For decades, a remote island near Scotland has sat undisturbed due to the horrifying secret buried deep within its soil.
The island of Gruinard sits 1km off the coast of Scotland, near Laide and Ullapool. It’s visible from the mainland on a clear day, but in the 40s it was the testing site for a biochemical bomb of anthrax, which Churchill was considering dropping on Germany during World War 2.
In 1942, as the war with Germany raged on, Churchill feared the Nazi Party was developing a biochemical weapon , so tasked his team of scientists to find an equivalent weapon to fight back. They decided on anthrax – a naturally occurring bacterium in soil which causes a deadly disease upon inhalation or exposure.
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Scientists created several anthrax bombs and then the Government requisitioned Gruinard from its owners.
In order to test the anthrax bomb, a flock of sheep were brought onto the island and the bombs detonated near them. Within days, they were all dead and their corpses burnt or buried under the rubble of a cliff that was bombed by the Government.
The virulent poison leached into the soil, and made the island entirely uninhabitable. The bomb was never used on Germany and for decades, Gruinard Island was abandoned and sat empty, a forgotten relic of the horrors of the war.
(Image: Mirrorpix)
Decades later in 1981, newspapers began receiving strange letters from a clandestine operation that called itself Dark Harvest. Operation Dark Harvest demanded the Government decontaminate the island, and said that a team of scientists had gone ashore and collected the poisonous soil.
The group threatened to leave the soil “at appropriate points that will ensure the rapid loss of indifference of the government and the equally rapid education of the general public”. True to their word, later that same day a sealed package of soil was dropped outside the military research facility which had been responsible for poisoning the island in the first place.
Testing revealed the soil did indeed contain anthrax – which is deadly if inhaled. Several days later, another package of soil was left in Blackpool, where the conservative party was holding its annual conference. This soil did not contain anthrax, but testing revealed it was similar to the soil found on Gruinard Island.
(Image: Daily Record)
It took until the early 90s for the island to be declared clean after an intensive decontamination effort was made by the Government. Starting in 1986, hundreds of tonnes of formaldehyde were poured over the land, and the worst of the deadly topsoil was removed.
However, the formaldehyde ran off into the surrounding ocean and killed all the shellfish and seaweed in the sea near the island. As of 2007, efforts to regenerate marine life were still ongoing, but not yet successful – however after the efforts to decontaminate the island, a flock of sheep was placed on it and survived.
But the horrors of Gruinard were not over yet. In 2022, a devastating wildfire swept across the barren island, devastating every inch of the land. Witnesses to the fire told the BBC the scene was “apocalyptic” and looked “like hell-fire”.
However, a spokesperson for Gruinard Estate which owns the island, told the Scotsman the fire had likely been good for the island.
“It will certainly have done the island a lot of good. It didn’t go out of control. It looked dramatic.”
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