Britain is an island nation, and perhaps that is why water has always carried such weight in our imagination. The sea glimmers with promise. It suggests freedom, adventure, the possibility of leaving and becoming something else. Yet it has also long served another purpose, quieter and crueller. 
Water can be a boundary as much as a horizon. 
It can separate just enough to wound.
Beyond the familiar coastline, beyond postcards and pleasure boats, lies another Britain. It is scattered across wind-scoured rocks and tidal remnants, places close enough to see home and far enough to make it unreachable. These were not distant colonies or exotic outposts. They were fragments of the same land, set aside so that society would not have to look too closely at what it had done.
The prison islands holds a particular kind of poetry. In stories, islands are places of wonder and revelation. 
In reality, they can be perfect cages. 
No walls need rise high when the sea itself keeps watch. Waves enforce the sentence tirelessly, night and day, asking nothing in return.
For centuries, Britain used its islands to confine not only criminals, but dissenters, rebels, children, the inconvenient, and the unwanted. Exile was quieter than execution, gentler than open violence. It allowed authority to appear merciful while ensuring silence. The sea could do the forgetting.
One of the starkest of these places is the Bass Rock, rising sheer and pale from the Firth of Forth. From a distance it appears almost unreal, a single immense stone lifted from the water, its cliffs bleached white by seabirds and salt. Today it is alive with wings and cries, a cathedral of gannets. In the seventeenth century, it was a place of fear.
The Bass was visible for miles, and that visibility was part of its power. Made of hard volcanic stone, it offered no softness, no shelter from wind or cold. A fortress was raised upon it in the late sixteenth century, and in a time of religious upheaval it became a place of confinement for those whose beliefs defied the crown. Covenanters, men and women who refused royal control over their faith, were taken by boat and left upon this vast, unforgiving rock.
As the mainland shrank behind them, so too did hope. The Bass offered little fresh water, little warmth, and no escape. Cells were cold and damp, battered by sea spray and storm winds that never truly ceased. Supplies arrived only when weather allowed. Hunger, sickness, and exhaustion were constant companions. Some prisoners were kept in irons. Others were held for years without trial, their lives suspended in a grey limbo between land and sea.
And yet, even here, humanity endured. Letters were written and smuggled away. Hymns were sung into the roar of the wind. Faith, which the prison was meant to grind down, instead became something sharper and more defiant. John Blackadder would later write of the Bass as a place of immense suffering, but also of spiritual intensity. That belief survived at all remains one of the island’s quiet miracles.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the Bass fell silent as a prison. Its fortress was taken, its purpose abandoned. Time and seabirds reclaimed what power had built. 
Today the rock stands uninhabited by people, transformed from a symbol of repression into one of natural wonder, though its history still clings like salt in the stone.
Far to the southwest, Lundy Island rises from the Bristol Channel, where tides clash and the sea behaves unpredictably, as if uncertain of its own intentions. Steep cliffs ring the island, broken only by a few perilous landing places. It is beautiful, austere, and difficult, a place that feels removed even before you set foot upon it.
Lundy was never a formal state prison, but for centuries it functioned as something perhaps more unsettling. Controlled privately and semi-independently, it became a place where captives could be held beyond easy reach of law or rescue. In the medieval period and into the seventeenth century, prisoners were confined there not because a system demanded it, but because power allowed it.
Under the Marisco family, particularly in the early 1600s, Lundy gained a dark reputation. Marisco Castle rose on the island not just as a home or a fortress, but as a place of detention. Political opponents, kidnapped victims, and prisoners taken during acts of piracy were held in chambers cut directly into the granite. 
Light was scarce. 
Comfort nonexistent. 
The island itself became the prison.
Here, punishment was not spectacle. It was absence. Days passed marked only by weather and tide. Escape was thwarted not by guards alone, but by waters that turned deadly without warning. Silence did the work. Hope eroded slowly, grain by grain, like the cliffs themselves.
After the fall of the Mariscos during the English Civil War, Lundy’s role as a prison faded. Authority tightened elsewhere, and private exile became less acceptable. The island passed through new hands and new identities. Today it is known for its wildlife and strange independence, yet beneath the grass and stone lies a memory of lives quietly removed from the world.
Portland tells a different story, though no less heavy. Now tethered to the mainland by a narrow sweep of shingle, it was once more distinctly island, shaped by wind and sea and separation. In the nineteenth century, Portland became a place where punishment was not only confinement, but labour.
As transportation overseas declined, Britain turned inward. Convicts were sent to Portland to quarry stone for the nation’s ambitions. The prison rose stern and watchful, but it was the landscape that truly punished. Men worked long hours in all weather, hauling and shaping stone with blistered hands and broken backs. The sea glittered close enough to taunt them, always present, always unreachable.
Their labour built breakwaters and harbours, fortifications meant to protect a powerful empire. The irony was cruel and complete. They built strength for a world that had no place for them. Names faded. The stone endured.
Portland remains a prison to this day, one of the longest continuously used penal sites in Britain. Though conditions have changed, the quarries and walls still speak of exhaustion etched into the land itself, of lives consumed in service to the state.
On the Isle of Wight, softer now with tourism and nostalgia, exile took on a different shape. Parkhurst Prison, established in the nineteenth century, was intended for children. Boys, many of them poor rather than dangerous, were sent across water to be corrected through discipline and isolation. Reform was the language used. Loneliness was the lived reality.
Strict routines governed every hour. 
Silence was enforced. 
Childhood slipped quietly away behind locked doors. 
For many, Parkhurst was only a beginning. From there, boys were transported overseas, the island serving as a threshold between home and permanent displacement. Across the water, the mainland shimmered with a life they could see but never touch.
What unites these islands is not only geography, but a particular cruelty of vision without access. 
You can see the world you are barred from. 
You can smell it when the wind is right. 
At night, lights flicker across the water, proof that life continues quite happily without you. The sea whispers constantly, promising escape while ensuring failure. 
Hope becomes dangerous.
These islands reveal something uneasy about Britain itself. A nation that so often chose distance over dialogue, removal over reckoning. 
Send them away. 
Place them somewhere we do not have to see. 
Let the sea absorb our discomfort.
And yet, these places were not only sites of suffering. They were also places where humanity endured with stubborn grace. Prisoners sang into storms. They carved initials into stone, small defiant acts that said I was here. Friendships formed. Stories were shared. Some even found a strange peace in the narrowing of the world, where tide and sky became the measure of time.
Today, many of these islands are quiet again. Birds nest where guards once stood. Visitors walk paths unaware of who once traced them in chains. The sea keeps its secrets well. But if you linger, if you listen beyond the wind, you may feel the presence of forgotten lives pressing gently against the present.
Britain’s prison islands remind us that history is not only written in grand halls and famous names. It is written in places people were meant to forget. They still lie scattered in the surrounding waters, commas in the long sentence of the past, asking us to pause, to listen, and to remember those who were sent away not to be healed, but to be erased.
Until next time, 
 
Ta ta for now.

Yours, Lainey.

🦋🦋🦋