Flat Holm Island | The Abandoned Plague Island

Описание: Today we’re heading for Flat Holm Island off the coast of Wales.
This island has been occupied since the viking age, it currently has a population of just one and the surrounding area is known to be treacherous for ships.

This limestone island is a small, almost circular island that consists of 86 acres of land.
Along with the light house and foghorn, there is a farm house, batteries & barracks, a radar station, an isolation hospital and a series of smuggling tunnels.

Nine guns were emplaced around the island to protect Cardiff, four battery sites remain.
These guns had the advantage of being almost invisible to shipping and also offered protection to the gun crews.

The fog horn was built in 1906 and is now a grade II listed building, and when the horn sounds it can be heard clearly by people on both coasts. It hasn’t been sounded since 2000 and the time before that was in 1988.

Flat holms light house was built in 1737 and is 30m high, its construction was put into action when 60 soldiers drowned after their vessel crashed on the Wolves rocks near Flat Holm in 1736.

In 1896 the Cardiff Corporation built a permanent sanatorium on the land for use of cholera patients and is unique in being the only Victorian isolation hospital sited on a British offshore island.
The last patient to die in the hospital was a victim of the bubonic plague and was cremated on the island at the end of the 19th century.
The hospital finally closed in 1935 and has remained derelict since.

The Anglo Saxons originally named this Island Bradanreolice, Reolice derives from an Irish word meaning graveyard, meaning this island was a place of burial for people of that time...
There are many graves dotted around the island, the ones that have been opened had remains of skeletons that had been doused in lime, indicating the occupants had died from a contagious disease.

There have been several shipwrecks around flat holm and over 50 shipmates are buried here on the island.

This island is absolutely steeped in history but remains almost deserted in the middle of the sea, the historic buildings further deteriorating.

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Drone footage by Matt The Secret Vault big thanks to him.