JOHN MACLEOD: A tradition dating back centuries... trashed by those who simply shout the loudest

Published: 20:34, 3 August 2026 | Updated: 20:43, 3 August 2026 They are the townships of Ness.  A ring of villages by the Butt of Lewis whose names – Eoropie and Fivepenny, Knockaird and Eorodale, Port and Lionel and Habost and Swainbost and Cross and the Dells and Skigersta – blaze like the banners of an army. But one, in all, of just 1,300 people: no match for a gleeful global pile-on whipped up by virtue-signalling, foolish sentimentalists and the cynical and unscrupulous. Since the Viking sagas the men of Ness have voyaged annually to deserted Sùla Sgeir, a crag forty miles north of the Butt, to harvest gannet poults. The fat, flightless pubescent birds are killed humanely with a single blow to the head. Then, in short order, plucked, drawn, spatchcocked and cured; packed in barrels and borne home to Ness. Guga, boiled for roughly an hour and a half with one change of water, is traditionally eaten with floury potatoes and a glass of milk and if – like myself – you were brought up with that annual feast, it is warming and delicious. The harvest is perfectly lawful. Expressly sanctioned, by Parliament, in derogations to the Protection of Birds Act 1954 and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Gannets are not in danger. The British population increased sixfold in the twentieth century; the men of Ness know what they are doing and how best to husband a resource. Protesters have now forced the authorities to call off the guga harvest And such is the symbiosis of the annual cull with the gannets of Sùla Sgeir that, when it had to be abandoned for seven years on account of Hitler’s war, the hunters returned in 1946 to find the colony had all but collapsed. It actually needs the yearly weeding-out of the slowest, dimmest, silliest birds most readily caught. But there will be no guga for anyone this autumn. Yesterday, having rewritten its own rules and taking the decision away from local officials, NatureScot refused to let the 2026 expedition proceed. It is unlikely – that quiet cultural compact since 1954 now trashed – it will be allowed again.  Something cherished and central to the very identity of the people of Ness has been whipped away by arrogant metropolitans; a community of 1,300 souls spat upon by the SNP government.  And defamed in extraordinarily abusive language and with totally pointless venom.  In the frenzy whipped up by Protect the Wild and its Facebook campaign, Abolish The Guga Hunt, the community of Ness have been mocked as cretinous inbreds straight out of the movie Deliverance. Accused of every vice from alcoholism to incest, the voyagers themselves have been damned as the ‘Thugs of Ness’.  Their photographs – and some of them have young families – even, irresponsibly, published online.  Plans were already gleefully in hand to disrupt this year’s guga harvest, had the voyage been sanctioned. Protect the Wild’s one object was noise – the loudest, vilest noise – and, in the face of the mob, our leaders folded like the walls of Jericho. My father was born in Habost, Ness, in November 1940. Annually, since I was a small boy, we cherished the autumn ritual – always a Saturday, about the time the clocks went back – of our guga feast. We shared it for the last time about November 2022; six months later, we buried our father within sight of the croft where first he drew breath. The gannet chicks were carefully selected in sustainable numbers The taste of guga was my last annual connection with him – and people I do not know have ripped it away, and for ever. Many doubtless happy to consume industrial chicken, reared on concrete and without a glimpse of grass or daylight. What maddens is that, of the crofters’ own counsel, the guga harvest was expressly cancelled in 2022, 2023 and 2024 on account of avian flu. And, again with community agreement, the cull last year was reduced from 2,000 gannet poults to 500. What infuriates no less is Protect the Wild’s efforts to paint the harvest as a blood sport. It is a harvest indeed – furnishing food for the table – and with scant fun about it. The voyage across forty miles of exposed Atlantic is not without risk. When I was in my early teens, one man was lost overboard. A visit to Sùla Sgeir is the best part of a fortnight without a shower and a mobile signal, and with but bucket sanitation. Day after day of physically gruelling work; night upon night lodged in chill, drystone cells crawling with earwigs and eating out of tins and packets. Misrepresentation is bad enough. Worse, the Scottish Government’s cowardice sends entirely the wrong message. I fear every fixated loon out there will now take note.