Islands always intrigue, hovering on the horizons of our imaginations – seen, according to your lights, as territories to be taken, ancient redoubts, repositories of secrets, even loci of lands of youth. Where there are no islands, we often imagine them – Plato’s Atlantis, the Celts’ Avalon, the Irish Hy-Brasil, Zeno’s Friseland, Columbus’s Antillia – and occasionally find them, like Terra Australis Incognita, postulated long before Europeans made landfall.
Orkney was a trading station long before London, and Iona was the epicentre of Celtic Christianity
Britain was once itself an imagined island – or rather islands plurally, called by Pliny Britanniae, one...
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