THE ULTIMATE
All by my selfie – her island photo album
How Eden star Katie survived – and thrived – on an uninhabited isle for 40 days and 40 nights without (gasp!) a modern mobile or access to the internet
IT’S the ultimate Girl’s Own adventure. For 40 days and nights, she chose to be marooned on a deserted island in the most remote corner of Scotland. Alone apart from a colony of seabirds and surviving on meagre rations bulked out with foraged nettles and seaweed, Katie Tunn struggled to keep dry amid the driving rain and salt spray.
Having now returned to civilisation, the 32-year-old has spoken to The Scottish Mail on Sunday about the physical challenges of life on an uninhabited island – but also about the extraordinary beauty and freedom.
Away from the ‘digital overload’ of 21st Century living, she reconnected with herself and found peace in the Shiant Isles.
Liberated from societal rules, she cast convention – and clothing – aside and began to appreciate the strength of her body instead of how it looked.
She said: ‘You stop feeling selfconscious, as puffins aren’t exactly going to judge you for not washing your hair or having hairy legs.
‘If I got hot when I was moving rocks, I took my top off without a second thought, like a male builder might – as there was no one to bat an eyelid.’
Although spending almost six weeks on an island might seem something of an odd career choice, Miss Tunn – who was recently named an Ordnance Survey ‘GetOutside Champion’ – is no stranger to life ‘off-grid’.
Many television viewers will remember the artist from Channel 4’s ill-fated reality show Eden: Paradise Lost, which saw 23 men and women attempt to survive in the Scottish wilderness for a full year.
In the Eden camp, on the isolated Ardnamurchan peninsula, most issues arose due to the people rather than the landscape, with egos and infighting causing more than half to leave before the end.
So when she embarked on her latest adventure, Miss Tunn was glad she was going solo.
Between April 1 and May 12, she lived on Garbh Eilean (Gaelic for Rough Isle) in the Shiant Isles, which lie off Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Only a mile-and-a-half long and half-a-mile at its widest point, the island has been uninhabited since the last residents quit in the late 18th Century, leaving no more than ruins and memories.
With only a sleeping bag and tarp, a notepad and pen and a few essentials such as rice, oats and flour, Miss Tunn wanted to find out just how little she really needed to survive.
She was almost forced to give up after suffering a bad fall that saw her taken to hospital by the Coastguard.
However, the unique opportunity to live alongside one of the UK’s largest breeding puffin colonies – and a newfound love of ‘seaweed spaghetti’ – spurred her on.
Miss Tunn, who grew up in Windsor but now lives on Skye, said: ‘People warned me I might get bored or lonely or scared but I didn’t feel any of those things. It was surprisingly easy to cope.
THERE is no white noise on an uninhabited island, just your thoughts. It gave me time to think properly for the first time in a long time and unravel things in my mind. Because you have no distractions, you are really faced with yourself. If there is anything that is bothering you, you can’t escape it.
‘Being away from the constant heckle of emails and messages pinging and the pressure of thinking, “I really need to reply to that,” was refreshing, as was not knowing the news or anything that was happening outside this bubble of birdsong and pretty views.
‘I wasn’t ever bored. I learned new things about the landscape and the wildlife every day. It’s amazing what you can spot without the distractions that smartphones and televisions bring.
‘Paring back your existence, even just for a few weeks, shows you how little you need and what is really important.’
With no one else around to pass judgment, the self-styled Girl Friday embraced her newfound freedom.
‘Social conventions you are expected to follow as a woman go out of the window,’ she said.
‘To be able to strip off for a wash in the sea feels great. And I would walk over the hills in my pants when it was warm. There’s a really satisfying freedom in that.
‘I didn’t look at myself in the mirror for the entire time and started to cherish the strength and agility of my body over how it looked.’ She supplemented her diet of basic grains, oats and dehydrated soup sachets with foraged nettles and seaweed and collected fresh water from a nearby burn. ‘There is something quite special about finding, cooking and eating seaweed down on the shore,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure it
would taste quite the same in a city kitchen, but when you are hungry and surrounded by sea air, it is very satisfying.
‘I would make flatbreads from the flour on a campfire and have porridge in the morning.’
She continued: ‘As a luxury, I took a few bottles of whisky with me, which was as much to keep me warm as anything else.
‘The cold and the damp was relentless, as the island is so exposed.
‘I don’t usually mind being cold and wet but there’s little respite when living outside.
‘The first couple of weeks involved scraping ice off my sleeping bag in the mornings – but that was preferable to later rainy days where I had to wear clothes to dry them.
‘It was a good day when I could feel my fingers and toes.’
As Garbh Eilean has no trees, Miss Tunn used driftwood, an old abandoned gate, rocks and moss to construct a shelter.
The self-deprecating artist describes the rough and ready abode as ‘not all that great’ – but the handmade hut she named The Hermit’s Nest could have come straight from the pages of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
She said: ‘I bivvied under a tarp at first but that whipped in the wind and soon became torn, so I had no choice but to build a more substantial shelter.
‘I didn’t take a tent as I didn’t want to have a barrier between me and the place I camped. Sleeping in an open shelter had its pros and cons. It was constantly windy and the rain came in sideways as the gales howled.
‘Sometimes I was even showered with sea spray, but it was worth it to open my eyes first thing in the morning to see a wren hopping beside me or an eagle passing overhead.
‘On some nights, the moon was so full and bright that I could see the birds moving around in the night, flying with each other and casting shadows on the ground. It was magical.’
Before she left for the Shiant Isles, Miss Tunn had promised her family that she would make sure she kept herself safe. However, less than halfway through her ‘castaway’ life she was forced to use a basic old mobile phone she had packed in case of an ‘emergency’ – to call for medical help.
She suffered concussion after