanishing Circle

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Reid, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 4 July 1884 the naturalist John Harvie Brown stepped ashore on Priest Island and found something that ought not to have been there: a near-perfect circle of nine stones lying flat, smaller ends inward, the whole thing flush with the short green sward. The stones, he wrote, had...

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Image: Alan Reid | CC BY-SA 2.0

Priest Island: The Hermit and the Naturalist

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donald MacDonald, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Gazetteer for Scotland records Priest Island as an early Christian retreat - a piece of land remote enough that a hermit who wanted to be left alone with God could mostly count on the weather to do it for him. The island's Gaelic name, Eilean a' Chleirich, means the cleric's ...

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Image: Donald MacDonald | CC BY-SA 2.0

Priest Island: The Birds Took Over

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Simpson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds owns and manages Priest Island as a nature reserve. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Protection Area, and it holds one of the largest colonies of European storm petrels - Hydrobates pelagicus - in the Un...

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Image: Dave Simpson | CC BY-SA 2.0