Rockall

The last piece of empire

Rockall is the stump of an eroded volcano, mostly bare, near-vertical granite.^[2][1] The Royal Navy surveyor Captain A. T. E. Vidal charted its exact position in 1831, and the earliest recorded landing was in 1810, by Basil Hall of HMS Endymion.^[2][5]

In the 1950s Britain was setting up a range on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides to test guided missiles. The government feared foreign agents could land on Rockall and watch the tests.^[5][2] A Royal Warrant of 14 September 1955 ordered the captain of the survey ship HMS Vidal to take possession of it.^[3] The ship arrived on 15 September, but high winds stopped a landing for three days. On 18 September a helicopter put a small party of Royal Marines and the naturalist James Fisher on the rock. They raised the Union flag and cemented a plaque into it.^[5][2] The BBC has called it the British Empire’s last new piece of territory.^[2]

In 1972 Parliament passed the Island of Rockall Act, making the rock part of Scotland, in the District of Harris in the County of Inverness.^[3]

“…the Island of Rockall … shall be incorporated into that part of the United Kingdom known as Scotland and shall form part of the District of Harris in the County of Inverness, and the law of Scotland shall apply accordingly.”^[3]

A rock, not an island

By then the prize was no longer the rock but the fish around it and possible oil and gas under the seabed. Ireland, Iceland and Denmark, on behalf of the Faroe Islands, all made rival claims to those waters and that seabed. No other country recognised the UK’s claim to the rock itself.^[2][1]

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea set a rule that mattered here: “Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.”^[6] The UK still claims a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea around Rockall.^[1] People tried to prove Rockall could be lived on. The former soldier Tom McClean spent 40 days there in 1985, and in 1997 Greenpeace activists stayed 42 days and declared it the capital of a “Global State of Waveland” in protest at mining licences in the region.^[2]

When the UK joined the convention in July 1997, it accepted that Rockall was legally a rock and gave up using it to claim a 200-mile fishing zone.^[2] In 1988 the UK and Ireland had already agreed a line dividing the continental shelf between them to the north-west.^[7] By the coordinates in the agreement, that line runs about 100 km south of the rock, leaving the seabed around Rockall on the UK’s side of it. The agreement itself does not mention Rockall.^[7]

Fishing after Brexit

Ireland’s position is that no country owns Rockall. “We don’t have a claim on it. We don’t accept any other sovereign claim on it,” the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said in 2019.^[1] In 2025 an Irish minister told the Dáil that Ireland had never recognised UK sovereignty, and so did not recognise a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea around the rock either.^[4]

Ireland says its boats fished around Rockall unhindered for decades. In June 2019 Scotland’s fisheries minister warned that Irish vessels could be boarded if they fished within 12 miles of it. The Scottish government said it had always been against the law for non-UK vessels to fish there; Ireland said Scotland had first raised the issue in 2017.^[1] Once the Brexit transition ended, a Marine Scotland patrol boat boarded the Donegal trawler Northern Celt on 4 January 2021 and told its captain he could no longer fish within 12 miles.^[8]

Irish and Scottish officials negotiated a deal to let Irish boats back in, with Ireland paying for marine research shared with Scotland’s fleet. In May 2024, the day after a UK general election was called, the UK government vetoed it; it said it saw no benefit for the Scottish fleet.^[9][10] Ireland’s foreign ministry said an agreement remained a “priority”.^[11] Irish boats catch squid there within 6 nautical miles of the rock, and an Irish task force put the cost of losing access at about €6.6 million.^[4]