V is for...

... Vatersay

Island

Outer Hebrides

50

Acres: 2372, Height: 623ft

By the 1960s the island of Vatersay, the second biggest of the Barra group of islands, was a community in rapid decline. With a population of less than 100 (from 240 in the 1930s) it looked set to become what it once had been, an island farm run from Barra. However a causeway completed in 1991 now links the two islands, forming a permanent bond and making the two communities stronger. Home to rare flowers and birds, the island was also the place where Marion of the Heads, who lived in Kisimul Castle in Barra in 1427, had many of her workers drowned and stepsons beheaded. Although it was her wish to be buried on her birthplace of Coll, she too ended up on Vatersay, some say because of a thick fog which prevented the journey, others because she was hated so much that no-one respected her dying wish...