LAST MONTH Visit Scotland posted a picture of Gruinard Bay in Wester Ross on their Facebook page.
“Whoah! Have we just found the most idyllic beach ever?” the national tourist body wrote.
“THIS is Gruinard Beach & we [heart emoji] it!”
But past the stunning sands, and beyond the sparkling clear blue/green water, right at the back of the picture, just to the left, was the outline of Gruinard Island, the mile-long rock in the sea, still known by some as Anthrax Island.
For the Canadian metal band Hammerdrone, the history of this uninhabited, bleak Scottish island, and the action taken by a group of activists to force the government to clean it up, is far more awe-inspiring than the “most idyllic beach ever”.
The Alberta five-piece released Operation Dark Harvest earlier in the year, a concept album inspired and named after the campaign that, depending on who you speak to, was either an act of Scottish nationalist terrorism or a fed-up community pushed to the limit taking back control.
Describing themselves as an aggressive melodic death metal band, Hammerdrone are fronted by Perthshire-born Graham Harris, who emigrated to Canada a few years back.
Like many Scots of his generation, he never knew the story of Gruinard. It was only after reading about it in Ian Rankin’s book The Impossible Dead, itself inspired in part by the1981 plot, that he started to learn more.
Speaking to The National from his home in Calgary, Harris said he’d always been drawn to songs based on good stories.
“I guess that I just found this idea fascinating; here’s an obscure piece of history where the protagonists – who happen to be a group of university students and profs - actually threatened the government with the consequences of their own actions, developing biological weapons if they didn’t make good on an old promise to rehabilitate the land that they had contaminated in their testing.
He adds: “And I suppose that the imagery of terrorists threatening the country with carefully planted packages of anthrax-laden soil is both topical and, well, very ‘metal’.”
Harris has some sympathy for the actions of the Dark Harvest commandos, saying their actions were “more of a protest, resistance movement than terrorism”.
“It’s hard to believe they actually meant to contaminate parts of the UK with anthrax when their raison d’etre was removing anthrax contamination.
“They had a specific objective in mind and it wasn’t actually to spread terror but to hold a government to account. ‘Terrorist’ actions around the world today are really just mindless murder and hate crimes dressed up as religious war”.
Listen to the album at hammerdrone.bandcamp.com
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Hoax threats helped to clean up the island that time forgot
ON Gruinard Island in 1942 the British government invented the use of anthrax as a weapon, effectively turning an organism well known among shepherds as “wool-sorter’s disease” into a means of attack and defence against the Nazis.
In those pre-nuclear weapon days, the British War Office ordered scientists at the government’s secret research laboratory at Porton Down to explore potentially using biological weapons against the Germans.
Anthrax was a huge success.
The only problem was that it left the ground inhospitable for generations.
So drenched in spores was Gruinard after two years of experiments that it was completely sealed off.
The actions of Dark Harvest, now believed to be linked to the Scottish Civilian Army, who were a precursor of the terrorist Scottish Nationalist Liberation Army, were seemingly what finally what spurred the Thatcher government into action.
In 1981, a package was discovered at Porton Down filled with soil. Dark Harvest told the press they were microbiologists and they had retrieved 300 pounds of contaminated Gruinard soil.
A second package was sent to Blackpool, where the Tories were having their party conference, though tests showed that sample did not contain any anthrax.
In 1986, the government finally decontaminated Gruinard.
Four years later, junior Defence minister Michael Neubert visited the island, removed the warning signs and declared it safe. Some locals are still sceptical.
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