The men of Ness and a 500-year-old ritual
For two weeks in August, 10 fishermen spend 10 days harvesting a rare food that few of us will ever eat. It is an oddity that the annual guga hunt — a practice that has been in existence for more than 500 years — still goes on in much the same way that it always has. Guga are the young of gannets, the extremely fertile — and very noisy — wild sea birds that occupy our remotest rocky shores.
Many years ago, I once sailed past a renowned ‘gannet rock’ off one of the Channel Islands. Little of the rock was actually visible. It was completely draped in gannets, appearing from a distance like one great shuffling white feather cape. Yet, among the many populations of these birds found around the British Isles, there is only one subjected to a licensed hunt.
Sula Sgeir is an uninhabited island 64km north-west of
