Gruinard Island is a seemingly inconsequential lozenge of stone — one of dozens flecking the northern terminus of Scotland’s jagged western coast.
Hovering in the maw of a shallow inlet, the nearly featureless scrap of land has little to recommend it aside from the fuzz of greenery covering its 2-km expanse. To locals, it was a conveniently circumscribed grazing area for sheep, used for little else. The last permanent residents left in the 1880s.
But existential threat and devious human ingenuity converged, imbuing this otherwise anonymous place with strange and disturbing significance. For nearly 50 years, a plague lay dormant just beneath the surface of its rocky soil.
Between 1942 and 1943, the British government used the island as a testing ground for Project Vegetarian—a cunning plan to deploy a bioweapon against Germany. Winston Churchill feared that the Nazis might unleash disease as World War II raged on and hoped to have a pathogenic riposte at the ready.
In 1940, a team at Porton Down, a Ministry of Defense research lab in Wiltshire, was assigned the task of coming up with something deadly. Led by microbiologist Paul Fildes, they eventually focused on the use of anthrax (Bacillus anthracus) as an ideal agent.
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References to anthrax date back to ancient times — likely anthrax outbreaks are mentioned in the Bible and the work of Roman poet Virgil. It is a soil-borne bacteria afflicting mammals such as sheep, cattle and horses, which ingest its spores while grazing. Humans typically contract it by handling these animals or their products. The Germans had already made halting efforts to weaponize anthrax during World War I.
Fildes and his 50-strong cadre of scientists picked up where the Germans had left off. But after initial simulations using benign compounds, they needed somewhere isolated to test the real microbial munitions they had developed. So, the British government requisitioned Gruinard from the family that owned it. The heretofore bucolic island was given the sinister — if unimaginative — codename Base X.
The scientists tested their devious innovations by detonating anthrax bombs — launched on the ground and in one case from an aircraft — on unwitting sheep tethered downwind. The idea was that they would inhale the spores and become infected. And indeed, they did — most died within days. Despite the success of the airborne transmission of the disease, they ultimately decided that it would be more efficient to infect German cattle by feeding them linseed cakes laced with the bacteria.
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Five million of these poisoned treats were produced, with the idea of dropping them over German pastures by plane. They were never deployed — nor were any anthrax bombs. However, in 1943, sheep that had been improperly disposed of washed up on the mainland, passing anthrax to local livestock. The event was attributed to a Greek boat that had dumped infected carcasses into the water.
That year, the island was burned in an effort to destroy any residual anthrax spores. The effort proved ineffective. Anthrax is remarkably resilient — it can survive in the soil for decades. Gruinard was thus quarantined indefinitely, though the reason was not initially made public. For more than 20 years, scientists conducted annual tests and continued to find anthrax, largely at the test site. Rumors about the nature of the restrictions on the island swirled and a 1962 BBC report documented the suspicions of residents who had seen the experiments from shore and lost animals due to anthrax.
A report in 1979 formally acknowledged the tests and described the extent of the contamination. Incensed by the failure to remediate the poisoned earth, an anonymous group calling themselves the Dark Harvest Commandos left a bucket of dirt from Gruinard containing anthrax spores outside of Porton Down in 1981.
They then left a box of soil from the island — not containing any detectable anthrax — outside of a Conservative Party conference in Blackpool. A letter from the group, which claimed to include microbiologists, stated that they had taken 300 pounds of soil from the island and would continue to distribute it in protest of the experiments and the lasting damage they had caused. However, they posted a final letter at the end of the year stating that they had achieved their intent by drawing attention to the lurking hazard.
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It was not until 1986, though, that an intensive effort was made to destroy the remaining spores. The test site was again burned and then soaked in a solution of seawater and formaldehyde. The process was repeated in 1987. Sheep were then reintroduced and were deemed healthy after a six month sojourn on what by then was known as Anthrax Island. The abundant rabbit population was unaffected as well. The next year, it was officially declared free of the disease.
In 1990 it was sold back to the family that had owned it for £500 — per an agreement in 1946. Now, it has returned to its original use as pastureland and serves as a morbidly fascinating stop for tourists wending their way along Scotland’s scenic northern crest.
Gruinard was again in the news in 2022 when it was swept by wildfire. Residents noted the cries of birds disturbed by the blaze — oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) and other species nest there. And the island is frequently visited by white-tailed sea eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla).
top image: A view of Gruinard Island on the west coast of Scotland. Credit: Colin_Hunter/ Getty Images.
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