Welcome to the “island of death”: where a lethal disease lurked beneath visitors' feet
For half a century, this tiny island’s toxic past meant it was declared off limits by its country’s government.
Located just off the north-west coast of Scotland, there is a minuscule island which, for much of the 20th century, was declared a no-go zone by the U.K. government.
“Hereabouts, they call it the island of death, the mystery island,” the BBC reporter Fyfe Robertson revealed in 1962. “And for good reason.” Officially known as Gruinard Island, this 484-acre piece of land is better known in Britain by the menacing moniker ‘Anthrax Island’.
‘Anthrax Island’ at the heart of biological warfare op
A remote but accessible island located under a mile from the mainland, Gruinard was the site of then-top-secret military experiments during the Second World War, as the British government prepared itself for potential germ warfare.
Amid fears that Nazi Germany was readying biological bombs, prime minister Winston Churchill ordered the development of an equivalent weapon at the beginning of the 1940s, to be used should Adolf Hitler carry out such an attack.
A plan, initially developed at the Porton Down military facility in southern England, over 600 miles from Gruinard Island, was hatched. As part of ‘Operation Vegetarian’, linseed cakes would be contaminated with the Bacillus anthracis bacteria - the cause of the deadly anthrax disease - and dropped into Germany.
There, the linseed cakes would be eaten by livestock, which would not only get anthrax themselves - potentially decimating the animals' German populations - but also pass the illness on to anyone who ate their meat.
What happens if you get anthrax?
According to the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people and animals can contract the illness by breathing in anthrax spores or by consuming contaminated food or drink. Humans may also be infected by allowing spores to enter an opening in the skin.
Per the CDC, people who eat anthrax-infected meat can display a range of symptoms, including fever and chills, bloody vomiting and bloody diarrhea, and fainting. “If you don’t get proper treatment, all types of anthrax have the potential to spread through your body and cause severe illness and death,” the agency warns.
Gruinard Island’s role in ‘Operation Vegetarian’
As can be seen in a chilling video declassified by the U.K. government in 1997, it was on the uninhabited Gruinard Island that military scientists tested out Bacillus anthracis as a means of poisoning animals. In the footage, the scientists are seen exploding ‘anthrax bombs’ close to tied-up sheep. The anthrax proved effective: one by one, the sheep dropped dead in the days after exposure.
While ‘Operation Vegetarian’ was never carried out, the military experiments left a lasting, lethal legacy on Gruinard, whose soil remained contaminated by anthrax spores for decades. For nearly half a century, indeed, warnings posted on the island’s shoreline cautioned the public not to set foot on Gruinard. “This island is government property under experiment,” the signs read. “The ground is contaminated with anthrax and is dangerous. Landing is prohibited.”
As is noted by Iain Macdonald of the Scottish newspaper The Herald, though, the word “anthrax” did not actually feature on the warning signs until more than two decades after the Gruinard Island experiments.
While the mysterious deaths of animals on the nearby mainland had, at the time, offered locals a clear indication that sinister work was being carried out during the wartime operation on Gruinard, the exact nature of the scientists’ activities on the island remained enveloped in a cloud of secrecy for years afterwards.
“We knew there was something going on there,” one surviving local resident, John Alick MacRae, told the BBC documentary The Mystery of Anthrax Island in 2022. MacRae recalled “people in white suits going to the island”, while another man, Roy McIntyre, remembered that, from the mainland, he could see “puffs in the air, a few little explosions going off” on Gruinard.
What McIntyre saw, it later became clear, was the detonation of the experimental anthrax bombs.
Watch the shocking footage of the ‘Anthrax Island’ experiments:
“Where better to send the seeds of death”
In 1981, The Herald was among the recipients of menacing messages from a then-unknown militant group which, Macdonald writes, “sowed seeds of panic in the British state” as it demanded Gruinard Island’s decontamination.
Calling itself Dark Harvest, the group said it had removed a quantity of the anthrax-infected soil from Gruinard - and planned to deposit it at sites around the U.K., including Porton Down. “Where better to send the seeds of death,” the group said, “than to the place from whence they came?”
A soil sample containing anthrax was indeed found at Porton Down. Soil was also placed in the west-coast English city of Blackpool, which at the time was hosting the annual conference of the U.K.’s ruling Conservative Party. This sample, though, turned out not to be infected.
A group whose members have never been identified, Dark Harvest got its wish in April 1990, when the U.K. government declared Gruinard Island decontaminated, having sprayed the soil with large quantities of a formaldehyde solution. The following month, the island was sold back to the heirs of its original owner, for the price of £500 - exactly the amount the government had paid to purchase it half a century earlier.
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