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MISSION TO THE EDGE OF EXISTENCE
Scots adventurer leads team to Rockall – described as the most desolate, despairing and awful place in the world
AARON Wheeler has chosen a fitting title for his forthcoming documentary on Rockall, that lonely, wind-scoured, uninhabited islet in the North Atlantic: “Rockall – the Edge of Existence”. The edge of existence, indeed. When Aaron and an expedition team later this year set out for Rockall, which lies more than 200 nautical miles off the west coast of Scotland, it will mean a 16-hour boat journey each way. Other options – non-military helicopters, sea-planes – were impracticable so far as the expedition is concerned, because of the sheer distances involved, the high cost of fuel, and the absence of a safe landing-place from the air.
As Baroness Tweedsmuir, Minister of State at the Scottish Office, told the House of Lords as long ago as November 1971: “Very few attempts have been made to land on Rockall, partly because it is a very difficult operation from the sea because of the steep, smooth sides of the island’s granite, and the constant swell, let alone frequent violent storms”.
No wonder that Cam Cameron, the Rockall 2022 expedition lead, acknowledges: “The greatest challenge is getting out there”.
Cameron, medic Dr Chris Grieco, and mountaineer James Price – who between them hope to raise £1 million for charity by living on Rockall for a week in June – will be filmed by Wheeler, director of photography Bryn Howard Williams and producer Ed Emsley. The current plan is for the filmmakers to live on the boat while Cameron, Grieco and Price stay on the rock itself. Radio operator Adrian ‘Nobby’ Styles, the expedition’s fourth member, will join for at least the first 24 hours to make a ham radio broadcast.
For such a small, isolated, uncompromising place, Rockall has for decades excited considerable intrigue and attracted attention. A newspaper headline once described it as a “guano-stained speck that continues to exert an allure”.
It was formally annexed by Great Britain in 1955 – it has been described as the last territory to be taken into the British Empire – and it was incorporated into the district of Harris, Inverness-shire, by the Island of Rockall Act of 1972. It is now part of the Western Isles.
PRITTI PATEL’S PLAN
The island has from time to time featured in popular culture. The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell once had Margaret Thatcher living on Rockall; more recently, he had Priti Patel saying that asylum-seekers would be processed on the remote islet. Rockall furthermore is familiar to millions of
BBC radio listeners from its nightly inclusion in the shipping forecast, alongside such other areas as North Utsire, South Utsire, Shannon, Dogger and German Bight.
Periodically the island has been at the centre of diplomatic and legal wrangles, too; Ireland, Iceland and Denmark, on behalf of the Faroes, have at one time or another all claimed the rock. In 2019, a dispute flared between the UK and the Republic of Ireland over Rockall and the surrounding 12-nautical-mile territorial sea. The Republic insisted that the waters were shared by all EU member states, but Scotland’s Fisheries Minister, Fergus Ewing, warned that Irish vessels could be boarded for fishing within 12 miles of Rockall.
DR Alasdair Allan, the SNP MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, told Holyrood at the time: “In the context of the large increase in illegal fishing activity around Rockall, the Scottish Government has been absolutely correct to take the action it has in protecting the rights and interests of Scottish fishermen.
“Domestic law recognises Rockall as part of Scotland, and the Scottish Government clearly has a duty and an obligation to regulate fishing rights in the territorial waters around it, as is laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea”.
The problem has continued to fester, however. A joint statement issued in January 2021 by the Republic’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue, said they were engaging with Scottish and UK authorities to discuss Ireland’s “long-standing fishing tradition in the area”.
The Irish Times noted at the time that tensions had resurfaced over fishing access when the Donegal-based Northern Celt was “blocked by the Scottish marine authority and told they could not fish within 12 nautical miles of the uninhabited island”.
Rockall’s claims to fame do not quite end there. Despite – or perhaps, because of – its forbidding nature, a tiny handful of hardy adventurers, including Tom McClean and Nick Hancock, has lived on Rockall for periods of between 40 and 45 days. (Hancock, as it happens, is the new expedition’s technical consultant).
In July 1985 McClean, a survival expert and a former SAS man and Paratrooper, came home to a pipe-band welcome on Mallaig after having spent 40 days on
Rockall in order to re-affirm Britain’s oil and mineral rights. The Glasgow Herald reported: “With food for several months crowding him out of his 5ft by 4ft shelter, he spent the time watching distant fishing boats, seabirds, a bat, and a solitary seal, and maintained twice-daily contact by radio with his wife, Jill, at home at his adventure centre at Loch Nevis”.
CRAZY? IT’S NOT CRAZY
McClean had in 1969 become the first person to row the Atlantic single-handedly, and crossed again in the smallest sailing craft, said of his experience of Rockall: “Crazy? It’s not crazy. It’s the way I make my living”. ITN footage of his time on the islet can be seen on YouTube.
In 1997 three Greenpeace activists occupied Rockall as part of its Atlantic Frontier protest against oil drilling plans in the area. They spent 42 days on the islet, living in a yellow, solar-powered pod, lashed to the rock with steel and heavy-duty straps. They spoke of the territorial disputes that have long been stirred by Rockall. One of the activists was quoted as saying: “The seas around Rockall, potentially rich in oil, are fought over by four nations – Britain, Denmark, Iceland and Ireland. By seizing Rockall, Greenpeace claims these seas for the planet and all its peoples.”
In 2014 Nick Hancock broke records by living alone for 45 days on Rockall, living in a home-made survival pod on a tiny ledge atop a 17-metre-high cliff-edge. He had originally planned to spend 60 days there, but his hopes were dashed by a fierce gale that resulted in much of his equipment and supplies being washed away in the ocean.
