Gough Island
— — the loneliest weather station in the world.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcanic island far below the latitudes shipping cares about, more than two thousand kilometres from the nearest port. A handful of South African meteorologists overwinter here. Around them, millions of seabirds: albatross, petrels, the small endemic bunting that exists nowhere else. The wind never really stops. The Tristan boat comes once a year.
Gough Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gough Island sits in the South Atlantic at roughly 40 degrees south, about 400 kilometres southeast of Tristan da Cunha and 2,700 kilometres west of Cape Town. It is part of the British Overseas Territory of Tristan da Cunha. The island covers roughly 65 square kilometres, rising to Edinburgh Peak at 910 metres. UNESCO inscribed Gough and Inaccessible Islands as a World Heritage site in 1995, recognising one of the least disrupted island ecosystems in the cool temperate zone. The only human presence is a small South African weather station on the east coast.
There is no airstrip, no harbour, no settlement beyond the weather station that has operated here since 1956. The annual relief voyage from Cape Town brings in a fresh team of six or seven meteorologists and takes the previous crew home. Between voyages, the only sounds are wind, surf, and the colonies: Tristan albatross, Atlantic petrel, sooty albatross, the Gough bunting and Gough moorhen, both endemic. The island holds an estimated several million breeding seabirds. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds calls it one of the most important seabird sites on Earth.
Gough sits in the Roaring Forties, a belt of westerly winds that circles the southern ocean. The climate is cool and wet year round, averaging roughly 11 degrees Celsius, with rain on more than 250 days and winds frequently above gale force. Most seabirds breed in the southern spring and summer, between September and March. The Tristan albatross, critically endangered, fledges around June after nearly a year on the nest. A long-running RSPB programme to eradicate the invasive house mouse that preys on chicks ran its main operation in 2021.