About

In July 2011 Cape Farewell embarked on a month-long expedition by boat across the Scottish Islands, bringing the notion and experience of expedition home to the UK, with an exploration of island ecologies and cultures, and of the strategies for sustainable and resilient futures being implemented across the Scottish Isles. More ›

The Crew

The expedition crew of 40 includes island artists, storytellers, film makers, playwrights, architects, designers, musicians, community leaders, social scientists, ecologists, marine biologists, oceanographers, poets, acclaimed Gaelic singers and a chef.
Meet the crew ›

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Exploring

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Video highlights

Watch video highlights from the expedition ›

Long-lines

They’d all have cleared and ploughed and harrowed up and down and sown in turn Each lot of tacked inbye, outrun, drill and rig in their own townships and been around The headlands of the Horn and Hope in the image here from way back when The burns, black as the Styx, were full of... Read more ›

Three Island Reels

Three Island Reels
Shot by Matt Wainwright

Uist My Love

Uist My Love by Julie Fowlis

Blue Bonnets

Blue Bonnets
Shot by Matt Wainwright

To Finlay MacDonald, St Kilda / Dha Fionnlagh MacDhomnaill a Hiort

Boreray from St Kilda (Photo by Natasha Freedman)
This poem was written by Norman Campbell from Ness, Lewis for Finlay MacDonald, one of the last great gannet hunters on St Kilda. To slaughter the gannets, the hunters first had to target the watch bird. The community left the island in 1930, leaving the jagged cliffs to the gannets (solan geese).   Finlay Macdonald... Read more ›

Guarding the sands of the West Coast

While The Song of the Whale continues it’s voyage to St Kilda I find myself back in Taigh Chearsabhagh to have another peruse of Ian Stephens exhibition as well as a post trip chat with Andy.  Sitting in the café, an elderly gentleman strikes up a conversation that initiates from a minor technological struggle that... Read more ›

Monachs

Lighthouse, Monach Islands
machair spills a rough greening to the sandline this is where sea gets eroded but it kicks back on the other side repels boarding boulders tosses them like pups a long way in the harling’s gone so you see the join – bricks over stone maybe one shift of scale was enough  – market, catch... Read more ›

Out of the Mist

St Kilda
We reached St Kilda after an eight-hour sail from Lochmaddy in 28 knot winds, on a grey-black sea wrinkled, serrated, swollen and rolling. Some of us bowled over by seasickness; the rest holding to bits of heeling boat in our storm gear, searching for the lost horizontal. 100 miles from the mainland, on the western... Read more ›

St Kilda archipelago

Chart St Kilda
it’ s a particular three individual spears dipping and trimming in nearly mutual response to airs and in present documented light two islands of a known group are bare to their midriff rock but you know they possess summits somewhere in the drizzle and a whole neighbour still concealed  

Rock, wind, sand, peat, water

Sailing to Lochmaddy
Lochboisdale, South Uist. Met with Joanne Ferguson of Scottish Natural Heritage, David Muir from Coast Adapt, and Huw Francis from Storas Uibhist (community landowners of the South Uist Estate, the largest community buyout in Scotland). Small crofting communities, separated by mountains, boggy peat lands and lochs, are scattered along the broken coastlines east and west,... Read more ›

Virtual St Kilda

Village Bay
Although it took me three attempts, I have been lucky enough to visit St Kilda before. This archipelago, the remotest part of the British Isles lying 41 miles west of Benbecula, has been in the news again recently. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a permanent settlement on Boreray, which could date back to the... Read more ›

Kyla Orr on seaweed

Video Kyla Orr
Kyla Orr of the the Scottish Association for Marine Science talks about her research into the ecological impacts of using seaweed as a biofuel. Video by Matt Wainwright