Gruinard Island
— — the green that came back after the warning.
Not only on a wall.
“A small heather-covered island in Gruinard Bay, on the road between Gairloch and Ullapool. Uninhabited. For forty years a notice on the shore kept visitors away; it came down in 1990. From the A832 the island looks like any other in the bay: low, green, quiet. Cormorants pass through. Nobody lands.
Gruinard 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.
Gruinard Island lies in Gruinard Bay on the northwest coast of Scotland, in the historic county of Ross and Cromarty, part of the Highland council area. The island covers roughly 196 hectares and rises to about 106 metres at its highest point. It sits a kilometre offshore from the A832 road, the long coastal route that runs between Gairloch and Ullapool through Wester Ross. The Crown Estate has held the island since 1990. It is uninhabited, treeless, and covered in heather and rough grass.
In 1942 the British Ministry of Defence chose Gruinard for the wartime anthrax trials known as Operation Vegetarian. Sheep brought to the island died within days, and the spores stayed viable in the soil for decades. The island was sealed off and posted with red warning signs. From 1986 the Ministry sprayed 280 tonnes of formaldehyde diluted in seawater across the contaminated ground. In 1990, after a flock of sheep grazed unharmed, the site was declared safe and the warning signs were taken down.
No road reaches the island, no path circles it, no jetty welcomes a boat. Local skippers from Gairloch occasionally land naturalists who note the cormorant and shag colonies on the western cliffs, and the heather that has grown back over the test sites. Visitors are technically permitted but rarely come. The bay is more often photographed from the lay-by on the A832 above Laide, where the water turns a pale Atlantic green and Gruinard sits low between the headlands of Stattic Point and Greenstone Point.