When is an island not an island?

When it is no longer surrounded by water!

In the excellent book The Scottish Islands, by Hamish Haswell-Smith, the author gives detail on every island around Scotland (about 790, as has been mentioned elsewhere), but only goes into detail on 162 of them (listed in tables 1 and 2). His criteria is based on the size of the island (table 1) - from Lewis/Harris (220,673 hectares) down to Flodday and Brother Isle (40 hectares each). Its a fair enough criteria, after all how big and expensive would the book have been if every island was covered in detail?

Table 2 lists the island according to height with Linga Holm finishing bottom at 10m. Had this been the criteria for selecting the islands to be given extra attention would undoubtably have been different. However, the criteria used makes sense, but... its this second table that highlights the reason for the above question! The highest island in the list is not Skye (as expected at 992m), but Mull (966m). The reason for this would appear to be... that bridge!

Skye, like Seil Island further south, is no longer considered to be an island, but an extension to the mainland to which each is connected by a bridge! However, while many people do not consider these two masses of land surrounded by water to be islands, the fact is they are indeed completely surrounded by water... making them islands to me!

Other islands that are no longer islands in their own right include:

North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay;
Barra and Vatersay;
Great Bernera and Scalpay, which are now considered part of Lewis and Harris (with those two always having been part of the same land mass).

All of the above in the Outer Hebrides and are grouped together as they are joined by roads. Mainland, Burray and South Ronaldsay in the Orkney Islands are also considered one in the same ever since they were connected by the Churchill Barriers!

In each of these cases, the foundations of the actual roadways (or barriers) probably stop the water from completely surrounding the island as before, so by definition perhaps these are, strictly speaking, no longer individual islands... I wonder if the people that live there quite see it that way?

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