The Shiant Isles — The Charmed Islands of the Minch

Shiant Isles, The Minch, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Three small uninhabited islands in the Minch, owned privately by the same family since 1937. Sailors say they hold a hostile fairy people — the Sìthichean of the deep water — and that ships passing too close are followed by puffins acting strangely.

The Shiant Isles — Na h-Eileanan Seunta, "the charmed islands" — are a cluster of three small uninhabited islands and several skerries in the Minch, four miles east of Harris. They are spectacular: 150-metre basalt cliffs of vertical columns drop straight into the sea, and the islands hold one of the largest puffin colonies in Britain — over 240,000 birds in the breeding season. The Shiants have been privately owned since 1937, when the author Compton Mackenzie sold them to the journalist Nigel Nicolson. They have a single basic shepherd's bothy and no permanent residents. The grazing has been let to a Harris family for generations; no one lives there for any extended period. The Gaelic name — "the charmed islands" — is older than any historical record. Local Harris tradition is that the islands were never settled because they belong to a hostile fairy people, the Sìthichean of the deep Minch, who tolerate brief visits but punish those who try to remain. The folklore records several attempts at permanent settlement, all abandoned: an early-medieval monastic cell, a 17th-century shieling, a 19th-century crofting attempt. None survived more than a few seasons. The fairy-presence on the Shiants is marked, in the modern tradition, by the strange behaviour of the puffins. Boats passing close to the cliffs at dusk in summer are sometimes followed by small groups of puffins who behave aberrantly — flying in close circles around the boat, making vocalisations not in the normal puffin repertoire, sometimes settling briefly on rigging or rails. Puffins are normally not interested in boats. The fishermen of the Outer Hebrides regard these following puffins as a warning: turn the boat away. Adam Nicolson, the current owner — son of the journalist who bought them, and a noted writer on Hebridean nature — has documented the puffin behaviour in his own books without committing himself to the fairy explanation. He reports, however, that one does not stay on the Shiants for long.