Hancock passed his time on Rockall in all sorts of imaginative ways. According to an article in Men’s Journal he “began talking to the homing pigeons and guillemots that landed on the rock. He read several books.
He wrote blog posts. He watched shearwaters gliding centimetres above the waves. He observed two minke whales surface close to Rockall. He viewed fishing trawlers that passed by. He did housekeeping. He began taking Italian lessons. Oh, and he also raised $17,000 for the Help the Heroes charity”.
Now, in 2022, comes a new expedition. Aaron Wheeler, the film-maker, conceived of his Rockall project during lockdown, long before he learned of the planned expedition. “In the back of my mind somewhere I knew about this island”, the 24-year-old says. “In my head it was an island that people from the army would have to live on for the UK to say, ‘we owned it’. And then I looked into it and found out about people like Tom and Nick. We did initial filming with them both last August.
“I asked them how they dealt with loneliness and isolation and they said it hadn’t been an issue at all. Both of them are from military backgrounds. Emotionally, I think, their attitude was more about getting the job done. They were just too busy trying not to get washed off the rock by the waves, really.
“Now the documentary has morphed into a look into why we do such trips, why we risk our lives for arbitrary accolades and adventure,” Wheeler adds. “Going to
dangerous places like [Rockall] reminds you how interested humans are in terms of exploring the Atlantic ocean”.
Why does he think Rockall has aroused so much fascination? “Nick said something to the effect that it was really difficult not to give Rockall a personality because it’s such an iconic thing, stuck in the middle of the ocean with nothing around it for 200 miles.
“It has really weird proportions, sticking out the way it does. Even the shape of it feels very iconic. I can imagine someone in prehistoric times almost seeing it as like a god or something, because it just seems so vivid and big and bold. Immediately, people are interested in Rockall because of that. But you also have lots of economics and geopolitics issues around – the value of the oil underneath”.
IT IS A DREADFUL PLACE
IT was in September 1955 that the Admiralty announced that, on the authority of the Queen, a party had been landed on Rockall by a helicopter from a survey ship, HMV Vidal, to take possession of the island. “A flagstaff was erected on the island”, read the official statement, “the Union Jack was broken, and a commemorative plaque was cemented to the rock. The annexation of this island was necessary since it is within the sector of the sea which is likely to come within the orbit of the projected guided weapons range in the Hebrides [South Uist]”.
This newspaper reported that there had been four previous known landings “on this tiny oceanic pyramid which is 70ft high and 83ft high”. The first was in 1810, by a party from HMS Endymion; the ship’s captain at first took the island to be another ship. In 1904, however, some 700 people drowned when a New York-bound Danish steamer, Norge, was wrecked off Rockall.
During the Second World War, and twice in the decade to 1955, the RAF made flights over the island to photograph its teeming bird-life. News of the annexation prompted The Herald’s editorial diary to note: “In these days of self-determination and contracting frontiers it is thrilling to record any movement in the opposite direction. It is therefore with a modified imperialist satisfaction that we read of an annexation and a flag-planting on Rockall, and that it was a proper naval operation …”
It had, however, been a secret operation, the Admiralty having presented it as a fait accompli. The Herald diary added that it came at a time “when the Argentine, a country which above all others takes an acquisitive interest in the rocky outcroppings in the Atlantic, is too preoccupied with internal affairs [President Peron had just been deposed] to extend the protection of its flag over a nest of gannets and a line in the weather forecast for shipping”.
Sixteen years later, in 1971, the Island of Rockall Act was debated in Parliament. In the Lords, Lord Kennet, who had seen war-time service in the Royal Navy, made a remark that has often resurfaced in articles about Rockall. “My Lords”, he declared, “I think that everybody who has ever been in the Royal Navy will have seen Rockall, but not many other people. It is a dreadful place. There could be no place more desolate, more despairing and more awful to see in the whole world”.
ANOTHER peer, Lord Tanlaw, said he feared that Rockall’s “very remoteness and apparent uselessness could one day tempt certain interests to see it as a safe and stable platform for experiments involving nuclear devices”. He sought assurances “that this newly acquired part of Scotland, this small speck, if you like, on our planet’s surface, which is about to become, through this Bill, the responsibility of civilised Government for the first time, will be entirely left alone by homo sapiens, in perpetuity”.
Baroness Tweedsmuir declined, saying:
“It is really beyond my responsibilities or those of any other Minister in this House”.
Now, more than half a century after that debate, Cam Cameron, at 52, is readying himself for the expedition. The Rockall dream is something that has been with him for a long time. As he told the Northern Scot recently: “About 15 to 20 years ago I remember looking at Rockall and thinking, ‘That’s something I’d like to do’. Nick then did his record-breaking stay on Rockall, which is an amazing story.
I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT
“I put it aside, though, and never really thought about it again until a while ago when we had a guy who came to speak to our naval training unit in Bristol about the Royal Navy team who rowed across the Atlantic. It got me thinking and I reckoned we could do something like that.
“I wanted to do something different that would catch the eye so I thought, ‘We could go to Rockall, nobody goes there, and stay there for a week’.”
Cameron, who is from Buckie, has the qualities and the experience it takes to get to Rockall and endure the unforgiving elements. He spent six years with the Gordon Highlanders before training as a marine biologist and oceanographer, and is also a skipper and Yacht-Master Offshore. There are probably easier ways to raise a million pounds for charity than by journeying to that lonely, far-flung islet, but he and his colleagues deserve credit for their tenacity and ingenuity.
The seas around Rockall, potentially rich in oil, are fought over by four nations – Britain, Denmark, Iceland and Ireland