The greatest threat to Holy Island since the Vikings

It’s hard to explain how sad it will be if, after Christmas, Defra officials ban fishing on Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, in the North Sea, where the Lindisfarne gospels were written and where men and women have fished for hundreds if not thousands of years.

For some reason no one can quite work out, Holy Island has been placed on the shortlist to become a Highly Protected Marine Area – HPMA – in which no fishing of any sort is allowed. But banning all fishing will destroy the village; Lindisfarne, which has been inhabited since long before its most famous residents, St Aidan and St Cuthbert, set up there, will fade away. There’ll be tourists, but no actual community, no life. Even the Vikings didn’t manage that.

I imagine future historians hunting through Defra records looking for the great explanation; the reason officials thought Holy Island was a necessary sacrifice. The saddest thing of all is that I don’t think there is one. I’ve read the Defra consultation ‘factsheet’ and I’m afraid there’s not much evidence of thought: just a vague impression of apathetic officials spending a few hours on Google over a Pret salad at lunchtime, picking feasible places for their HPMA candidates list – remote, northern, less likely to make a fuss.

The ‘factsheet’ says an HPMA on Holy Island would be ‘designed to achieve full natural recovery… of the biological communities present’. Perhaps they thought this an unarguable good. If they’d only Googled a little further, or visited, they’d have discovered that fishing on Holy Island is already about as ethical as any eco-Tory could hope for. There are only a handful of fishermen, and because the island is already in a protected zone all they catch is lobster and crab – carefully returning any hen lobsters ‘berried’ with eggs.