The Irish Sea, tucked between Great Britain and Ireland, is home to more than a dozen islands, ranging from places with populations the size of small cities to bare rocks nobody has ever lived on. A handful of them have surprising stories behind them.
Off the coast of Wales sits Anglesey, known in Welsh as Ynys Môn, the largest island in the Irish Sea. It was once the spiritual heart of the ancient druids, and the Romans are said to have crossed the water specifically to wipe them out, according to the historian Tacitus. Today the island is connected to the mainland by bridges, including one designed by the engineer Thomas Telford in the 1820s.
Off the coast of Northern Ireland lies Rathlin, a small island with only a handful of permanent residents, making it the only inhabited offshore island in the country. Local legend says the Scottish king Robert the Bruce hid in a cave here after a defeat in battle and watched a spider try, fail, and try again to spin its web, an image said to have inspired him to keep fighting for Scotland’s independence.
Off the coast of northern England sits Walney Island, a long, narrow strip of land next to the shipbuilding town of Barrow-in-Furness. A bridge built in 1908 connects it to the mainland, and today around a fifth of the town’s population lives on the island. At its southern tip lies one of Europe’s largest colonies of nesting gulls, with tens of thousands of pairs crowded onto a stretch of dunes and pebbles that visitors are not allowed to walk through during the breeding season.
Right in the middle of the sea sits the Isle of Man itself, the second-largest of the group and by far the most populated. Its parliament, Tynwald, is often described as the oldest continuously operating parliament in the world, said to have met without interruption for over a thousand years.
There is also the Calf of Man, a tiny island just off the southern tip of Man. Almost nobody lives there permanently either, except for a small team of volunteers who run a bird observatory, watching the seabirds that pass through in huge numbers each year.