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 ›

Read posts by

Exploring

Video


Video highlights

Watch video highlights from the expedition ›

Cape Farewell – we know what to do, can art help us get on and do it?

The following is an excerpt from Sara Parkin’s article found on the Forum for the Future website. …I was fortunate enough to join the crew for one week of a four week tour of Scottish Islands, starting with Skye and Canna before crossing the Minch to Mingulay, Barra and South Uist. The weather was kind,... Read more ›

Islands and Visions

Eigg Barbecue on Song of the Whale
There is a sea view when travelling from Eigg to Mallaig where you have a 360° vision of the Small Isles, Skye, the mountains of Scotland, Mull and, far into the distance, the Outer Hebrides. At 6 am yesterday the grey of the sea bled into the numerous blues of the mountains all dramatised by... Read more ›

Annie Cattrell and Jo Shapcott in conversation about week 4 of the expedition

Annie 1
JS Annie, what is it about islands? AC I like the fact that there’s a larger proportion of sea than land mass visible. There appears to be a completeness and self-sufficiency about the individual islands even though they are all distinctly different. There seems to be a big distinction between uninhabited and inhabited islands –... Read more ›

The Puffins of Rona

Puffins
Video by Erika Blumenfeld and Siôn Parkinson. The day finds me on the remote island of North Rona, which sits on the 59th latitude in the North Atlantic Ocean. Here, amidst the thick salty air and the steep verdant hills, which tumble toward dark rock cliffs into the restless sea, lives a vibrant colony of... Read more ›

Heisker (Monach Islands)

Monach Islands
Swam this morning off Ceann Ear, one of the Monach islands (Heisker) torn from North Uist by centuries of storm and broken into an archipelago of white shell sand beaches, dunes and flowering machair. We travelled in a day from the dark vertical near-impossibility of St Kilda to the horizontal stillness and limitless skies of... Read more ›

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 ›

Tiger Moth

Tiger Moth
At Canna House I showed our group the Hebridean moth collection – mostly specimens from Canna and Barra – in cabinets in the entomology room. We took turns to crowd into the little space, jostling with butterfly nets, a moth trap held together with large coloured paper clips, rows of diaries for every year from... Read more ›

Corncrakes

Field
One of the simple pleasures of living in North Uist is to stand in my garden just after midnight and listen to the loud rasping ‘crex, crex’ song, recalling a grated comb, of around 10 corncrakes that inhabit the crofts surrounding the loch where my house is situated. After long-term declines dating back to the... Read more ›

Dolphin

Dolphin

Basking Sharks

zissousshark

Puffins

puffinthumb