Fascinating info on Foula below, don't think I could hack it.

The life of Foula

November 17, 2016
It’s hard to imagine life outside of the constant flow of interaction and traumatising socialising of living in a city suburb. Especially when you were born and raised in a village just a stone’s throw away from the city centre where you’re integrated into society of that flow from birth. That’s exactly the environment I was raised in, in Raheny, North Dublin.

You rarely give thought to the fact that there’s people going about their life around the world, but when you do, you don’t think of Foula.


Foula is a fascinating island in the Shetland Islands, a set of islands off the Northern coast of Scotland. Foula has a population of just 38 people. It’s one of the most remotely inhabited islands on earth.

It was first inhabited by Norsemen around 800AD, and they ruled the island until the 15th century. The influence from those first inhabitants still exists, with places on the island called Norderhus, Krugali, and Guttren. The name itself is Old Norse for “Bird Island.” Foula was one of the last Shetland Islands to still speak the language.

Foula is so unique it stills used the Julian calendar, while the rest of the world have used the Gregorian calendar since 1752. Christmas day falls on January 6th, with New Year’s Day falling on the 13th of the same month. When you think that the island is so remote, you think the people must be behind the times of the modern world, and while that would be a reasonable assumption, it most definitely is not that case.

“As far as we’re concerned, you’re the weird ones.” Islander Marion Taylor says to Jon Henley, a Guardian journalist visiting the island. “Everyone has to have a roof over their heads and ours just happens to be here. We’re just getting on with our lives. We don’t really see what there is to get worked up about.”

To visit the island you can catch a ferry that travels twice weekly to Foula, taking two and a half hours, or you can travel by a tiny eight seater aeroplane, taking 30 minutes roughly to reach the narrow tarmac airstrip.

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It is truly astonishing that people live here. It has constant blustery conditions and there’s no shops or pubs located on the island, it’s a mystery how a person can survive here. There is a post office though it’s no bigger than a Fiat Punto. The inhabitants have enjoyed the luxury of telephones since the 1960’s, and have been given the pleasure of running water and power supplies since the mid-1980s.

Anyone from the outside world would fail to adapt to living conditions in Foula. Groceries come in by plane, the same plane that carries passengers to the island that is, and they’re normally greeted by passengers of potatoes and tinned tomatoes.

Not everyone is a mainland shopper though, as Jon Henley discovered on his excursions of the isle. In Foula’s southernmost settlement of Hametown, 32 year old Amy Ratter, who is a relation of the Holbourn family, the family who has owned Foula for more than a century, grows half a dozen types of vegetable and rears 28 Shetland ewes, two rams, three lambs, 11 pigs, a dog, and piper her Shetland pony.

Similar to those before her and those after, Amy moved to a boarding school in Lerwick at aged 11, and similar again to those before and after, she didn’t return. “I got a job, bought a house down south and forgot all about it. But then one autumn I came here to visit my mother for the first time in six years and I thought what on earth am I doing over there? Working for someone else?

Amy arranged to return to Foula, moving into her grand-fathers retired cottage, and started her life back on the island by rebuilding fallen stone walls and pencilling in her apportionment to go hill grazing. Now she puts in 21 hours weekly pumping the islands supply of water each morning. She is a part time fire brigade member and spends the majority of her day working four crofts. It’s harder work than us foolish mainlanders will probably ever endure.

The people of Foula agree on one thing; the island needs a few more inhabitants. Not many, but some small families. What kind of traits would you need to ensure survival in the remoteness of the Shetland Islands? “Self-reliant, adaptable, fond of their own company, tolerant of other people’s views.” Says Sheila Gear, another member of the Holbourn family. She moved to Foula in 1964 to marry Jim, whose grandfather landed time in the 19th century and is remembered fondly throughout the island folk for petitioning queen Victoria and Disraeli to obtain the islands first regular postal service. Self-reliant because when things break in Foula, you need to fix them yourself. Fond of your own company because the island mingling isn’t exactly on the same scale as Oxford street. “This is a community that when it really comes to it, like when the council threatens to base the ferry of the island, everyone pulls together.” In what Henley describes Sheila as mild mannered and bespectacled as she stands behind the post office counter.

The community feel you get from Foula is similar to a rural Irish town in the sense, everyone knows each other, but not everyone is in contact. It’s a truly captivating way of living right on our door step, essentially.

People have been falling in love with the Island for years. One of those people is Penny Gear, who carries out a range of extraordinary duties on the Island. Penny is the daughter of Sheila and Jim Gear, and her duties on the island cover a broad range of areas. Shes a pony breeder, relief cleaner, school lunch supervisor, airstrip fire warden and bird monitor.

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Penny explained her reasons to Jon Henley for returning, and in hind sight, they are very reputable. “I never saw anything on the main land that I wanted more than Foula” although there has been stages on the island where she wished things would be easier for her. “I never wished I would be anywhere else. I love the freedom, the nature, the beauty, the life. On occasion I walk over to see the rollers coming in, it’s breathtaking, always.”

Bizarrely, well to outsiders anyway, Penny’s two boys, Paul, six, and Robert, 10, they are the only pupils to attend the island school. With the aforementioned Lerwick boarding school looming on the horizon for Robert, she admits she is dreading the change. Although she concedes her son Paul should take the baton of responsibility before too long. “But how many parents wouldn’t like to drop their children’s home and school into the middle of a park, where they can bike to school and the front door is never locked and there’s no worry of crime or pollution.”

If that’s what being remote is, that’s fine by me.”


Kindest regards

Barrel